If I had all the time in the world, I probably wouldn’t have chosen the end of June as the best time of the year to pack a bag and head out into the middle of the desert. However, I was happy to do it for my friends Khalil, Silas, and Silas’ housemate Moses. When Silas told me a few weeks ago that he had never been to Wadi Rum, the famous Jordanian camping retreat in the desert, I was very surprised. I had already seen it a couple times in the past year, first with Haitham, and then with my EGT coworkers. But to have not seen Rum after two years (Silas) 4 years (Moses) or 20 years (Khalil) seemed downright unfair to yourself. I vowed to do something about it and told Silas that I would find a way to get him and his housemate down there before they left the country in a few weeks.

Khalil kindly offered his SUV as our transport vehicle, and after work on Thursday afternoon he and I left Ayn al Basha, picked up the others from Rabbia, and the four of us basked happily in the air conditioning of the large extended cab and watched “Wicker Man” on the DVD player built into the dashboard. We only stopped the car once on the 3 hour drive south, and when I climbed out to stretch my legs at the edge of the burning desert sands, the dry wind whipped my breath from my throat, leaving me gasping for breath and sweat pouring down my face. Nothing was visible around us at the point except for the glowing ball to our right and the occasional truck roaring past, windows tightly rolled up and sealed.

However, when we arrived in the Wadi at half past 6 that evening, the sun had shrunk below the pitted mountains that now surrounded us and the weather was much more tolerable. We were a little late, but Suleiman jovially greeted us at the same parking lot where I had last said farewell to him seven months ago as my EGT colleagues and I had left from our Thanksgiving trip. I had called him up as soon as I learned that Silas had wanted to go to Rum, and he was happy to schedule our little group in for an overnight trip. Same as before, we loaded our bags and cooler into the back of the tall Bedouin’s familiar banged-up Jeep, and the engine banged us forward across the reddish sands drifting over the Bedouin village’s streets. Within a few minutes, the road vanished and the huts faded behind us into the mountains, and were swallowed by the deserts.

At the tourist center, Moses poses next to Rum's most famous mountain group, the Seven Pillars of Wisdom

My three companions were enjoying themselves greatly, especially Khalil, who is probably one of the most cheerful men I’ve ever met. Although he’d certainly camped in the desert in Saudi before, mountains like these were entirely new to him and he snapped photographs constantly and called his wife enthusiastically to tell her what he was seeing. Although Khalil only speaks a few words in English, between Silas, Suleiman, and myself, we were able to keep him entertained, and he’s vowed to be “conversational” in English before I return to America in October. I don’t think he’ll have a problem – I tell all of my non-English speaking Arab friends that anyone that learned to speak Arabic can learn English without breaking a sweat.

We bumped our way up to the campsite and with a final lurch, the Jeep ground to a halt, causing us all to fall on the floor and atop the cooler. The sun was just moving behind the lowest mountains in the distance, but the four of us climbed to the top of the low mountain behind the tents, gaining the high ground and the ability to watch the sunset a second time. Back on the ground, I met Suleiman’s two assistants at the site, Amar and Mahdi, both of whom where also wearing the long flowing thobe that is so common in these parts for relieving the heat. Suleiman joked with us, switching easily between English and Arabic in conversation although Silas and I tried to keep things in Arabic mode as much as possible to help Khalil out.

The other three tourists load up their plates by the glow of gas camping lamps

Dinner was roasted chicken and vegetables with rice, illuminated dimly in the red-carpeted tent by two gas lanterns that once again brought sweat to our foreheads. No zarb this time, unfortunately – I guess you need to let them know a little more ahead of time in order to get some zarb-cooked food. Afterward, the seven of us stretched around the campfire on farshat-mattresses atop the soft sand. Khalil had brought his personal argeilleh along (he’s never without it for long) and lit up the classic tuufah (apple) flavored tobacco, puffing away as he and Suleiman chatted. Moses, Silas, and I watched the stars brighten into existence above, and as our eyes adjusted into the darkness we could even make out a couple satellites shooting past overhead, dim dots next to the stars but moving as fast as any airplanes. Because of the khamaseeneh dust weather which still has not entirely cleared up yet, the stars weren’t as bright as back in November, but it was still a gorgeous night and the temperature had rapidly descended to a warm breeze which blew around us and lit the coals in Khalil’s argeilleh. Like he had at Thanksgiving, Suleiman rose at about 10:30 and bid us farewell, vanishing into the sand silently, his sandals barely raising a whisper. The coals darkened around the blackened teapot sitting the circle of stones, and suddenly the night stars doubled again.

Suddenly it was dawn, and I had a nasty discovery of what the cool daylight brought with it – biting black flies who had a penchant for flying into your ears like tiny bad-tempered jackhammers. Smacking my head a few times blearily, I pulled my small blanket over myself, tucking in my legs, and managed another hour of semi-sleep, vaguely attuned to the sound of dozens of tiny whirring flies bouncing off the blanket like BB-gun pellets. When I next pulled the blanket aside, I was the only one left by the ashes of the fire and everyone else was gone. As it turned out, Silas had abandoned the campfire in the middle of the night citing the cold breeze and was lying in a heap on the floor of the tent a few meters away.

