So, our visitor wanted to see a camel up close.

Generally, interactions with camels here come as part of a “heritage” package that likely includes tea on a stretch of carpet inside a tent, a falcon or two, a “dune bashing” ride in someone’s SUV … and a ride on a camel. A very touristy thing, and that’s fine for lots of people.

Our guest was interested, really, only in the camel.

How to handle that?

By calling Anna!

Anna, the camel blogger at The National, has spent most of her life in the UAE, and she knows the country as well as any Westerner around.

We were looking for a recommendation, but she offered to direct us to a camel farm not far from Abu Dhabi island, and we happily took her up on the offer. Not only that, she told us stories about camels in the UAE, and racing, and camel beauty contests (long eyelashes and drooping lower lips are key)… all sorts of interesting stuff.

We drove east, in the direction of Al Ain, and near the settlement of Al Wathba (best known locally as the site of a prison), she had us leave the freeway and head deeper into the desert.

She couldn’t direct us to where she was going, but she knew it from the lay of the land and could sense it, almost like a bird returning to where it was born.

We were on a truck road for a while, and she decided we needed to turn around, and then she had us take a right, in the direction of a sort of shell where visitors can sit while watching camels race.

(Camel racing is a popular sport here, but it is impossible to follow from a fixed position — because the races are run over an enormous loop. Most “spectators” follow the camels in a chase pack of SUVs.)

The racing season in Al Wathba is over, but Anna was not deterred. She was sure farms nearby would still have more than a few camels.

We saw some outbuildings in the distance, and she directed us in that direction. As we got close we saw a truck driving at us, and Anna suggested we flash our lights and angle our path to meet it.

It worked. The driver stopped and we pulled up. Anna leaned out the window and in Arabic asked where we could find a camel we could ride. The man pointed back up the road and said, “Look in there,” and off we went on a sort of road, part concrete, part packed sand.

We swung into an opening in a fence of corrugated metal, and there were a batch of camels in small enclosures, and several men sitting outside a cement-block building … looking at us as if we had just landed from Mars.

Anna had us stay in the car, and off she went to chat with the camel hands. We could see her smiling and gesticulating, and a few moments later she came over and said, “We’re good!”

We climbed out of the car, and exchanged “salaam aleikums” with three guys (apparently) from the subcontinent, and we shook their hands, and Anna pointed out our visitor as the person who was keen to ride the camel … and away we went.

They identified a very tall camel as being “a grandfather, very friendly” and as we were studying the beast up close, they began to saddle him. (We noticed that this camel did not have a muzzle on, as did some others. Gramps, not known for biting.)

Camels are ridden behind the hump, not on it, as is often depicted.

The gear includes a sort of saddle with a ridge in the back to keep the rider from sliding off the camel’s back, and a batch of blankets under the saddle but also on the back slope of the hump. A harness goes over the camel’s head, and the ropes are pulled back towards the rider, offering a means of rider control.

They had the camel go down on all fours, which always looks like a folding table being broken down, and called over our visitor, and she sprang up and into the saddle, showing the dexterity you might expect from a former horse rider.

The camel rose up, and you notice that a rider is far, far higher in the air, atop a camel, than on a horse. Which makes it creepier. Then one of the hands began leading the camel, and there was our ride. (In photo, above.)

Camels going slowly offer a quite smooth ride; only when they break into that curious lope do they become difficult to sit on.

Meantime they got two other camels ready to ride, and if they had offered me a chance to ride, I would have taken it. But they did not, and I thought we already were taking advantage of a high level of hospitality.

The trickiest part, for our little rider, was the dismount. Camels go down front knees first, and when that rider in the saddle is at a very steep angle, but she held on tight, and then the back went down … and she hopped off, beaming.

We thanked the camel hands repeatedly, with Anna doing the best job of it, because of her Arabic-language skills.

We got stuck in the sand, on the way out of the area, and after they joined us in trying to push the car free, they drove over a pickup and dragged us backwards out of the sand, and we thanked them all over again … and off we went, heading back for the big city.

Anna suggested that “those guys will talk about this for weeks, the day that these people just drove into their farm and asked to ride a camel, and then this one girl did it.”

One camel ride, and several grateful Western visitors. To our guide, to the guys at the ranch, and to the camel.