Well it has definitely been a while since I have written a blog post and I sincerely apologize for that. I hope this post will make up for it.

So some background information: Our professor Munther had a language conference last week in Germany, so we all had a few days off from class as well as the weekend. Some kids went to Syria, some kids stayed in Amman, and I went with few others back to Wadi Rum. For all devotees to the blog, you’ll remember that I went with my entire class to Wadi Rum, Aqaba, and Petra a while back on a weekend trip. Well this time Nathan, Sarah, Caitlin and I decided to make a return visit because we loved it a lot last time. If you don’t remember what Wadi Rum is exactly here’s the wiki page, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadi_rum). I would take a look at it because it is going to be really hard to convey its full majesty and awesomeness if you don’t know exactly what it is.

Anyway so we decided to go for two night, from Friday until Sunday. Dr. Mohammed Al-Masri helped us arrange the trip and made us reservations to stay in the same camp that we stayed in last time for only about 40 Jordanian Dinars, which comes out to something like 60 bucks I think. Anyway we planned on leaving Amman Friday morning by bus. As we planned the logistics of the trip however we were informed that there is not public transportation to Wadi Rum, but we would have to get on a bus headed to Aqaba and just get off at the Wadi Rum intersection, as it is located along the way. From there we would have to find a bus or cab that would take us into the wadi itself (wadi means valley in arabic by the way) and Ratib (the owner of the camp we would be staying at), would pick us up and take us to the camp.

As a quick side note, before I go into the story of what actually happened, I should mention a little bit about how the bus system/public transportation here works. In general, there are a few different types of buses and taxis. The buses we are all used to in the states, that is the large blue public buses, are definitely found here as well, albeit with less frequency than in the US. Much more common here are smaller older buses, which can hold about 20 people and have a driver and a control. They usually have their circuit written on the front of the bus (for instance if the bus makes trips between Amman and Jerash, the words Amman and Jerash will be written on the front of the bus) but in general are pretty flexible with where they go specifically. They are also really cheap, about 30-80 fils depending on how far you need to go. These are in my opinion the optimal mode of transportation because of their cheapness and the frequentness with with they are seen. The last type of public bus (there are others but for my purposes I will just describe these three types) are huge buses which make longer trips, like from Amman to Aqaba or from Zarqa to Mafraq. These buses are usually similar to tour buses, except usually without all the nice accommodations like movies and drink and bathrooms and engines that work (foreshadowing?…maybe…). All these types of buses drop people off and pick people up along the way, so they are always prone to stopping randomly in the middle of nowhere to pick up some person on the side of the road. Anyway besides these types of buses there are two or three types of taxis which I will describe quickly because they don’t really relate to the story. First type is the yellow taxi, which usually use meters and are cheap enough if there other people with you. the second type is the service taxi, which usually is a predetermined price albeit a cheaper one. These service taxis are usually white, and I prefer not to take them because the times I have they have tried to cheat me and I prefer the safety and assurance of a meter. The last type of taxi is a nicer taxi, usually they are silver, and probably supremely expensive, I don’t know because I have had no reason to take one.

Ok so back at the ranch…er Amman, we woke up early (around 6 or so) and packed up our bags. I basically just packed a pair of pants and a few shirts, and a bunch of socks since I know how dirty everything gets. I also packed one little dinky packet of OFF bug spray wipes, which just had one wipe in it (this will be important later as well). In addition to that I brought a toothbrush obviously, some dewaderm and bandaids (thanks dad!) and my passport, camera, ipod and phone all in a sealed plastic bag to keep the sand out. So we caught a taxi from near the apartment to مجمع الجنوبي or the Southern Bus complex (it’s less of a complex and more of a parking lot by the way, although there are other nicer bus complexes) and chose one of the big buses i mentioned earlier (the old tourist looking kind) and hopped on board. The fare to Aqaba was 5 dinars, which is pretty good for going across the country, and since they weren’t hiking up the price for us (I heard them say 5 dinars to other jordanian passangers too), we figured this was good and got on.

I really should have expected it, I’ve had enough experience with it now that you’d think I would be smarter at this point, but these huge buses don’t leave until they are full, so we had to sit on the hot bus for about an hour while it filled up with other passengers which was lame. It was ok, I was rally tired so I napped a little bit and tried to do a bit of studying (oh yeah I brought some work along with me too). Finally the bus was full we were off on our adventure! I sat with Nathan and we talked a bit, until we fell asleep for an hour and a half or so (the trip to aqaba is about 3 to 4 hours in total). When we woke up the bus had stopped at a rest stop and everyone was ordering قهوة وشاي (coffee and tea) and of course everyone was using this time to smoke 3 or 4 cigarettes, since it was ممنوع التدخين (smoking prohibited) on the bus (although like I mentioned before, despite this rule in almost every building and vehicle, everyone ignores it…). Anyway we stayed at the rest stop for about 15 minutes and then got back on board to continue the trip. And this is where the trip started to get interesting….

