Last Post in Jordan

This is my last post in Jordan. I leave for China tomorrow night, at 2 am. Sorry I've dropped the ball on posting for the last month, finals was stretched out for a full three weeks, so I have actually been busy, plus I've traveled almost every weekend. My last exam is actually tomorrow. I've taken three trips in the past month, two in Jordan and last weekend, I went to Israel. I'll start with the Jordan trips though, Wadi Rum and Dana Nature Preserve.

Wadi Rum is one of the more famous places in Jordan, although unless you've researched the country you've probably never heard of it. It's a great place for rock climbing and actually reminded me very strongly of southern Utah. It's desert, like the rest of Jordan, but although it's called valley (wadi means valley) its more like a lower altitude plateau with small mountains bordering it and somewhat randomly appearing in the middle of it than what I think of as a canyon. The mountains are, not surprisingly, sandstone, which makes climbing somewhat interesting. This was a CIEE trip, and it was a very popular one, so my experience was quite a bit different than if I had gone in a smaller group. There were probably 80 of us, at least. We had been told that we were going on 4x4s, which I thought meant 4-wheelers (ATVs, whatever you want to call it). I couldn't imagine CIEE actually putting all of us college students in charge of our own motorized vehicles, not least because it is strictly forbidden in the study abroad rules. It turned out that I was right, by 4x4s, they meant small pickup trucks with benches in the back suitable for 6 people. At first I was somewhat disappointed (I would have liked to drive something) but it was fun being driven. Of course, being college students, a lot of the 3 hour trip was spent trying to get our drivers to race each other across the desert, and at times they obliged us. There was a LOT of yelling. If there had been any animals in the vicinity, (I never saw any other than camels, who I imagine are used to noisy tourists) they would have been long gone. It was fun though. We had periodic stops for tea and impromptu rock climbing. There were no ropes or anything like that, of course, it was just bouldering, but its been a long time since I got to climb anything, so that was probably my favorite part of the first day. Oh, and did I mention that it was hot? It's gotten hotter since then, so the memory isn't as clear, but it was definitely hot, at the beginning of April. The seasons here mess with my mind a bit.

After the jeep (as they called the pick-ups) ride, we were dropped off at a somewhat picturesque (although it would have been hard to find an un-picturesque spot) spot to watch the sun go down. This would have been much more fun with less people. Possibly with no people. As it happened, we didn't even completely finish watching it go down before we left. Our "camp" for the night, which I had been told was not a bedouin camp, but it was "like" a bedouin camp, consisted of rows of tents made out of rough cloth, which is actually what some bedouin tents are made of, except they use pretty much anything and their tents tend to be more of a patchwork of plastic and fabric, not nearly as orderly as our accommodations. I know this mostly because of the many bedouin tents I've seen by the side of most of the roads in this country, and even occasionally in Amman. Another thing that always accompanies the real bedouin tents is goats, sheep or both, and our hotel definitely didn't have that. There were probably ten establishments like this one all clustered in this one part of the desert, around a small mountain from a town, so as to seem more isolated. Nevertheless, it was nice enough.

The next day, we woke up to the sound of camels. The main features of this trip were the kinds of rides arranged for us. The first day was jeeps/pick-ups. The second day was camels. I thought surely we'd at least get to "drive" our own camels, but that did not happen either. Imagine seeing 80 camels, carrying mostly white American college students, mostly led in chains of camels by Jordanians across the desert of Wadi Rum. It was probably quite a sight. Camels, as it turns out, are not the most comfortable beasts to sit on for long periods of time. Our ride was 3 hours, and if there had been no trotting, I probably would have made it alright. The way you are supposed to sit on a camel is by hooking one of your knees over the front pommel and propping your other foot on top of that leg, sort of cross-legged. Most of us seemed to manage this alright, but my saddle happened to be too big, and there was no way for me to do this without sitting directly on top of the camel's hump (you should be just behind or just ahead of it, I think), which is both uncomfortable and rather precarious. So I wished for stirrups the whole way and couldn't walk the next day. Despite that, it was an interesting trip. We made a few stops at various spots, but the point was the ride itself. I was in the back of a string of 3 camels, led by a Jordanian who also held the reins to another string of 3 camels, so there were 6 of us and our "driver." The driver changed periodically, and watching these guys climb all over their camels was entertaining. My favorite way of mounting that I saw was when they stepped on the camel's neck while it was standing to get up to the saddle. We all mounted on the ground, and then the camel stood up, which was an extremely jerky process (first the back legs straightened, then the front) and you had to hold onto both the front and back pommels to stay seated. Oh, and then there was trotting. Walking was fine, not exactly smooth, but not jarring either. Trotting, on the other hand, is torturous, at least if you aren't sitting right it was. Our driver for the second half of the trip was quite a flirt, although not with any of us (all 6 of us were girls). He would bring our whole mini caravan up to a girl and start chatting. This was fine, except when he decided that he needed to catch up with a particular girl. Then came the trotting. This continued for probably the last hour, and by the end we were all cursing him. My camel in particular was unhelpful in this regard, because he seemed to delight in trotting at any time, and even though he was in the back, he still sometimes got the whole group going unnecessarily. I say he, but I was never actually able to check since he only stood up when I was on him. I named him Ahmed, just for something to yell when he started running. Not that he payed any attention to me of course. I'm sure these camels have carried hundreds of tourists across parts of Wadi Rum. We rode the camels to the visitor center, which is where we met our buses, so that was the end of the Wadi Rum adventure. I'll post pictures later, my internet is being a bit slow at the moment.