Day 261: Aqaba - Wadi Rum (وادي رم)

Dec 20 - Arrange with a taxi to get us out to the desert today. The charge is 25 JD for the hour-long trip, which is about as good as we can do without trying to hitch our way from the main Aqaba-Amman highway to the park entrance.

The route north from Aqaba looks a fair bit like the Sinai: stark, eroding mountains with no vegetation, low areas chocked with sand and a few acacia trees in the wadis.

I’ve been to Jordan before, and a lot of the country is desert-like. The climate is very arid, with no major rivers to use for irrigation (as Egypt and Iraq have). Traveling around, you get a sense that are aren’t many resources available. Jordan missed out on the fortuitous location of oil deposits, and unlike in ancient times, cannot act as a middleman on lucrative trading routes.

Today’s route: (A) Aqaba, (B) Wadi Rum.

Stop at the Wadi Rum visitor’s center to get our Jordan Pass stamped (would have been a 5 JD fee without it), then on to the Bedouin village six km down the road. Here, we hang around the parking lot until a car from our tent camp (Bedouin Host Camp) shows up and drives us out into the desert. It is a family-owned camp, about a 20 minute drive along one valley and then another.

Camels traversing the valley floor.

Wadi Rum, prior to its current fame as a tourist destination, was the home of the Zalabieh Bedouin tribe. They led largely nomadic lives, herding goats and camels. The region was declared the Wadi Rum Protected Area in 1998, curtailing any large commercial development that may well have occurred. All development for touristic purposes is controlled by the Bedouin, and the vast majority of visitor accommodations are tents (I did see one camp of little geodesic domes hidden away in a valley). I feel like a lot should be credited to the Jordanian government for doing this. All I have to do is look at what happened to Sharm El-Sheikh and Na’ama Bay, where a Mövenpick Hotel and Hard Rock Café now tower over what used to be a quiet beach.

We arrive at the camp midday, and rest a bit in the big dining tent. It is a permanent structure with concrete floor and metal frame covered in patterned cloth. The desert is very quiet here, though there are the distant sounds of birds. The valley floor also has some vehicular traffic time to time. There are many tent camps here, dotting the edge of the cliffs. They have spread out the camps to try and give each one a solitary camping experience.

One thermos dispenser is exclusively for Bedouin tea, which in this case means sweet black leaf tea flavored with thyme and sage.

Good views from the dining tent.

Our own tent is a metal frame with two layers of cloth cover, the outside one made of rough wool. After hanging around for a bit, Odette and I go rock scrambling up a nearby canyon.

This dark-leaved plant may be a sort of Colchicum crocus, though I am not sure.

Everything I see around the camp area are sandstones. The surfaces are abrasive and easy to climb.

The sand of Wadi Rum valleys varies from white to red, depending on the particular geologic units exposed on the surrounding cliffs. We are in a ‘red’ area, more or less.

Late afternoon offers some good color and shadow contrast.

A rock formation in the middle of the valley.

Yes, of course there was a nice sunset.

There are about 15 people staying here tonight. There is a French family with a six-year old girl, so Odette has someone to run around with and get all covered in sand. It starts to get cold after sunset, so we move inside the dining tent. It has a fireplace in the middle. There is a Bedouin buffet dinner, which we skip because we had a big lunch. We do hang around for the music though, and general conversation. There is another family from Poland with three kids, some Germans, a Brit working in the UAE, a Czech backpacker who I end up talking to for hours, and a few Italians.

Jordan