It had been a holiday of tight deadlines and this morning was no exception. We whipped through breakfast and had to drive an hour to get the Wadi Rum visitors centre to meet our guide. It was the worst possible timing for our rental car not to start. Although it was not in great condition we hadn’t had any serious trouble with it until now. The engine just didn’t turn over. We popped the hood and got the usual crowd of helpers to poke around. One guy jumped in the car and gave it a go himself. Wonder of wonders the car started and he happily revved it like crazy to get it warmed up until his friend gave him a funny look as if to say, “I think it’s warm now!”. We drove to a petrol station on the highway to check the battery water levels but couldn’t see anything obviously wrong. Then the car had trouble starting again. This isn’t the situation you want just before driving into a desert but we figured that the Wadi Rum visitors centre was not exactly remote, being one of the premier tourist attractions in Jordan, so we left it to fate and drove off at a fast clip to meet our guide.
He turned out to be a small Bedouin man, it turned out not much older than me even though he looked about sixty. He drove an old landcruiser with an open-air bench arrangement in the back for us to sit on which was a great way to see everything as we drove by. In no time we were past the Bedouin town, which is packed with satellite dishes, and on into the sand. There aren’t strictly speaking any roads in Wadi Rum, just lots of tracks made by other vehicles which branch off in all sorts of directions and our driver seemed to pick at random to go in whichever direction served him best at the time.
First we clambered up the big rocks leading to a natural spring, obviously an important site in the desert. It hadn’t rained for some time in Jordan that we could tell so the spring looked more like a crack of water in the rock but the view from the top of the small hill was worth the price of admission alone. Wadi Rum had been undersold by Rick pre-visit as just a bunch of rocks and sand (we had been through a lot of desert after all) but the country around here really is something special.
Next we clambered up a big sand dune with fine red sand then ran back down again to have a cup of tea brewed by our guide. He has six children and another on the way but was relaxed about it all.
The next two stops were for some ancient camel engravings in the cliff and the crumbling wall of TE Lawrence’s desert base, just a small place under a rock from what we could tell. Finally we ended the day at our guide’s camp out in the desert for the sunset over the valley. It’s possible to sleep out here it pretty well constructed tents, a bit more solid than your typical Australian variety, but we had concerns about how warm it would be at this time of year so headed back to Aqaba for dinner.
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