A million stars in the sky

Tue, February 9, 2010
Wadi Rum - Jordan

What an amazing experience. We are here in the desert in our Bedouin camp and it is just Jeff and I plus Wayad, our guide. There are several campsites set up all around this area, but it seems that we are the only guests staying in any of them. It’s as if we get the desert to ourselves.

The distance and sense of scale is so deceiving here. Rock formations loom up out of the sand like ships on the ocean. As you travel the desert floor between them, it seems as if you’re just a short distance from them, but you could easily be 5 or more km away. It is only when you see a vehicle or a person on foot or camel moving across the desert that you realize how vast the space is and how incredibly massive the rock outcroppings are. The formations seem to grow as vehicles approach them until a 4x4 looks like a tiny matchbox car next to a ten story building.

We arrive a little early in Wadi Rum, so we asked our guide, Aouda, to arrange for a camel ride for us. Normally tourists take a two hour camel ride that is thirty minutes riding to Lawrence Spring, an hour hanging there, and a half hour riding back. For us, it was two hours of straight riding from the village to our camp in Wadi Rum, which is a long time when you’re not used to riding a camel. You sit very high off the ground and the camel rocks back and forth as it walks. With no stirrups, there is no place to go with your feet, so your legs either swing around or you throw one up over the horn of the saddle and rest your ankle on the camel’s back. That’s ok for a while, but then you just make another part of your sitbones achy. By the time we reached camp, I was definitely ready to be done riding camel.

The funny thing about the camel ride is that, because we threw it together at the last minute, we didn’t get an adult “driver.” Aoudoa told us it will be a child. I figured he meant a 14 or 15 year old. What we got was a kid no more than 7 or 8 who rode the lead camel that ours were tethered to. His name was Yassim. His older brother, who was maybe 13 or 14 came along with, ostensibly to help, but he mostly sat on his camel texting a friend and watching some sort of program on his telephone. At one point, he broke away to go visit someone camped a short distance away and when we had gone for some time and he hadn’t come back, we stopped and little Yassim hollered and hollered for Aqmed to come back so we could all keep moving on. When he did rejoin us, the two of them argued back and forth just like brothers do with Aqmed treating Yassim like a kid and Yassim getting ticked off. The ironic thing, of course, was that Yassim was acting much more responsibly than Aqmed, staying with us and keeping us at a steady pace and the animals under control. They were hilarious to watch and listen to. Just like being at home.

At camp, we got ourselves situated then went for a walk, marveling at just how vast the desert is. Looking back from our vantage point, our camp looked miniscule. It was getting to be late afternoon and as we walked back, we found a nice rock ledge and parked it to watch the sunset. Just beautiful.

The best, though, was after dinner, when it had gotten quite dark. We went back out and laid down on the rock looking up at the stars. It is pitch black here, and you can see millions of stars. It’s as if someone stretched black velvet across a white sky and then poked millions of tiny holes in the fabric, and what you’re seeing is the spillage of the light from behind the black curtain. For the first time in my life, I could really see the constellation of Orion the Archer. Finding his belt is an easy task just about anyplace you are, but this was the first time I could recall actually being able to see his bow and visualize him standing there with his arrow pulled back ready to send it into flight.

By that time, all the other tourists had left and silence fell over us. Not just quiet. Absolute silence. Unlike being in northern MN, there was no sound of water lapping at the shore or wind in the trees or loons calling across the lake. It was completely still. When I strained to hear something, what I got was the sound of my own blood in my ears. It wasn’t hard to imagine the rocks breathing. Quite an experience.