The "egg-like" mountains of Beyda village....alright, just use your imagination, okay?

The "egg-like" mountains of Beyda village....alright, just use your imagination, okay?

Cycling Jordan tries to host a few long-distance overnight trips each year, and now as the weather begins to finally turn cold in Jordan, Sa’ad invited his hardcore biking fans for the last overnight trip of the year (the other one was a camping trip in the south as well, but I was in Tajikistan at that time). The plan was for the 18 of us to take a bus down to the village of Shobauk in the south, and the bike from there through the mountains on the edge of Wadi Jordan to Little Petra, where we’d spend the night. The following day we’d do some more biking the next day and the return home by bus to Amman.

I wore the green and gold jersey that the Rome-Mecca cycling tour group had given me, and a few others had jerseys as well. The bikes were loaded onto the bus roof as usual and we packed into the bus. During the two hour ride south, some slept and some talked; personally I only woke up for coffee at one of the many tiny little coffee stands out in the middle of the desert.

The ride itself was quite the experience, much like our daytrip to Azraq in late spring. One thing’s for sure – I never knew how much I appreciated cars/trucks and all they do to flatten out gravel and knock big rocks out of the way on these tiny little shepherd truck paths. Over five hours of biking, we spent probably about a combined total of 10 minutes on actual paved roads. The remaining time was fairly evenly split between paths that looked like they were frequently used by Bedouins and their beat-up old trucks, or the alternative – biking over rocks the size of grapefruits and praying we wouldn’t hit something that would fling us off the side of the mountain slope.

Although the views were great, there was an interesting milky haze hanging over the entire mountain range, relatively uncommon in previous travels. It gave the cliffs a pale golden glow that seemed to appear gradually around us as the bike ride continued into the afternoon.

Two of the people on the trip had definite problems with the rocks in the trail right away; falling down repeatedly and one even hurt herself with a pulled muscle in her leg after landing the wrong way on something. They only stayed with us for the first 3 hours before taking one of our support pickup trucks (we had two with extra water and spare rental bikes) and getting driven back to Amman. The rest of us pushed on, but it was great that we were all at similar athletic levels. The person in front was never more than 5 minutes ahead of the person bringing up the rear.

Couldn't have been worse timing to lose the support truck, considering what was about to happen...

Couldn't have been worse timing to lose the support truck, considering what was about to happen...

At one point, the road was actually split open by a ravine, requiring us to portage our bicycles down through this small ditch (probably a better descriptive word than ravine) and up to the other side. That was when the rocks started getting particularly bad, likely because no cars had been up this path in a long, long time.

Mohammad used a cable tie to hold it onto the frame of his new "scooter"

Mohammad used a cable tie to hold it onto the frame of his new "scooter"

They got so bad, in fact, that the rear derailleur system of one bike was caught on a rock, and was torn right off the bike. Unfortunately, he was using his own bicycle, so we couldn’t just replace it with pieces we had with us. Even worse for him, the remaining support truck had been forced to turn around at the ditch with orders to meet us at the village for the night later on. The cyclist, Mohammad, made do with what he had: the bike still rolled, just couldn’t be pedaled anymore. So he coasted down hills wherever he could get any speed, and then ran uphill with the bike when he couldn’t.

On the final (and hardest) downhill before reaching Beyda, that dim group of buildings in the middle of the plain there

On the final (and hardest) downhill before reaching Beyda, that dim group of buildings in the middle of the plain there

Thankfully, we were close to our nightly goal of Beyda, a tiny village with barely a hundred people living in it. The mountains around the city were large, rounded, and burnished a creamy off-white with sand and dust from the desert. As the Arabic word for egg is “beyd” it’s obvious from where the village got its name. I won’t say that all of us were exhausted, but it definitely felt like it had been a long ride, on par with Sa’ad’s original estimate of 70K or so. Imagine our surprise when we checked in with one biker’s GPS which corrected us to a much less impressive 33K. Although it had taken us almost five hours of biking to reach Beyda, we simply hadn’t been going very fast at all; how fast can one expect to go when you’re always either going straight up cliffs or trying not to die on the downhills!

It didn’t matter though; most of us were tired enough that we felt as if we’d gotten our money’s worth. We explored our lodging for the night…turns out it wasn’t quite done yet. No hot water, little pressure, and toilets were ceramic holes in the floor. Be that as it may, the building was clean, tidy, and freshly painted, and with plenty of windows to check out our surroundings. After a dinner of fried chicken in rice with stewed vegetables, we loaded back onto the assembled bus in the chilly night and drove to Wadi Musa for some fun.

