Dancing with Bedouin

Hi everyone!  I’m back from an amazing weekend in Wadi Rum (have I ever described any weekend here as anything other than amazing?  I need to come up with some better adjectives. Incredible, astounding, fantastic, wonderful…). Wadi Rum is a beautiful stretch of desert waaaay down in southern Jordan, really close to the Red Sea and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. It’s about a 3 ½ - 4 hour drive from Amman.  It’s known for its huge stretches of bright orange sand and huge rocky cliffs, which jut out of the desert and sometimes form really weird shapes and formations. It’s also famous for being the site where Lawrence of Arabia participated in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire.  

 

Wadi Rum is kind of an isolated area – the closest “real” city is Aqaba, which is a town on the Red Sea about 45 minutes away.  Hotel options in the desert are very limited, and the “thing to do” in the area is stay overnight in a Bedouin (traditional desert nomad) camp. Depending on where you go, the camps offer varying degrees of amenities – in some places you have to bring your own tent or sleep under the stars and there are no bathroom facilities, and on the other hand I’ve heard rumors of tents that include ensuite toilets and showers.  Not being an overly “outdoorsy” type of person, I was a little nervous about the former type of experience, less so about the latter. One thing that I did know was that I had to experience Wadi Rum in some way before I left Jordan, because every person I’ve ever met who has been there told me it was an incredible experience that was not to be missed.

From the beginning, Wadi Rum was the hardest trip for me to organize in Jordan. The public transportation here is very poor – the best you can do is take a bus from Amman to Aqaba, then arrange a cab from Aqaba to Wadi Rum.  This part wouldn’t necessarily be too difficult, but there aren’t really any cabs waiting around in Wadi Rum to get back to Aqaba, so you either have to arrange in advance for a cab to come for you at a specified time, or as my Lonely Planet guide suggested, hitchhike back to Aqaba.  Being a solo female traveler, I was not about to attempt hitchhiking through the desert in a foreign country. Not quite that brave, or stupid, or something. If I was a bit more adventurous, I could have rented a car in Amman and driven down, which is what most groups of tourists do, but the thought of driving in Amman frankly terrifies me because people are crazy drivers here, and I was worried about getting a flat tire or something in the middle of the desert with nobody around to help me on the way down.  I really doubt that my AAA membership works here.  I tried seeing if I could join a group tour, but there were none that were organized on a schedule that was workable for me (damn this whole working-full-time thing…), and most of the private tours that I looked at were ridiculously expensive, like $500 for two days.  Maybe that’s not a lot for some people, but it’s a lot for me. So last week I was starting to get worried that I wouldn’t be able to make it, because I had nobody to take me and it was proving so logistically difficult to arrange it on my own. I mentioned to my boss here that I was really hoping to go, and she called somebody at the travel agency she works with to see if they could arrange something for me.  Finally they were able to arrange a driver and tour guide for me, named Anas, and he was willing to take me down and back, show me around, and book me a night in a Bedouin camp for a little over $300.  Still expensive for a weekend, but much better than my other options.  Deal.

The first dilemma – what does one pack for a Bedouin camping trip in the desert?  I asked my roommate Rebecca for advice, and her response was “a hotel.”  Not very helpful (sorry Becca!). So here’s the final packing list of things that would fit in my backpack, some of which I ended up needing and others I didn’t:

Things I Packed for Wadi Rum:

Lightweight clothes – linen pants, cotton, loose-fitting t-shirts

A sweatshirt for night in case it got cold

Sheets

A light blanket in case it got cold (it’s cold at night in the desert!)

A little towel

Good walking shoes

Hiking sandals

A flashlight

Sunscreen

Bug spray

Hand sanitizer, wet wipes, toilet paper

Benadryl in case I was stung/bitten by a weird desert insect

Snacks (always helpful for hiking excursions plus it’s Ramadan…I’m getting skinnier already…)

A ton of water

Powdered Gatorade packets in case I got really dehydrated

Camera

Things I Didn’t Pack for Wadi Rum

A hotel – didn’t fit in the backpack

Makeup – What’s the point?

Jewelry – Ditto

Downy anti-wrinkle spray – Same

A hairdryer – Completely useless

So, my tour guide Anas picked me up on Friday morning at about 9 am, and we started the journey down the Desert Highway to Wadi Rum.  Anas was really friendly and young – 25, the same age as me.  At one point about 2/3 of the way through the journey, he stopped the car on the side of the road in the middle of the desert and announced, “ok, this is the kidnapping spot, time to get out.”  I gave him a weird look and asked him very politely not to kidnap me.  He laughed and pointed out some different places on the horizon – the direction of Petra, Karak, etc. Rest assured that no kidnapping of any sort occurred on this journey.

 Me, at "the kidnapping spot"

We arrived in Wadi Rum at about 12:30 and went for a hike up to a little water spring at the top of this cliff. This hike unfortunately confirmed how out of shape and unaccustomed to desert cliff-hiking I truly am, but I powered through it and made it to the top with only two breaks to “take pictures” (ie, catch my breath. And take pictures.)  The spring was pretty cool though – it’s the only natural source of water I saw in the entire area, and there’s a decent amount of greenery around it, which (as you can see from my pictures) is a rarity in the area.  The water was really cool and refreshing.  We hung out there for awhile with some goats and their Bedouin shepherd who was also sitting in the area.

