A couple of weekends ago, Mike and I travelled about three and a half hours south of Amman to Aqaba, Jordan’s port on the Red Sea. It was our second trip there, we’d taken the girls when I first arrived in Jordan. One of our friends was celebrating her birthday and we had a great opportunity to go back with her and her wife and two other friends to enjoy a weekend out of the city. After a fun night at the Kempinski Hotel we drove the next morning to the amazingly breathtaking desert of Wadi Rum. This special edition blog post is dedicated solely to that adventure.
Wadi Rum is a protected area of Jordan that is inhabited by tribes of Bedouins who are the nomadic desert people of this region of the world. We arrived early to the visitors center, checked out the map and decided what we wanted to see. An eight hour tour, to include a sunset, was what we chose and we were matched with a guide who settled us into the back of his Toyota and off into the desert we went!
Our first big climb was up an enormous sand dune to reach the rocks that we climbed up to this view. At first I thought that it would be impossible to fill eight hours but, let me tell ya, it takes time to climb up rocks and once you are up there you just want to sit and rest for a bit before you turn around and figure out how to climb back down!
After three stops we drove to a shady spot to have lunch, well – our guide brought some lunch to share with us but we packed our own not knowing that we’d have lunch provided :)! Thankfully, there were a couple of people in our party that were happy to take him up on his offer. We sat for a bit, ate, talked and then got antsy and back into the Toyota we went!
After our stop in the middle of the canyon our Toyota sped through the sand and came upon a herd of camel, thankfully our guide had some bread left from our lunch and offered a slice to this snacker who then checked us all out. Some of the animals that live in Wadi Rum are camels, foxes, snakes, hedgehogs, sand cats, wild dogs and ibex.
Our next stop was one of the big attractions, the Um Fruth Rock Bridge. Most of our party did not climb up; one of us went half way (not me) and another went all the way to the top (not me).
One of my favorite parts of the day was getting back into the truck, situating ourselves and just driving in the desert. It was a little like sitting in a speed boat that is racing through the water – fast, bumpy, windy and lots to look at.
I particularly liked my view once Mike turned his hat around and I could see the logo to my best friends’ brewery in Fredericksburg; Red Dragon Brewery!
The last stop before our sunset climb was to a formation that reminded me of Skull Island from King Kong. What was the most interesting was all of the stacked rock ‘installations’ up on the flat surfaces and tucked in the nooks! We added a rock or two to the Jenga like ‘artworks’.
At this point we’d been riding around for about seven hours and needed to get to the location where we could sit and watch the sunset. The climb was an easy one and we got there early enough to claim a primo spot. We watched trucks driving back and forth leaving trails of dust in their wake, we saw caravans of visitors on sunset camel rides and we talked about our day.
So, what do you after an eight hour tour of Wadi Rum? Some people camp in the park, either on their own or with a camp company. We stayed at camp outside of the park called Sun City
We got to the camp just before it got dark, dropped our things in our tents and headed to the dinner – meat cooked in the ground which is pretty cool if you like that sort of thing. LOL thankfully there was plenty for this vegetarian to eat; eggplant, hummus, even pasta! After dinner Mike and I took bean bag chairs over to our friend’s deck of the Martian Bubble tents we were staying in and gazed up at the full moon, tracked where the planes we could see were flying to (there’s an app for that), figured out what stars and constellations were in the sky (there’s an app for that), listened to music and chit chatted.
While I stayed in bed, our friends went on a sunrise camel ride to kick off Missy’s actual birth-day.
Needless to say, we enjoyed the heck out of ourselves. After having breakfast at the camp we packed up and headed home to Amman where we picked up Finn from the petsitter and returned to our waiting kitty, Iris. It felt so good to have spent so much time outside, walking and climbing, getting dusty, knotty hair, breathing fresh air and being with great people. We should all make the time to do that. Thanks for reading, bye for now.
DiForYou 