I love a good night camping in a desert under a blanket of stars, when it’s cold out and you sit around a fire and roast some marshmallows and tell stories and hear about different cultures and ways of life. So when I went to Jordan, I knew that was something on my must-do list for the country.
I’d done something really similar with the Berbers in the Sahara in Morocco, and it was one of the best experiences of my life, so I knew I had to do it again! This time was a bit different: instead of taking some shitty, painful camels through the desert, I sat in the back of a truck and sailed around on those dunes with ease.
Wadi Rum is gorgeous. It’s very different than I’d both imagined and experienced with deserts before. It’s a lot flatter than I’d expected with less rolling dunes and a lot more rocky formations. All of that sort of added to the intrigue. From a base camp, I loaded into the back of rusty Toyota truck with not much more than a metal bar fused to the truck bed to hold onto as we spent about an hour and a half or more rolling through the desert to get to the camp for the night. We stopped off for people to sand board if they wanted to (or could, I should say. It looked very difficult!). Then we arrived to camp not long before the sun was going down.
We found our little rooms for the night and setup our beds and put on our warm clothes to prepare for the plummeting evening temperatures. Before long, we were being called out to the main tent to eat dinner that was cooked in the typical Bedouin way–in a pit under the sand. The food was good; not much to write home about. It was mostly meat, some veggies and hummus, and bread. But the best part was what was to come: sitting around the fire under a blanket of stars, roasting marshmallows, and chatting about where we’d all come from. There’s something really beautiful about being in the middle of nowhere, where phones don’t work and there’s no other means of connecting, except with one another. It really allows you to get to know people and talk about things that might not ordinarily talk about.
The group of people camping out in the desert on this particular night were from all areas of the globe: Australia, Asia, Canada, Europe, India, and Africa. Around we went, each introducing ourselves–ages, occupations, where we were from, attached or single, and basically about our lives in each of our respective countries. One guy was a former race car driver; a couple were retired teachers from India, living in Africa; two girls were on a hiatus from work, traveling around the world; another girl just moved from Thailand back to England after years of teaching abroad. It was a lovely, diverse group of travelers to spend an evening with.
As the evening wore on, we all made our way to our tents to bundle up under blankets and continue some light chatter between the walls made of blankets. Early in the morning, we were woken by the guide and wrangled up, back in our Toyota trucks to head back to base camp for some breakfast and tea. I never think that I’ll sleep well out there in the middle of the desert like that, with only blankets between me and people’s snores and weird sleep sounds, but somehow, I’m always proven wrong. It’s so peaceful and comforting.