One of the English guys with us commented ruefully that it was his first time “at” Petra, and it was now 7 at night and pitch black. And he was right – we were inside the fences of the national park area and 10 meters from the front gate of Petra, in a joint that was dubbed “The Cave Bar.” It would have been slightly more accurate to refer to it as “The Crypt Bar” however, because we were actually in one of the more distant Nabatean tombs, sitting at a table in the exact center of the burial chamber. I tried not to look too hard at the table in the candle-lit chamber; just in case they hadn’t even bothered to remove this poor guy’s casket before they turned his final resting place into a 6-dinar-a-glass swanky bar.

After returning back to Beyda and our resthouse, I debated going up to the roof with the provided farschat mattresses to get the effect of “camping,” but after checking out the wind-and-pebble-swept roof and the giant buzzing mobile telecom tower mounted on it, I decided that downstairs would be fine. At least I got to enjoy the familiar camping experience of extreme morning back pain from sleeping on a hard surface on a 5 centimeter thick mat! Ah, memories.

As soon as we had everything packed back onto the bus after our relaxed late breakfast, Sa’ad took us a mere kilometer farther south to Little Petra, a local treasure of Beyda that we had driven right past in the darkness last night without noticing. Just like the name would imply, this is a some sort of separate Nabatean burial center that even predates its famous neighbor up the road. The entire sight can be seen in about half an hour if you want to go quickly, or an hour if you’d like to linger and enjoy yourself. We had more biking to do, so we didn’t stay around too long, but here’s a couple pictures.

The first monument is like a sentinel for the rest of the site, hidden inside a miniature siq trench

The first monument is like a sentinel for the rest of the site, hidden inside a miniature siq trench

The largest tomb after passing through the siq

The largest tomb after passing through the siq

Just like with Petra, you go through long, narrow trench in order to reach the majority of the tombs. This siq is proportionally smaller compared with the Great Siq in Petra, but it definitely would have done the trick to prevent a large invading force from entering this burial center. The Siq is about a half meter wide and ten meters long. For more pictures and information on area, check out this site.

Onwards! We had more biking to do, so as the winds started to pick up, we left the Wadi Musa basin area and drove for another half an hour to reach a farm farther north. A large windmill squawked dustily at us, grinding out tuneless music as we unloaded the bikes onto the dirt path. It was one of the first times I’ve seen wind being used a personal generating resource here in Jordan, and I saw at least one more as we hurdled through the twists and turns of this section of the mountains – way to go, farmers and shepherds!

The comparisons between the previous day and this one were easy to make. Instead of being over a thousand meters up on the edge of the Jordan Valley, we were now a scant 400 and riding through a shall valley. Although there were no uphills of comparable length to yesterday, the hills here were much more potholed and filled with trenches and gullies, which meant that this road was actually much, much harder to navigate than the previous. However, I had even more fun on our relatively short trip that afternoon then the previous day, because of how much more technical riding there was. I could focus much more on actual skillful biking and avoiding rocks – or not avoiding them and jumping them instead – instead of trying not to fall over with exhaustion on the side of a cliff. We could faster here than anywhere else, and it was definitely an adrenaline rush to fly over the top of sand dunes, getting a bit of air only to sink down into the sand on the other side and have to pedal madly in order to maintain momentum. Sa’ad did a great job of picking out this area for us to just go wild in. The rocks were huge, and I thought my wrists were going to shake and vibrate right off my hands, but we made it through the 25K stretch of desert in only a couple hours.

We ended the trip next to a late-Ottoman period house that looked like it just been plunked into the middle of the desert out of nowhere. It was badly in need of a cleaning; but we joked about camping out there and making a two-night trip out of the next time. We had a three hour bus ride back to Amman, but it felt good to sit on a seat that wasn’t furiously vibrating like I’d just stuffed some quarters into it.

In other news, there’s only 8 days remaining before I’m on a plane again to return to the U.S.A.! I can’t wait to see everyone again and enjoy some of my dad’s famous Thanksgiving meals – as much as I enjoyed our Wadi Rum Thanksgiving last year, I did promise to my dad that I couldn’t miss two of his feasts in a row. This will probably one of my last blog entries of the year right here; I probably won’t write too much after I get back to (good ol’ predictable) America. But I definitely will have a few more left in me before the clock rolls over to 2010.