Pt1 - 11: THE WADI

At 7 the next morning we took the highway north out of Aqaba in a boxy little Daihatsu Feroza stuffed to the roof with four bodies and all our gear. The first stop was a place called Wadi Rum. I’d never heard of it but Micha assured us that according to his guidebook it was worth a detour en route to Petra.

I was designated chauffeur for the first leg. It only took an hour of changing gears with the door handle and indicating with the windscreen wipers to get used to the left-hand drive thing, by which time we arrived at the Beau Geste-ish police post at the mouth of the wadi. We paid a modest entry fee and proceeded to the Government Rest House in the little village to orientate ourselves on a vast wall map of the 30km deep wadi and all its tributaries.

After dense black coffee we headed through the village and into the wadi proper. I had no expectations about this place so what unfolded before us as we rounded the first bend was a complete and stunning revelation that awed us all into silence.

Immense rock walls, or jebels, boiled out of the sand on all sides in a staggering array of sizes, shapes, textures and colours. We felt like insects in a matchbox toy on the surface of a distant planet. Suddenly Micha yelled, “Look! Up there, Lawrence’s Well.” We followed his pointing finger to a venerable palm tree – the only tree of any girth still standing in Wadi Rum – about half way up a slope of scree on the right.

We parked the Feroza and scrambled up over smooth rock strata tortured into psychedelic patterns by the geological cataclysm which created this wonderland about twenty million years ago. Eventually we stood in the shade of the palm T E Lawrence (of Arabia) snoozed under between preparations for the assault on Aqaba Castle.

Although the well in question was little more than a stagnant pond concealed in a cleft of rock the panorama was truly sensational. Imagine the wadi as a crude T with the well at the intersection looking straight down the leg. A sea of coloured sands, ebbing and flowing between the brooding jebels, spread away to the horizon. In the far distance the palette of reds, ochres, golds, greys and whites resolved into a lavender haze under an improbably blue ceramic sky. It was easy to appreciate how Rum came to be known as the Valley of the Moon and why the notoriously grumpy Lawrence would later write in Seven Pillars of Wisdom without apparent irony: “But in truth, I liked Rum too much.” The sense of scale left us feeling even more irrelevant than we did below.

Mesmerised by the tricks of shifting light bringing the walls of Rum to life we spent the long day wheeling deep into the wadi in search of two elusive rock bridges mentioned in Micha’s guidebook. We stumbled upon the Dali-esque arch of the small bridge mid-afternoon. It was an easy climb onto the span where Micha and I pretended to be Peter O’Toole and Anthony Quinn stirring up a horde of sword-weilding Bedouin warriors, our voices lost in a crescendo of echoes from the surrounding walls. Indeed, the spectacular backdrop to the scene where O’Toole and Omar Sharif join forces with Quinn in David Lean’s 1962 epic is vintage Rum.

Fortified with a snack of nuts, pitta, tinned tuna and tinned Kraft cheese from Australia – how strange it was to see that familiar label in Arabic – we returned to the well to catch the sunset. I wish I could capture the canvas of light in a deft phrase. Suffice instead to use the old cliché and say it was simply breathtaking as the bronzed jebels dissolved into dusk.

We found a place to camp in Wadi Ishfrin, one of Rum’s many branches. The girls organised the site while the Great White Hunters set off to fill the Feroza with enough thornbush for a half decent fire, which we just managed to do as the last light faded completely.

The night promised to be chilly and since Micha and Lea were travelling without sleeping bags we drove into the village to rustle up some blankets before returning to camp. The jovial fellow at the rest house insisted we take them free of charge. Micha offered to leave some collateral. “What you want to steal these for? Ha, you will bring them back in the morning.” And so I drove back out onto the sand where we discerned a slight problem. Where the hell was the camp?

