Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Travel and Adventure

East contrasts with west in the Jordan Desert
67620_l

A short road trip through Jordan revealed that nomadic and desert people, the Bedouin, are adapting to Western ways. Driving from Amman in the north, through dry and rugged terrain, to Aqaba in the south, we encountered mostly Bedouin men who, with their families, have settled into a semi-sedentary life.

They live in the large goat-haired tents (dark brown, often with a few white or black stripes) pitched along the two-lane highways that bisect the country, or on the lower mountain slopes, surrounded by goats, maybe a camel or two, and some kind of vehicle. Or they've invested in a basic breeze-block dwelling in what has become a Bedouin village.

Our first face-to-face encounter was near the Dana Nature Reserve, a more than 300 square kilometre desert wilderness extending from the Jordan Rift Valley, in the west of the country, down to the lowlands of Wadi Rum.

Half a dozen men - wearing both Western jeans and traditional caftans, and some in the red-checkered Arab head-dress or keffiyeh - had been hired to drive us 10 kilometres to the Feynan Ecolodge, at a remote location within the reserve.

These cheery if grizzled-looking men bundled our luggage and us into what's known as the "Bedouin jeep" - usually a battered Toyota or Nissan pickup truck that appears to have done many hundreds of challenging kilometres.

These guys spoke next to no English. As we headed into the reserve, our driver pointed to a cluster of buildings in the distance and said "Bedouin school," apparently proud of at least one advantage of a settled existence.

The drivers dropped us in the darkness of Wadi Feynan - entirely "off the grid," as Palestinian-born lodge director Nabil Tarazi put it - and headed back to their village. These Bedouin, we were assured, would be reimbursed the entire cost of the transport.

The Feynan Ecolodge is a gorgeous 26-room hotel (where classic adobe meets contemporary architectural detailing), set in a desert wadi surrounded by strange rock formations and wily acacia trees - in other words, utterly enticing. National Geographic Adventure Magazine has named it one of the 50 best eco-lodges in the world.

An excellent vegetarian dinner was served on a patio under a night sky as rich as you'll ever see. And while a few in our group walked down a track to meet with a Bedouin elder, I reveled in my rudimentary if oddly elegant second-floor room - with mosquito net (not needed in April), red-clay jug of filtered water, wall brackets with candles and just enough solar powered-light in the bathroom to take a quick shower and brush my teeth.

The silence was absolute. Then at 6:30 a.m., I heard the strange trills and gurgles of unknown birds. An elderly Bedouin was already outside, well back from the lodge, with a camel - presumably hoping to earn a few Jordanian dinars by posing for photos.

Guides take visitors deep in the Dana wilderness. But on this short trip, we were heading south to the famed city of Petra, and then on to the desert of Wadi Rum - described by its famous denizen, T.E. Lawrence, as "vast, echoing and God-like."

On the sands of Wadi Rum, beyond the Visitors' Centre, the "Bedouin jeeps" were again waiting to take us to an overnight "camp" somewhere in its labyrinthine interior.

In what was once an important trade route between Petra and Damascus, Egypt and Palestine, and southern Arabia, this mountainous desert has always been well-travelled. Today, a staggering 100,000 visitors come here yearly; roughly 5,000 Bedouin live in the surrounding villages, earning a living from the tourist trade.

While technically you can drive a four-wheel-drive vehicle into Wadi Rum, you need to know where the subtly delineated "roadways" run - on unmarked routes that pass through through "canyons" of sandstone or near picturesque rock "bridges" or millennia-old petroglyphs - not to mention how to manoeuvre on shifting sand.

You can also travel by camel or on foot - but you must hire a guide, or be hugely familiar with the terrain, covering 720 square kilometres. (We saw a camel caravan in which a woman, obviously in serious distress, was close to falling off the animal.)

Our driver looked like a teenager who had seen it all, and drove with what seemed like wild abandon. When we stopped for a break from what was a rough ride in the back of a truck, he squatted in the shade of the vehicle and smoked a cigarette.

And at our overnight camp - a cluster of goat-haired tents, for dining and sleeping, presided over by half a dozen young men, possibly from the towns or cities, and again without any English - we experienced a worldly if accommodating attitude.

Our hosts prepared a traditional desert dinner of spiced meats and vegetables cooked in a large pot set on a charcoal fire buried in the sand. They graciously served us the wine we'd bought at the duty-free shop in Amman (in considerable quantities) and looked on tolerantly as a few in the group danced to an oud and other live instruments.

Then the owner of this "camp," a portly businessman who also operates an upscale hotel and restaurants in Aqaba, briefly showed up to remind me, at least, that hard-nosed business people are everywhere, even in the depths of Wadi Rum.

At sunrise, I wandered out into grassy sand-scape in which camels where grazing, and from where you could hear Bedouin herders laughing, presumably from a camp in the nearby mountains. It was a nice reminder that some things never change.

Websites: www.visitjordan.com, www.feynan.com, www.wadirum.jo