 

Up at the spring, with the goats

After coming down from the hike, we ate a huge lunch of grilled chicken, rice, hummus, lentils, and tomato & cucumber salad at the Rum Village Rest House, and then headed to the Jebel Rum Camp where we would be staying for the night. We each got our own tent, and I was relieved to discover that this camp could definitely not be described as “roughing it”.  While I did not have an ensuite toilet and shower (shocking, really!), there were completely legitimate bathroom facilities with flush toilets and fully functioning showers with hot water about 100 yards away. The tents each had two twin beds in them and came with clean linens, blankets, and towels. They also were carpeted and had electric lights in them. It’s a good thing I didn’t pack a hotel because it really would not have been needed.

 My tent

After settling in at the camp, we headed back out into the desert for a drive and some more hiking. We climbed a huge sand dune and spent some time just admiring the scenery, and then Anas tried his hand at off-road driving, which worked fairly well on the flat, pretty hard-caked sand, and less well on the deep, loose sand that is widespread throughout the area.  We got pretty badly stuck at one point, but very luckily a couple of Bedouin in a pickup truck just happened to be driving in the area and pushed us out of the sand. So, all’s well that ends well, I guess. After that we decided to head back to the camp and not get into any more trouble for the evening. The sun was setting anyways.

 Anas and I climbing the sand dune

We enjoyed sunset at the camp, which creates some really astonishingly beautiful colors on the sand structures all throughout the desert. That evening, the Bedouin camp owners cooked us dinner in a zerb, which is an underground fire pit oven thing.  They put lamb and chicken in a cage, and then put the cage inside a huge cauldron, which then they bury underground.  The meat cooks for hours underground and comes out really tender, falling off the bones. There were about ten other tourists staying at the camp, so we all enjoyed a huge dinner of lamb, chicken, rice, couscous, a variety of salads, bread, hummus, and some sort of coconut cake thing for dessert.  It was delicious.

 Digging out our dinner

Dinner - Yum!

After dinner, our Bedouin hosts played music and taught us some traditional dances around the campfire. I learned how to do the dabka, which is a Arabic step dance, and then the Bedouin performed a really complicated step dance for us that I would never have been able to do.  After dancing for awhile, Anas and I went for a night hike into the desert to see the stars. As you can imagine, there’s very little light out in the desert, so you could basically see the entire galaxy.  It was a surreal experience, and I understood why some people opt to just sleep outside under the stars (although I still wasn’t feeling quite that adventurous). Then I went to bed and actually slept like a baby despite being in a tent in the middle of the Jordanian desert. At one point I woke up and had the confused “where am I?” moment. Then I remembered – tent, desert, Wadi Rum.  Ok, back to sleep.

 Bedouin dancing

On Saturday morning, we got up and ate breakfast (hardboiled eggs, bread, cheese, jam and coffee, pretty standard), and then went on a truck tour around the whole Wadi Rum area.  At first I planned to take a camel tour, but because the area is so big, I found out that the best way to see most of the place is on a truck or Jeep that’s fit for off-road driving. The pick-up truck that we hired was fitted with seats in the back so you could see the whole area well and take pictures while it was driving around. We made several stops along the way too so that I could explore some areas more in depth – I climbed a huge sand dune for a panoramic view of the area, and we made a stop at the cave where Lawrence of Arabia hid out for awhile.  My favorite part was when we stopped to climb this huge arch built into a rock.  It looked pretty high at first and I am not an experienced rock-climber by any variety, but I managed to make it up without too much trouble.  It was pretty high, but the view was amazing and I was so proud that I was able to climb it!  On the way back to the camp, we stopped at a Bedouin campsite for some sage tea, which was really good.  I’ve never had sage tea before. 

 Me on the sand dune that I climbed

 The arch that I climbed

 View from the arch.

After the truck tour, it was unfortunately time to head back to Amman.  I slept for most of the car ride back because I was completely exhausted, and it was really hot on Saturday, definitely over 100 degrees in the south. I spent much of the rest of the day trying to clean orange sand off of myself and all of my belongings, haha.  My sneakers, which were brand new and pitch black before coming to Jordan are now a shade of orangey-brown.  At least they match the scenery better.

Now it’s less than two weeks before my friends come, and I’ll be back in Washington DC three weeks from today.  The time is seriously flying, but I am super excited for my trip to Petra and Israel with my friends and Aunt Michele, and I’m looking forward to seeing my friends back home again. I don’t have any plans for next weekend yet, but unless somebody suggests something truly spectacular, I’ll probably just stay in and rest up before my week-long vacation.  It’s going to be so incredibly busy for that week that my friends are here that I’ll need all the energy I can get!

Anyways, hope you’re all doing well.  I’ll talk to you soon!

Love,

Sarah