In this twilight zone between sun and stars we could just make out the leonine shape of the huge jebel on our left. We followed the profile as far as it went but then it was flying on instruments, threading our way through the low thornbush scrub by the Feroza’s dim headlights. I don’t think Micha shared my enthusiasm for the challenge but he trusted me enough to keep his doubts to himself as we worked our way painstakingly up Wadi Ishfrin. Finally we rounded a low bluff and spotted the glow of the campfire the girls had got together with a few twigs. They’d convinced themselves we were lost for the night and were visibly relieved when we jumped from the car and called out “Hi honey, we’re home!”

We stoked the fire at sat round it sipping Micha’s aromatic Becherovka, a Czech spirit I suspect was originally distilled to clean upholstery. It was cold away from the campfire when I went to take a pee but the sense of complete solitude and the immense jebels silhouetted against a night sky in full bloom more than compensated for any small discomfort. Later we bundled ourselves up in our sleeping bags, pulled our beanies down over our brows and counted the shooting stars into a deep, restorative sleep.

In the morning we feasted heartily on the usual fare and retraced our route of yesterday straight down the middle of Rum towards the rock bridge. In retrospect we might have been better off seeking out more rock art, the Nabatean temple or the headquarters of the dashingly named Desert Camel Corps whose job it is to run down smugglers, but M was obsessed with finding the second, larger bridge so we pushed on.

We stopped at a Bedouin tent to ask directions. I got out of the car and approached the camp. A swarthy young man with the compulsory black moustache and wearing a scuffed black leather jacket came to meet me and shook my hand. His grip was gentle but insistent and he smiled broadly when I asked him about the bridge.

“Come, come,” he beckoned, and waved the others out of the Feroza. He led us to the tent. Made of goat’s hair panels, it was about six or seven meters long by four or five wide and held erect by poles and ropes. Inside were three women, three children and a man in his thirties dressed in a grey gallabiya and a red keffiyah who welcomed us as we might welcome distant relatives we’d been expecting for days, a bit shy but determined to extend our warmest hospitality. The tent was furnished with the bare necessities, nothing that couldn’t be loaded into their two white Toyota 4WDs at the drop of a hat – cooking utensils, sleeping mats, a small fire of glowing embers over which hung a pot of boiling water. Kids, of the baby goat variety, capered all over the place.

Ouda, he of the grey gallabiyah, was head of the clan – acting as it transpired – and moved us all out into the sun. Mats were laid in a semi-circle and we sat in a particular order: guests to the left, family to the right, with Ouda and myself – and I can only assume this was in deference to what remained of my grey hair – side by side in the centre. The younger man set up a battered old black kettle in front of us and rinsed five small glasses in a saucepan of fresh water. His name was Ali but I couldn’t stand it so I mentally christened him Tawfiq - imagine a world where every male you meet is John. He poured tea for we guests and Ouda.

Almost an hour passed in grunting conversation illustrated with inflections, sign language and pictures in the sand. While Tess and Lea clucked over the children we men discussed the important business, like how many camels the family had and where Ouda and Tawfiq’s father had taken them to graze three days ago. We also discovered that the big bridge was just around the next spur.

We were making the most of an extended photo opportunity when Tawfiq spied a sand cloud about two kilometres distant and announced the return of his father. The old man approached surprisingly quickly on foot, released a string of six camels just in front of the camp and came to greet us. It was difficult to guess his age; if you went by his toothless smile, leathery skin and thick grey stubble you’d say he was about 70; on the other hand, if you went by his spry gait you’d say he was half that age. He politely declined our requests for a classic character shot on the grounds he wasn’t looking his best after three days in the desert and unfortunately we didn’t have the language to argue this was precisely the point. On that note, we bid a respectful goodbye and left the family to catch up on the old man’s news while we struck out for the bridge.

The big bridge turned out to be a carbon copy of the small bridge, only a lot of meters up a sheer rock face. We gave the climb a miss, drove back in to the village where we returned the blankets and set course for Petra.

Coming up: Rose Red Petra...