The Flip Side of the Coin

In his last post, Dan left quite a few blanks to be filled in, so I’d better start telling you some of what he was hinting at!

After our chilly and fog-ridden adventures in the Great Thar Desert of Rajasthan, we thought we’d try again and visit another one in Gujurat. This time we would visit the ‘Little Rann of Kutch’ – a remote salt-plain desert on the Pakistani border – and see if we could ditch the woolly jumpers at long last!

The Rann of Kutch is a slightly strange desert – it’s more of a part-time sea, part time desert. Every year it is flooded: first by the sea (the neighbouring Gulf of Kutch) and second by the monsoon rains. All this water turns the land into a salty, barren mud flat.

We had arranged to be shown round this strange landscape by a tour company called Camp Zainabad. We took a two-hour bus journey out into the wilderness and were dropped off at the desired location – the instructions we’d been given were to get off the bus “at the corner with a tea stall”, equivalent of saying get off a bus in London “outside the newsagent”!

Thankfully our skin colour saved us yet again and we were told by the bus driver when the right corner arrived. The tour company picked us up in their dune buggy and we headed off to the desert. It was all very strange as there was greenery all around us but no sign of the mud-baked desert the guide book talked about. Even when we arrived at our guesthouse there was still no desert, although we certainly had the baked mud – all the furniture was made of baked cattle dung! (It actually looked quite good in a rustic way, and was surprisingly comfortable.)

The plan for after lunch was to head into the desert and see if we could catch a sight of the world’s last remaining wild population of Khur, the wild ass that Dan was looking forward to! So in our dune buggy we drove through green fields and fertile lands and then suddenly the green stopped and we were surrounded by white mud. This was the Kutch.

It had the look of a cold, frosty day at the beach. The mud was baked hard with deep cracks scouring the surface, implying rain hadn’t been here for a while. But on the top was a thin layer of salt, giving the appearance of light snowfall. There was even a heat haze – the desert proper! As we cracked the salty surface of the white mud, a four-legged vision appeared through the haze – WILD ASS! Lots of them!

We got up as close as we could and then tried to track them on foot, but despite our best efforts, the Khur never got any closer – these shy animals were very good at maintaining the distance between us. Dan was slightly disappointed as they looked just like donkeys, but impressed that they live on such inhospitable land.

Wildlife in the Kutch (as you would expect) is few and far between, and as we drove through the cracked white countryside another image came into view through the haze – rows of neatly arranged Olympic-sized swimming pools. As we got closer the surreal image revealed itself to be a small settlement with people trudging back and forth through the “swimming pools”. It was a settlement of salt workers.

Every year the water table of the desert is polluted with salt water. Once the sea recedes, the salt worker families move in and pump the salinated water up onto the surface, flooding these shallow pools. Then they wait for the sun to dry out the water and harvest the remaining salt crystals. It is back-breaking work, causing all sorts of health problems – the salt farm workers have to spend huge amounts of time wading through heavily salted water, living on bread and chili for months on end (they are deep in the desert with no access to fresh produce).

Camp Zainabad works with an NGO to try to improve the lot of the salt workers, but it is a difficult task. The salt worker families are often from a very low caste, and with no other jobs for them to do they have little choice. As the worldwide price of salt diminishes, their future looks increasingly bleak.

The other thing the Kutch is famous for is flamingos. The next day we went to their breeding ground and saw the supermodels of the bird world strutting their super-skinny legs in this toxic salt water. They are queer birds, and if they look weird balancing on one leg in the water they look even stranger in flight – like flying pencils!

The Kutch was a very peculiar desert and again the weather was cold and cloudy… maybe we are the answer to global warming! On returning to Ahmadabad, to take the wildness of the desert out of me Dan enrolled me in a “How to be a Good Wife” course. Having been enjoying a wonderful variety of food while in India, and it appearing to be so quick and easy to make, I decided I wanted to find out more about how to actually make it. This was the first time that we’d been in a place long enough to have some time to take a cookery course and unfortunately the one that we found was part of a longer course on being a good wife! We explained to the lady running it that we just wanted the cookery bit and that Dan would just have to hope that I would turn out to be a good wife. Then to her shock Dan asked if he could be taught too!

She decided that we were both mad and shouldn’t be allowed to mix with her female students on the Good Wife course, so we were lucky enough to have a one-on-one full day cookery course (although Dan quickly took the job of chief taster, adding helpful comments like “Yep, you can make that one at home.”).

It was really good to see the principals of Indian cookery in action. We even learnt that the long list of ingredients that usually make up an Indian recipe aren’t actually that complicated, and with a bit of preparation it is surprisingly easy and very tasty. I am really looking forward to getting home and having a try of my new skills to see if I can find it as easy as she made it look (and see if Dan sticks to his “you can make that one again”).

As for if I would pass the rest of the Good Wife course, Dan will have to tell you that over the next 50 years!