Jordan On My Mind: Part III and a half

I'll just let the pictures of Wadi Rum speak for themselves.

Jordan On My Mind: Part III

The next day a youngish Jordanian took me in his taxi to Wadi Rum. This is where Jordan went from mediocre to spectacular. The Wadi Rum visitor center is crammed with every modern caricature and stereotype imaginable, groups of elderly Japanese taking photos of exotic garbage cans or his and hers camel signs adorning the bathrooms, clueless Americans who think that speaking to someone as if they were a child made them more intelligible, young European backpackers who would pitch their tents in a pile of garbage if it meant saving a few bucks and having a “genuine” experience, and old people, who no matter their background all start resembling each other after a while.

Despite the touristy atmosphere of the visitor center, the village of Wadi Rum did a remarkable job of filtering and separating this homogenous group into manageable clusters. It was a surprisingly good representation of a bedouin village. It has not yet been sanitized like an American counterpart (say Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon). There were the immaculate inner chambers of many of Wadi Rum’s tour operators surrounded by a varying degree of neglected courtyards. Many of the guides had family homes in the village. It was unfortunately a little dirty, from the effects of tourism, modernity, and their combination. As you can imagine the Bedouin, like nature, did not create much that wasn’t biodegradable for thousands of years. When you threw something out in the desert, it simply disintegrated. In the part of the world that houses the most oil, plastic is an environmental tragedy.

I didn’t have too much time to reflect on the town that first day as my taxi quickly dropped me off at Jordan Tracks, the guide/camp service that I had haphazardly contacted the day before. I dropped off my big pack and pulled out my little Indiana Jones satchel bag (because it makes me feel like an adventurer) and threw sunscreen in it. My guide, Awad, pulled out a satellite image of the 700 square kilometers of rock and sand that comprised Wadi Rum and laid out my itinerary for the day. Unfortunately from a satellite picture it was basically impossible to distinguish anything from anything else, so I just nodded along.

“First we will go to the Burda Rock Bridge here,” he said pointing at some kind of dark blob, “then we will go to the valley with the red sand here,” pointing to a slightly ‘redder’ blob, “and then we will have a bedu lunch here, and then we will go see the big sand dune here, and then the sunset here.” There were probably more specific names for these things, but I was clearly out of my league, and had a feeling they presented it this way on purpose. Disappointed people complain, confused people will often through the pride of not wanting to look like clueless buffoons go along with anything. But I already knew I was a buffoon, so I fired off a barrage of questions about how far and how long each leg would take, what the elevation of the mountains were, how deep into the desert would we go the second day, would I get a chance to summit this or this mountain etc…

Every white person who goes into the desert sees it as some test of strength, that they have their chance to be Laurence of Arabia, because the desert doesn’t kill with huge animals, or sheer precipices, it’s exotic, but feels harmless. Unlike the open sea, you cannot simply get swept a hundred miles from help. There are no gang fights, or muggings, the dangers are not something we immediately comprehend, and nobody would let a tourist get close enough to those dangers anyway. It is not a safari in the African bush, and Jordan does not suffer from pangs of sectarian or fundamentalist bloodbaths. When the deserts in Jordan killed, they killed with silence. It kills with an unimaginable solitude that can confront you the second the last person you remember seeing passes from earshot. Satchel bag or not I’m well aware that I am a tourist, and I will be herded around in Jeeps by a 20 year old who knows this almost endlessly identical landscape like the back of his hand. The truly powerful grip of Wadi Rum comes from a casual traveler’s tendency to be so awed by its beauty and immensity that they feel completely alone within it while staring at the back of the guide that got them there.

The first place Awad took the three of us was Burda. It would be a two hour hike to the top and about an hour back down. When we arrived we were the only jeep parked there, as we had probably gotten out a little while before some of the other guide services. They all more or less came to the same places. We saw a few lanky Canadians on the way up, but otherwise we were alone, clambering up a barren mountain. There weren’t any trail signs, in fact there weren’t any markings to denote the trail. The guides have simply learned all the paths of the tourist hikes and memorized the twists and turns. This was a pretty remarkable feat considering the lack of a path. There was no underbrush kicked to the side, no dead space in the foliage to go by, just a steady climb of switchbacks from the bottom of the mountain to the top. The views of the surrounding area became starker and more enchanting every time we stopped on the way up, and the view from the top was simply stunning. The Burda Rock Bridge near the top of the mountain is probably where most people fall in love with this patch of the wild in Jordan.

After the Burda Rock Bridge we clambered down and got back in our jeep. Awad drove us through this relatively flat, unpaved pack of sand at around 50 miles an hour, whipping around turns and switching back and forth between the tire tracks of other jeeps. Eventually we stopped at a shady spot and settled into our “Bedu lunch” of some Arabic bread, cans of tuna, tomatoes, cucumber and hummus. We washed it down with some kind of orange drink and knock off Little Debbie cakes made in Saudi Arabia. The French couple and Awad went off walking around somewhere as I settled into a coma for the better part of an hour.

