Camels And Khaled
Having already handed over the money for the camel ride, we weren’t unduly worried by the fact that Khaled was now negotiating a fee with the animals’ handler and obviously taking a cut for himself, what concerned us far more was that Khaled appeared in the midst of a deal with a boy aged about eleven.
“Come” said Khaled, “we are ready.”
As we mounted the camels, Khaled was clearly giving the boy directions back to our camp, which, given the expanse of empty desert between our current location at the Lawrence Spring and Eid’s camp several miles away, was another worry. But in the flick of a camel’s eyelash Khaled was gone, and we were starting the 90-minute camel ride “home”, accompanied only by an 11-year-old boy walking alongside….yes, walking, in sandals, in the blazing sun, over a distance that would take an hour and a half.
As the peaceful rhythm of the ride began to quell our initial fears, two new worries started to niggle away at the back of my mind. One was how we were going to get off this damned thing at the end of the journey, the other was why my camel kept turning its head to look at me with a surly expression that was deeply unnerving. It was almost sneering, for Gods sake.
Anyone who has done this will know that disembarkation from a camel is not straightforward. You are perched in between the hump and a kind of pole positioned behind you for stability: this means that, once the camel kneels to let you off, you can’t swing your leg round behind you, bicycle style, because the pole is in the way.
The solution is to lower your left leg until you make contact with the ground, at which point your legs are at a 90 degree angle, one straight down to the ground and the other straight out on to the camel’s back, then you slowly withdraw your horizontal leg while shuffling backwards on the other. It was at exactly this point that my belligerent camel decided to stand back up, throwing me into a backwards cartwheel which wrenched my right thigh but, worse, threw me on to the hard ground so that my left shoulder took my entire body weight as I hit the deck. Pain was immediate and intense and I wasn’t sure what damage was done. I became vaguely aware of Michaela and Khaled close by.
“Phil”, she was saying, “you need to move quickly”.
I probably groaned.
“You are laying right under the camel. If he steps on you you’re in real trouble, you need to crawl NOW”.
The Bedouins at the camp were very caring, but I knew the shoulder was badly damaged; no broken bones, but there was clearly damage.
It remained a problem. For several weeks I was unable to pull on a jacket or coat unaided; I couldn’t carry anything in my left hand; I couldn’t raise my left arm more than half way. There followed several expensive physiotherapy sessions and lots of exercise at home and although things improved a little, after six months I was resigned to the fact that my shoulder would be a source of pain for ever more.
Until that is, in Chiang Mai, ten months on from Camelgate, when walking through a ramshackle market we spotted a line of deckchairs and an offer of a cheap massage, a million miles from the “beach resort” or “massage centre” spots, just a few undoubted charlatans granting a quick session to anyone who was willing to pay.
I recoiled as this skinny guy with bony but strong hands prodded my left shoulder, and in a mixture of words, gestures and hand signals told him and his lady boss the story of Camels And Khaled. He pointed to the shoulder.
“Pain at back?”
I nodded. He started work at the front, not the back.
Unbelievably, from the moment his bony fingers probed into the shoulder joint, I sensed something good, and as he dug deeper and probed further, I knew he was right on the crucial point of injury.
I have no idea whether this man was a genius or just a darn lucky charlatan, but for very few Thai baht I received a complete cure the like of which I had long since stopped hoping for. Over a year later, I have still not had the tiniest twinge.
Whatever the truth, he was a genius as far as I’m concerned!
