Jordan

The desert in Wadi Rum. Notice the red, orange, yellow, and white sands.

This is Jordan. Big, beautiful, and inspiring(kind of like Jordan, my former travelling companion) it is a place to come camping in the desert. So, that's what I did- and may do more of. Its colder and wetter than Egypt but absolutely gorgeous. I spent a night with a man named Mohammed (please, no jokes) in his home/hostel and a night in the desert. Stayed in a Bedouin tent, ate a Bedouin meal cooked in Bedouin style- that's by digging a hole in the sand, getting a good amount of hot coals in the bottom, and putting the chicken, potatoes, rice, onions, etc. in pans over the coals, and then covering the hole with a lid and finally sand. Pretty damn good, too.


This(at right) is referred to as Lawrence's house. The name is misleading, however, as only the movie, not the man, used this site. The brick structure(located on the bottom right) is left from an ancient tribe. Lawrence, the man, did not stay here, but the filmmakers used the site for a panorama of the desert.




Here is the tent site with cooking pit in the foreground. That old jalopy is somehow running-don't ask me how. They cross wires to start it and drive it like criminals on the run. All the loose metal and missing parts make it LOUD- rattling, banging, burning, stinking. While cruising at about 40mph across scrubland, the driver, a 20 year-old Bedouin named Tesser, pumped hard at the break about five times, and nothing happened. While I was trying to figure out if it was really the clutch, he smiled at me, and explained easily, festively really, as if admitting his love of music, "No work, no work." Ohhhh, the exhiliration.

Another glorious shot of Wadi Rum.