About an hour later, a little bit past Ma’an, basically in the middle of the scorchingly hot desert, the bus stopped on the side of the road. Now as I mentioned before, this is not a rare occurrence since buses are always picking up people from the side of the road, so I didn’t think too much of it. But then the bus’ engine shut off… The driver got down from the bus and I looked out the window to see him open up the back comparntment where the engine was and proceed to start working on it. A bunch of people got off the bus to see what was going on, so I got off with them and saw to my dismay that there was ugly black smoke billowing from the back of the bus…In short, our bus had broken down in the middle of the desert, still about 45 minutes to an hour from where me and my group had to get off. But the driver and a couple of the passengers were fiddling with the engine, and every so often the driver would call to someone at the front of the bus to try to start the engine, and we would see more black smoke and hear unpleasant sounds coming from the poor old bus.

After about 15 minutes of no progress, my group and I started talking about what we should do if the bus didn’t get fixed. We figured the best idea would just be to see if we could hitchhike the rest of the way, since there were a fair amount of cars on the road and like I said it wasn’t too far to the Wadi Rum intersection. Luckily though, we were relieved of having to make that decision when the driver managed to get the bus going again, and we all climbed back onboard and kept going. The 45 minute ride to Wadi rum however then became a 2 hour one since we went at a snails pace for the rest of the way, I assume to keep the engine from breaking down again. Finally though we made it to the intersection and hopped in a small bus which was going near to where we needed to be. They dropped us off at the مركز الامن (police station), where we waited for about 15 minutes and chitchatted with the police officers there while waiting for Ratib to pick us up.

After a while Ratib drove up in his truck and we hopped in. LIke I mentioned before, he was the owner of the camp that we had stayed at before, so we remembered him, although we still didn’t know him so well. He brought us to the camp and we sat for a few minutes and drank some tea and chatted with him and then dropped our bags in the tents and got ready to go hiking. At this point it was about 3pm (yeah the trip had taken that long…) so we only had a few hours of daylight to go hiking, but we didn’t want to waste any time so we filled up Nathan’s backpack with water bottles and our vaulables and headed out into the desert.

For all of you who have never been to any form of desert, there are a few basic things about the desert that I should explain. First off, the desert is made up of a lot of sand, which of course seems like it such a fundamental and obvious desert that you might now give it a second though. It is, however, really really ANNOYING to walk through sand in sneakers! And after the first few minutes of walking in Wadi Rum we stopped paying attention to that obnoxious feeling of having sand in our shoes and socks, because there was nothing we could do about it. (well I should say I tried to ignore the feeling, but since personally I think thats one of the worst feelings in the world, I always made sure I dumped out the litres of sand that had collected in my shoes when stopped for a few minutes). Anyways second thing aobut the desert: things look way way closer than they actually are. So when we thought “oh it’ll take a few minutes to get to that huge rock mountain with all the shade” it actually took something like an hour. Final thing I will mention about the desert here (I am sure I will add some stuff later on) is that it’s windy! There’s not trees or anything to block the wind, so unless you are standing nearby a large rock or something there’s not much to block the wind and sand, which is one of the reasons why Bedouins wear head coverings.

So where were we? Oh yeah walking in the desert. We walked in the general direction of a cool looking canyon, and made it after about half an hour, and then just went around exploring and climbing on things. One of the amazing things about Wadi Rum is that while there are plenty of tourists, the wadi is huge, so for the most part we had the entire place to ourselves. There are also occasional Bedouins who will pass by with herds of camels (flocks…?) and offer rides to tourists for a few dinars, but we didn’t accept because we are cheap and don’t like paying for silly stuff like that. We eventually came across a side canyon where it looks like a huge chunk of rock had fallen off and crashed onto the ground, making a mountain of broken rock which appeared to lead up to the top of the mountain and to a beautiful view as well. We started climbing, but as it was getting late in the day and pretty dark, we decided to go all the way up the next day, and headed back to the camp.

I just realized I have been writing for about an hour and a half, instead of doing work, so I think I will stop here, and finish tomorrow…I hope this wasn’t too long and boring, I haven’t even really gotten to the exciting parts yet!

As always, if you have any questions or thinks you want me to explain in further detail, shoot me an email cdf37@cornell.edu and I will write you back or try to include it in the blog. Also I just decided yesterday that I am going to Egypt on Friday! (thanks for the help mom!) so if you have been there and have any suggestions or cautionary tales or anything of the sort email me before I go.