Dana Nature Reserve

Full set of photos from Dana and Shobak Castle

The view waiting for us to get up in the morning was stupendous. The lodge has rooms with balconies that all face the valley and it’s a hell of a way to wake up in the morning. The goats in the valley are just black specks in the distance with accompanying goat herds specks. After a tasty breakfast buffet we headed through the nearly deserted Dana village for a walk into the valley. The rocks down here are fascinating. Scattered throughout the debris are fossils of urchins and shells. The loose rocks look like they have been sand-blasted smooth by the centuries and the layered red rocks bring to mind the sedimentary layering of the sea floor. On the way down we came across a young boy minding his goats with a small puppy, his trainee goat dog. The goats had bells on and jangled away as they ate. He asked for a light as we went by and I did have a lighter in my bag from Cuba. As he lit up Sarah took some photos of his donkey and gave him some small change. As we walked off down the hill he shouted down to us and gave us a jig on his flute, a bit like reverse busking. On the way back Rick used his goat call to lure Charles, a dandyish goat with blond parted hair and floppy ears, up into the abandoned town. We then abandoned him ourselves. He looked confused.

We spent an hour or so walking into the valley and another hour or so walking back out because, as usual, we had quite a full day planned. The Low family style of holiday is to cram as much as possible in. On the bad side this gets tiring and you don’t get lunch but on the upswing you do see a lot of interesting things. We were heading down to Petra in the vain hope of spending half a day there before our two full days of ruin wandering, but on the way we stopped in at Shobak castle, another staggering ruin which is free to enter and clamber all over. As with a lot of places in Jordan there are cats everywhere somehow surviving amid all the rocks. It looked like someone was camping out in one of the rooms of the castle. It was built by the crusaders in the 12th century, yet another extravagant edifice which fell to Saladin when he kicked the crusaders butts all over the desert. Shobak survived an 18-month siege due in part no doubt to the secret tunnel that leads from inside the walls to far outside the castle gates. The tunnel is still open and we stumbled across it (there are no signs or maps anywhere). The tunnel is quite large and has steps leading down into the blackness. Sarah does not like confined spaces so waited at the top while I switched on my feeble mobile phone flashlight and descended a step at a time into the gloom. The tunnel took a right turn and soon sunlight was just a glimmer above me. I could only see a few metres in front of me but the steps here still in good nick. Once I got to the point where I could see large rocks that had fallen from the ceiling my sensible side took over and a headed back up, but I could imagine doing it with a flaming torch while the Muslim army lay siege to the castle.

Somehow we got to the hotel in Wadi Rum, the town right near Petra, later than expected, but it worked out well because it meant that we could have a turkish bath rather than go sightseeing. Rick and Jackie told horror stories of turkish baths in Turkey where Rick was given a special headlock massage and doused liberally with cold water. The turkish bath attached to this hotel was not quite as authentic. We got changed and were guided into the steam room where Jackie and Rick were waiting somewhere in the mists along with a Malaysian guest of the hotel. Compared to Icelandic saunas this one wasn’t too hot but belched out a fresh batch of steam every five minutes so loudly that to have a conversation you had to shout at the person sitting next to you. The Malaysian lady was soon taken out for whatever fate awaited her and we were left to steam some more. Then we were left even longer. Then we began to wonder if they had forgotten about us. The steam had run out and now we were just sitting in a damp room. Someone clunked around behind the wall and soon we were being shrouded in stinking hot steam again, our heads hovering somewhere near our knees to get some relief. It was peak hour at the baths so we just had to wait our turn. Rick and Jackie were taken off next so Sarah and I waited in the steam ante room for our turn which seemed to take an age. I was pointed at next so went off with the nice man to a small room with a marble bench on which I lay while he sanded my back with something approaching the consistency of sandpaper. I just gritted my teeth and took it like a man but it hurt like hell afterwards and is still in the process of healing a couple of weeks later. The massage was unusual as well. I know that some massages are not supposed to feel relaxing, rather deep and therapeutic, but the moves this guy was pulling were almost too much to bear. It felt like he was running a pizza cutter up my spine, then he would suddenly chop my shoulder blades or run his fingers deep into my calves making my toes curl. When on my back he twisted my feet out, crushing my ankles into the marble. I emerged scratched and beaten to share a cup of tea with my parents-in-law, all of us wrapped in towels. I’m not sure the massage made me feel better. In fact I felt more tense afterwards and had a rash on my back, but the swim in the misty heated indoor pool was a good comedown, and let’s face it, I’m not working at the moment so how stressed could I be?

Wadi Musa, the town just outside Petra, is very pleasant. It is small and perched on a hillside. It has the usual one-way streets (which I’m pretty sure we drove the wrong way along one morning) and over-the-top advertising, but for a place that processes so many tourists a year it has a relaxed feel.

Full set of photos from Dana and Shobak Castle