How do you go capturing desert images, the kind used on Google’s Street View?  Obviously, a Prius won’t cut it and neither will a Land Cruiser, so Google resorted to ships of the desert, otherwise known as camels.

The internet giant hired a 10-year-old camel named Raffia and mounted a Trekker camera on its hump to collect images from Abu Dhabi’s Liwa Oasis that are now available on its Views website.

The Trekker is normally used by humans to capture 360-degree images in places unreachable by its Street View cars.

“With every environment and every location, we try to customise the capture and how we do it for that part of the environment,” Joyce Baz, spokeswoman for Google in the Middle East and North Africa, told The National newspaper.

“In the case of Liwa we fashioned it in a way so that it goes on a camel so that it can capture imagery in the best, most authentic and least damaging way,” she added.

Photos courtesy of Google

Photo Gallery

Video