In early March 2011 I had the unforgettable experience of spending 24 hours in Wadi Rum desert: on a jeep tour during the day and in a Bedouin camp for the night.
Wadi Rum is the magnificent 720 square kilometres of desert and mountain landscape in south-western Jordan (about 300km south of Amman) described by TE Lawrence as ‘vast, echoing and godlike’. There is only one road into Wadi Rum and that ends at Rum village. After that, to explore the area, one needs a four-wheel-drive vehicle and a guide. But what an area to explore! Towering cliffs of weathered sandstone, basalt and granite rise out of vast open swathes of rose-red sand. It is vast, it is silent. It feels empty but is not. From the jeep we spotted paw prints of hares and foxes, s-bends of vipers, and carpets of very small blue flowers.
Our seven-hour jeep tour included seeing the remains of an ancient Nabatean Temple near Rum village, scrambling to cool springs amongst the rocks, surrounded by shading vegetation, and making our way through deep narrow fissures between high-sided rocky walls. We stopped for lunch on the shady side of an imposing rock bridge, examined ancient rock carvings deep in the desert, and marvelled at the sheer scale of the whole area. But it is the vast expanses of sand stretching in all directions, punctuated by the imposing rock formations, that come to mind when I think of Wadi Rum.
The jeep tour finished at a permanent Bedouin camp, set up for visitors, in the middle of the Wadi Rum area. I had expected open-sided tents but in March it’s still cold at night and my tent was a 10 foot cube frame covered with a double layer of woven material. The heavy outside cover was, I believe, made from goat’s hair and dyed black and white; the lighter-weight lining, made of heavy-weight cotton in red, white and black stripes; the doorway was formed by the inner lining overlapping by about 6 feet across the front of the tent; the floor covered by brightly coloured woven matting. On the floor of the rear half of the tent were four closely packed sleeping pallets, each with a pillow and a warm eiderdown.
There were about 16 people staying at the camp the night I was there, including an elderly couple en route to family in the United States but currently living in Alice Springs, three young Japanese men who had been climbing some of the Wadi Rum mountains, and an Estonian woman with two teenage children. We met in the large community tent, similar walls and floor to the sleeping tents but with a large open fire around which we sat, shoeless, on thin mattresses. We sipped the traditional hot sweet tea poured from pots kept hot by sitting on the edge of the fire and were entertained by the staff playing softly on lute and drums. I climbed a large dune behind the tents to take photos of the sunset before returning to the community tent for a buffet supper of rice, meat balls and bean stew cooked by the Sudanese chef. By 7.30pm diners were drifting off to look at the magnificence of a starry desert night and to their tents where a low energy light bulb powered by solar panels on the camp’s admin tent stayed on until 8.15pm (no light switch – all centrally operated). My tent was at the end of the line and not as sheltered from the wind as some of the others. I managed to stop the door from continuously blowing in by weighing its bottom edge down with a spare eiderdown but I lay in the dark for a long time listening to the loose tent walls flapping and the tent frame creaking before falling asleep.
I rose before dawn to climb onto the nearby rocks and take photos of the early morning mists and the sunrise. I could see for miles but not see any other person or creature. A breakfast of boiled eggs, bread and hummus and then the driver was ready to drive us over the sands back to Rum village. En route he stopped the jeep to talk with his ‘cousin’ (a term used so frequently that I believe it’s used instead of ‘good friend’) who was bringing racing camels into the desert to practise for the races.
Endless sand, imposing rocks, a night sky of a billion stars – what a 24 hours!
First published in VISA 99 (Oct 2011)
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