The next few spots Awad showed continued to be majestic and overwhelming, and finally he drove us off to a big flat rock in the middle of the desert where we watched the sun go down and the sky light up in a dozen hues of pink and orange. Afterwards we headed back to the camp, a rather brilliant combination of hotelesque comfort and communing with nature. The camp was essentially invisible until we drove right up to it, nestled in the corner of a sizable mountain. A half dozen little wooden huts that comfortably slept two lined up along one edge, and a large communal tent where food was served consumed the other end, with a three stall bathroom and shower in the middle.

There were maybe 12 of us all together, including a French family with about 47 children. We settled into our huts under the cover of darkness and then meandered around the camp until dinner was ready. All the French people, thankfully, went to bed pretty early, and I stayed up to talk to an American couple.

They were a rare breed of conservative Californian who were also, paradoxically, impressively well traveled globe-trotters. Both had divorced twice before they met each other, but the third one was working out well, they’d been together for 15 years. The chica had apparently ridden a motorcycle around the world for three years at one point, alone. She had a big brass pair o’ balls. We swapped travel stories for a while and they told me one that resonated. They were backpacking through Nepal, and their guide was Tenzing Norgay’s Son. They went back to his family’s house at some point, and stayed for a few days. The house sports a collection of paraphernalia that I’m remarkably surprised the British haven’t managed to steal away to the British Museum yet. Most of the clothes that his father and Sir Edmund Hillary wore for their historic ascent, a rifle the Englishman gifted to his guide, as well as most of the climbing utilities they used. At some point a photo album was brought out which included a massive number of photos taken before, during, and after the descent from the top of Everest. Later the couple was invited to sit at a kind of family/community dinner in a large sitting area. Lounge pillows were laid around the walls of the massive room, and a single dais with a large chair rose prominently above the center of the room. When my erstwhile travel companions asked Norgay’s son (technically also a Norgay) who sat in that seat, they naturally thought he would have answered that the man’s famous father presided over the gathering there. Without skipping a beat the son answered that the area was reserved exclusively for the Dalai Llama, who often visited their home.

There really isn’t anything germane to Jordan in this story, but I think it’s a pretty good reflection of my belief that the world is an incredibly fascinating place, and if approached with the right attitude will yield experiential treasures beyond what you’d imagined before you got on the plane.

After the Yanks went to bed the only people still awake in our Bedu camp were the Bedu. I sat down with our three guides and regaled them with my dizzying array of practical Arabic.

“Ana ma hemar” – I am not a donkey

“Ana ma hemama” – I am not a pigeon, this is supposedly how middle aged Tunisians tell people they aren’t gullible. At least the one I knew.

“Ana ma thor” – I am not stupid

“Ana mish masool” – I am not responsible, or “it taint my fault”

And most importantly “Mafi mishkula” – No problem

I had learned these phrases specifically to yell at Omani cab drivers when the predictably tried to overcharge me for rides. They were ingrained in my memory because I would scream them at whoever was manning the security desk at the school every morning. At first they thought I didn’t know what I was saying, later they just thought I was crazy, and eventually they learned the valuable skill my parents have learned, they tuned me out. Anyway…

Every conversation I had with one of the bedu, or a Jordanian twenty something, started, carried through, and ended with the same subject, women. One of the unexpected benefits for these young bucks from the blossoming tourism industry in Jordan is that plenty of non-Muslim women crept through their lives, many wanting to “go native” for a night or two. After teaching my guides some off color English vocabulary I meandered toward my hut and passed out. A camel and guide was set to meet me in the morning to go further into the desert the next day.

Unfortunately after we’d all finished our breakfasts, and the American couple had departed back toward town on their own pair of camels, my camel was late.

In the end it turns out there was some kind of camel mix up, where my camel went to the wrong camp site and the guide was too far out to make it here in time. So I went back to town in a jeep, and some kind of last minute camel swap was made for a new guide and a new camel. A man named Fahad picked out a couple of shabby looking mutts and we went back to his house in the village to get…well I don’t know if they’re called saddles, but saddles. Awad, the previous days guide met us with food and water for the day and we set out for town, at the very least we didn’t go to any of the monuments I’d seen the previous day, but we visited a few of the more “touristy” sites that I could have done without.

My guide, Fahad and I rode out of Wadi Rum village sometime around nine or ten in the morning. I rode my own camel, but it was attached to Fahad’s by a length of rope, so I wasn’t controlling it as much as trying to adjust to its odd gate. Riding one of these quirky beasts, for a white guy who has no intention of becoming a Bedouin anytime soon, is one of those things people do simply to brag about it later. Look how exotic I am, I rode a camel. But you know, that still puts me one camel ahead of you.

