...google Wadi Rum

I remember it as a dream, even though it was only this past week…Wadi Rum. I could have been on the moon, in a painting, but not in reality.

Where are we?

Three days ago I left for my first trip to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Yes it’s a kingdom and there is a king and his picture is everywhere and people generally like him. I have been wanting to go, but necessity breeds action and my tourist visa was running out. So I went into Jerusalem and after scheduling an appointment for a work visa interview, I caught a bus far up north by means of the Jordan River Valley to a place called Beit She’an. There I grabbed a taxi to the border and after a series of questions, security checks, taxes and fees, I entered Jordan. At one point in the process my traveling partner and I had received our exit stamps, which means we had left Israel, but were waiting for a bus to take us over the river to get entry stamps into Jordan. We wondered where we really were and who would put us in jail if we committed a crime…

But wonder is all we did, and soon found ourselves under royal, setting sky. 

The setting sun from Jordan looking west

Something was different about this place. It was more open and expansive as if the land itself spoke of her freedom. This is a nation without Occupation. It is a land full of people just like the Palestinians but without checkpoints and tension. This is a place to come and go as you please without walls and gunman and x-ray machines to delay you. I could feel it in the air; it was refreshing.

My homebase was at a friend-of-a-friend's apartment. His name is Samer and he lives near the University of Jordan in Amman, a capitol city where there are millions of people and many foreigners. At one point during my trip I spoke in English and Arabic to a young Kazakh. That’s a first.

I spent the first morning grabbing a cab to Jabal al-Qala’a, or the Citadel. Atop this mountain (jabal in Arabic), there stand ancient ruins of many civilizations built atop one another, as is common in this part of the world (‘it was a temple, then a church, then a temple, then a mosque, then a church, then a mosque, now a crumbling tourist attraction’... it's a familiar mantra). 

From here we could walk around and get an exceptional 360° view of modern-day Amman, while prancing around this old fort-city. There were gorgeous ruins of a temple to Hercules, a palace, a mosque, a church, a bathhouse, a guard tower, old whispers of walls and rooms upon rooms upon underground cisterns. And when I looked up and out I saw towers and theatres and mosques and churches and hotels and houses upon houses upon the seven mountains of modern Amman. And I saw the world’s highest flag.

Amman, with a huge Roman theatre sometimes still in use.

But the focus of this trip wasn’t the citadel, or even Amman: it was Wadi Rum. I was traveling with Sofie, my Danish friend who is living in Palestine while she completes a paper for her Master’s program, and we were both eager to get out of the city. Palestine is crowded, sometimes claustrophobic. It is noisy and a bit cagey. Amman is some of those things too, and we both wanted space and quiet. So we rented a car, Sofie, Samer and I, and drove into the night, due south until we reached our destination.

The Desert Wolf at camp. He rocked my hat
so well, I gave it to him.

We were greeted by Ahmed, our Bedouin guide, the Desert Wolf, as he called himself. He was a pirate of a man who took us out into the middle of the desert, turning off his headlights at one point to look at the dark mountains for direction. I thought he was pretty cool, and I thought myself so for being there with him.

And then we stopped at our campsite.

I had a spiritual moment when I stepped out of the car. Looking up and around, letting my eyes get used to the dark, I saw massive shapes jet into the sky like the great teeth of a huge jaw. They surrounded me and would have swallowed me if not for the endlessness of the eternal night above me. Suddenly I was small and insignificant enough to gaze on the Milkiest Way I have ever seen. Honestly, I am having trouble choosing words to describe what I saw because it goes beyond what breath and tongue and lips can forge. This place awakened the vocabulary of angeltongue, of which I know not. But sometimes our bodies are smarter, or perhaps more enlightened, than our worldly-wise minds, and it knew what to do. So instead of saying anything, I ran, jumped, cartwheeled, spun, stretched and fell into a heavendance where my tongue could form no intelligence, my toes swam in the cooling desert and my entirety longed to make one grand jump from where I was to any of the infinity of stars that formed my canopy.

But my lungs exhausted long before my spirit, and I sat by the cooking fire to learn more of Ahmed and prevent my very cells from splitting from one another in ecstasy. We chatted, laughed, wrapped ourselves up and occasionally I looked up at my brobdingnagian ceiling.

Sofie and I didn’t sleep save for an hour or so. Instead, we strolled and explored, confined only by our moat of mountains, speaking of life, or silent in awe. The half-moon glossed everything, and we were quite able to find our way. We felt like we were on the moon, really, but when we looked up, we knew we couldn’t be: high and bright the arching moon chased the stars in an Olympian game of tag, and we found ourselves bewildered to look at something that couldn’t be real, could it? This place is a land one comes to in his dreams and has tea with God, finding clarity in something wholly heavenly and wholly earthly at the same time. It was incarnate, and I understood suddenly the reaction within me, of twins—no, more than twins…halves, perhaps—uniting in divinity unfettered by humanity.

Sofie in the sun.

But we knew it wasn’t over…morning was coming, and we were eager to see the sunrise and to see what our shelter looked like in greater light. A small nap sufficed to pass the time between the stars twinkling out and the sun peeking in. Tired and clunky, we rounded the corner of the nearest mountains in order to see the sun come. I have always found the sunrise to be one of the most beautiful things we can see with our eyes, but here, what he illuminated was so much more glorious. The golden light cast shadows as icebergs of stone rose out of a sandy sea around us. Ann-Sofie sat in awe; I ran into the horizon that never got any closer. Movement seemed the only proper response I could muster for such as Wadi Rum.

And then it was light and we welcomed the warmth of the sun, ate a modest breakfast and packed up camp. Ahmed drove us back to our car which we had abandoned near the road while we listened to some traditional Bedouin music and watched the gathering of the camels. We happened to be near a massive camel racetrack and today was a big day for racing. Some were being fed or watered, others walking around, awkwardly, like something out of a Dr. Suess tale. They are perhaps the only animals that ambulate by moving the feet of the same side at the same time. And then with their cleft lip, underbite and misshapen humps, they really are the goofiest of animals. And they got attitude, too. They spit and look at you with long lashes, bending their necks away from your approaching hand as if to say, “Nu-uh, not today brutha.” So sassy, they are. 

Driving in Jordan

But we had traveling to do so we couldn’t stay. The car hit the road again, this time with me at the helm. Driving is a pleasure I thoroughly miss, so guiding our rental up and down the hills and through the dessert, dodging Maersk trucks and other semi-trucks was quite the gift.

Later that night I found myself back in Palestine, having crossed the King Hussein or Allenby Bridge and passed through three sets of customs (Jordanian, Israeli and Palestinian), being driven from Arriha (Jericho) back to Khalil. I passed into that place between wakefulness and sleep and visited Wadi Rum all over. When I got out of the van and walked to my apartment I wondered if I had really been there, or if it was a dream all along...

Jordanian Desert

The World's Highest Flag

Can you find Sofie?