The next morning we woke up and grabbed a quick breakfast of hummus and pita bread before embarking on the bus to visit Wadi Rum Desert. We drove to the entrance of the park and loaded onto a set of pickup trucks to drive deeper into the Negev (which is the larger desert Wadi Rum is part of). The rocks and mountains in this canyon were so gigantic they put the others we’d seen till now to shame. Occasionally we’d see a group of Bedouins herding goats or sheep as we drove. Surprisingly, the desert was actually really chilly. Even though the sun was up and shining down brightly the desert itself had a very cold breeze blowing across it which made the whole desert about 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Ra’ad took us to a Bedouin tent where we were introduced to a family of Bedouin herders (who were drastically different from the peddlers at Petra). They didn’t speak any English, so Mark and Ra’ad translated for us while they proudly showed us their sheep and camels. We were invited inside to talk and given some delicious and very sweet Arabic tea.
From talking to the Bedouins we learned about firstly how hard their life is most of the time. However, at the same time they refused to complain about it. One thing that stood out to me was when we asked them how much money it took for them to live on each day, and the head of the family (who must have been in his forties but who’s weather beaten face looked about sixty.) replied: “One can live on 10 dinars a day, 1 dinar a day, or 4 piasters a day, but you still live regardless.” After saying thank you to the Bedouins we hopped back in the trucks and drove further into the desert.
We stopped at a huge rocky sand dune which Ra’ad encouraged us to climb (we were doing a lot more climbing in Jordan than I’d anticipated.) However, the dune was about 150-200 feet tall, so climbing up the dune was a bit of a chore. We finally got up to the top and looked right over the cliff edge at Dr. Haddad and Ra’ad down below. On the way down, Alicia decided to roll down the sandy part of the dune, which didn’t work very well, but did eventually get her down the dune, slowly. I got down and took my shoe off, and I swear that the whole dune came out of the thing before I was done shaking it out. On the drive back to the visitor center, we passed a group of people getting set up for the start of a marathon (the first that Jordan has ever done.)
We spent most of the rest of the day driving back along the desert highway to Amman, with one notable stop. We were originally going to detour to see Umm Rasaas (the “aa” is important, one “a” changes the meaning to “Mother of Bullets”), which was a 6th century byzantine church. Mark, however, being the ultimate adventurer, suggested we go off the beaten path to an old abandoned Roman fortress which was remarkably well preserved as well as being totally abandoned. We thought this was great (especially since it didn’t have any government workers or tourist attractions, so we could just enjoy it and do whatever we wanted.) WE drove off the main road onto a side road, but quickly discovered that in order to get to the fort, we’d have to drive about a kilometer over the open desert.
About now I took a brief moment to reflect over the crazy stunts we’d pulled over the last few days. We’d already climbed two mountains, ridden a donkey up a third, haggled with Bedouins, dangled our feet off of the top of a historical landmark, and gotten married. What else could we do to top that? The answer: we went off-roading in the desert in a tour bus. Our fearless (but not English speaking) driver Ali plunged the bus right off the road and straight into the desert. It took us a while navigating around trenches and sinkholes, but eventually we made it to the fort…even though it meant leaving the bus and walking the last couple of hundred yards to the fort while Ali went around back to the highway to come at the fort from a different direction to pick us up.
The fort was known locally as “Bashir” even though that’s not what the Romans would have called in. It was amazingly intact, with all four walls standing, and most of the four towers were all still where the Romans had put them. Despite this, there were plenty of rockfalls and rubble to climb over, and I actually got into the fort by climbing up the side of one tower, though a 1-foot gap at the top of a collapsed doorframe, up the inside of the tower using hand and foot holds about 12 feet off of the ground, and clambered onto the wall (gates are for boring people). I had to backtrack a little bit and actually go through the tower again and down into the courtyard because Dr. Haddad started looking very nervous as I walked along the 1-foot wide remnants of the wall’s walkway (Brenda Nelson later accused me of being suicidal.)
Inside the fort we explored the towers, whose stairs were cracked and didn’t look very safe. We found quite a few broken bits of bleached bones around the fort, mostly animals and such which had died out here in the desert, but at the bottom of the tower there was one very human looking skeleton laying amidst the rubble. Very creepy, and made worse so when I discovered the bottom half of a skull later on as I exited the same way I’d gotten in.
Ali was waiting for us with the bus as we left and we moved drove back across the desert and made the rest of the trip to Amman without incident. We stopped back in the neighborhood of our apartment and said goodbye to Ali and Ra’ad, then walked back to the apartment where we finally unloaded. It was an odd feeling to have the sensation of finally coming home to a place we’d spent less than 24 hours in earlier in the week. We were greeted by Chris who had a whole giant pot of more biryanni waiting for us that the women of the church had prepared. We at quickly and then hung out in the apartment listening to Fletcher play dubstep remixes of songs on YouTube and recovering from our exhausting first few days in Jordan.
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