Aside from bragging rights, in Wadi Rum there is a much better reason to go the slow route. When traversing these wide expanses by Jeep I tended to zone out while inside the car. Even driving on the sand has a kind of surreal quality to it, the sound in the jeep of the engine contrasts to the feel of the car dispersing the sand around the tires. The desert inhales the sound of the car’s passing, so that a movement that should make noise is all the more profound by its muffling. I didn’t really see Wadi Rum from the Jeep, I saw it whenever the Jeep stopped and we got out to roam around. When I was on the camel I saw everything.

After a half hour we had risen steadily enough that the town behind us disappeared, and the jeeps had all sailed well beyond us. For the day I was really in the desert, and the lamest, most predictably tourist excursion turned out to be the most genuine and satisfying. Fahad first took me to “Laurence Spring.” Wadi Rum was the World War I stomping ground of Laurence of Arabia, a man made more by Hollywood and ego than accomplishment, but the moniker is a strategy heavily utilized by the Jordanians to pull in Westerners. Here the day trip jeeps, weekend trip jeeps, and shorter camel rides coalesced. A wide concrete cistern was build to pull in water from a fairly reliable spring a few hundred feet up the nearby mountain. When I climbed to the top I saw that the spring itself looked like little more than a stagnant puddle filled with pond scum, but any reliable source of water in this area even 100 years ago, was a godsend.

We got back on our camels and plodded along until we got to “the big sand dune.” The area was notable more for the color that the quantity though, the sand moved progressively from a tan, to a pink, to a deep red, and the rocks of the mountains nearby changed hues with the ground. We got off the camels and I ambled around for a while taking pictures, afterward we headed to an open area with plenty of shrubs for the animals to graze while we ate our tuna in Arabic bread with faux orange drink. Nearby on one of the walls of a mountain was a series of pictures carved into the rock by the bedu. Fahad told me they were 400 years old, but he shrugged his shoulders as if he didn’t know or didn’t care.

The Bedu never left behind too much in the way of monuments. They were both a race that could often trace their tribe back thousands of years, many to names in the Bible, and at the same time have almost nothing tangible in all that history to show for it. Jordan still has a significant Bedu population, but even this is being sapped by the inevitable spread of modernity. Tents give way to houses, camels to Toyotas, goats to mops and brooms and taxi licenses. It might seem like an easy choice to many, a hard survival in an inhospitable clime versus the comfort of air-conditioning, cable, and Facebook on a 3g phone. The other end of that transition is trading the life of a free underclass, one that could roam in these vast and beautiful spaces, or being an enslaved underclass, moving back and forth along the same roads to empty jobs while compressed into concrete squares.

Like all generalizations there are nuances and subtleties, political and religious motivations, abundance or dearth of natural resources, and stability of national government to consider, but in the end I think the natural inclination for the people of some of these countries to cling to religion, to the timeless, when the world around them has become inscrutable and uncontrollable is a very good mirror into the motivations behind Midwestern grandmothers preparing themselves for armed revolution while reading tea party manifestos. A factory closing outside of Kansas city might meet with the same response as one opening outside of Wadi Rum.

Americans felt that they deserved, earned, and controlled their comfort. The Bedu believed they deserved, were rewarded with, and controlled their freedom.

The last stop on my camel tour was “Laurence’s House,” a crumbling foundation of stones where the same quasi-fictional historical character holed up during the lulls between raids. It was a rather unremarkable spot, but in Wadi Rum there really are no unremarkable spots. It was a beautiful nothing. The sun began its wonderfully long desert descent and we mosied toward a different Bedu camp, as Jordan Tracks had no other guests for the day.

I was later joined by an American couple who also taught English in the East of Saudi Arabia, and their two children. A few Indians working for the banking industry in Abu Dhabi and a Spanish summer camp organizer completed the group. We ate, we bantered, and once again all the foreigners went to bed and I stayed up with the Bedu. We inevitably tumbled our words toward women after a while, but their English was a little better, for instance, one of them tried to convince me he’d killed a man with a rifle after the man killed one of his friends. The story was almost believable until he added that his getaway occurred when a rich drug dealer friend picked him up in his Lamborghini which he promptly dumped in the desert after safely reaching Wadi Rum. I was on the back of a camel for a little over six hours. I felt fine for the rest of the night, but the only thing that registered when I woke up was pain…everywhere.

In the morning I took a jeep and left the desert. Back in Wadi Rum village I jumped on a bus and headed for the most famous spot in Jordan. The famous Nabatean rock city of Petra.