After the usual “simple breakfast” of bread, zataar spices dipped in oil, and leban cream, Silas suddenly realized that he was missing his prescription sunglasses, which meant that we turned the camp upside down for the next 20 minutes hunting them down. Searching beneath the dusty farshat, under the rugs, in all the bags, and below all the tables yielded nothing, but Khalil’s sharp eyes finally picked out a faint hump below the sand where Silas had originally slept and the mission was accomplished. I winced as he dusted off the grits of sand from the lenses, but he assured me that all was well. The sand in the desert of Wadi Rum is fine like ashtray sand, but if it had been larger-grained he might have been in more trouble.

The sun was just barely starting to warm the chilly sand beneath our feet when we left the campsite at 8, with Mahdi at the wheel of the beat-up Jeep. The shadow of the sun flickered in and out around the mountains the eastern distance; some were tall enough to block us, even from kilometers away, but some were far shorter and the sun struck out over them into our eyes. I recognized our location; we were at the dune-jumping location that Aaron, Erica, Lauren and I had leapt with Suleiman back on Thanksgiving.

Mahdi the Surfer Dude

But Mahdi had a different idea. He silently pulled out a long piece of plastic from the front cab of the truck and gestured for us to follow him. We raced after him to try to figure out what the heck he was doing, but our questions were answered when he turned it over in his hands, revealing a snowboard – or rather, a sandboard, judging from the thick coating of red dust in deeply scratched grooves on the bottom of it. After he demonstrated the necessary rocking, worm-like movement necessary to move the board in the sand (as it turns out, tiny rocks are much less conducive to smooth movement, we all gave it a shot. First Khalil, then Silas, then, Moses, then finally myself. I was wearing the always-fashionable “keffiyeh-tucked underneath safari hat” look, which was succicently defined by Moses and Silas as “making you look like a girl with weird white and red hair.” Of course he may have been jealous that I was by far the best one there at falling over; simply no competition.

Merely wearing a keffiyeh does not make you as skilled a sandboarder as a Bedouin.

After climbing up the rock arch again and posing on the top of it (a standard journey for first timers Mahdi promised that he would show us some “better boarding” that was a few kilometers away, deeper into the eastern desert. On the way out, we briefly stopped at two locations – the first of which was a tumble of large stones that used to be built against a wall. It didn’t look like much, but it was called “Lawrence’s House” because Lawrence of Arabia had supposedly stopped and rested here in this building on the way to one of his campaigns. A few kilometers beyond that, Mahdi pointed out the “real” Arch of the region, a massive collapsed rockfall suspended between the top of two mountains that looked massive even from 2 kilometers away. According to our guide, this arch took a day’s journey to climb via rope harness and tools, unlike the one we had just visited which took about 10 minutes in our bare feet. Perhaps next time when my parents are visiting we can check that one out!

Silas and Mahdi ponder the best way to tackle a giant sand mountain

Finally we rounded one last shadowed mountain and when our eyes adjusted to the blinding light of the midday sun, we saw the massive red lump of the hill that Mahdi had been referring to. It didn’t look like a dune, not exactly, but instead the mounded results of hundreds of years of sand storms that had slowly built up a 40 meter tall barricade of sand against a 60 meter tall mountain. Mahdi again handed Silas the board, this time with a little grin on his face, and stretched out in the sand in the cooler darkness of the mountain behind us. “Go on, give it a try,” he commanded in his soft voice, gesturing towards its summit several hundred meters away from the truck. After setting foot in the sand, we wisely decided it was time to put the shoes back on, but for poor Silas and Moses, who only had sandals, every step they trudged up the sandy slope meant digging their toes into the painfully hot sand. Me; I just stood at the bottom and filmed while drinking a martini. Like before, I was the last one to go down after Mahdi showed us all how it was done, but it was a fun experience. Definitely not fast enough to be dangerous; friction saw to that, and it did meant that if you fell (which you will) you can easily stop yourself, brush yourself off, and keep going down the rest of the hill. The results post-descent were the same as with the jumping – I was pounding hot sand out of my ears, pockets, and shoes for the rest of the day afterward.

We had our few bags with us in the Jeep, so we didn’t need to return to the camp again and instead headed directly back to the village on the edge of the Wadi. After paying Mahdi and saying our goodbyes, we still had a little time left to check out the fact museum in the visitors center and see the artifacts in it. I was personally more amazed that they managed to fit all of the dense information in Arabic, French, and English for each section, the writing dwindling down to little dots on the walls in some places.

As we left the Wadi and returned to the highway, Silas and Moses paused so that I could take pictures of them with a picture of a “Camel Crossing Zone” sign by the side of the road. As they explained, it would be probably one of their last chances to see such a thing, as they’re not available in America and I’m pretty sure the situation is similar in Nigeria and England, too. However, I’m glad that I got them to come out for one last weekend adventure out in the Jordanian desert, because after all, a life in Jordan couldn’t be complete without at least one visit to the friendly Bedouins down in Wadi Rum.