Wadi Rum is like an alien planet (are there any other sort?). Apparently that movie The Martian was made there and big chunks of Lawrence of Arabia amongst many others. We seem to have spent a lot of time recently visiting movie lots – this one plus Indiana Jones sets round Petra, Mad Max in Namibia, Game of Thrones, Gladiator and others around Spain and Morocco, Star Wars and Lawrence of Arabia (again) in Seville; the list goes on. Apart from Seville most of these places are spectacularly inhospitable and we invariably leave them hot, sweaty and exhausted (us not the locations). I hope the pampered pricks who star in those productions also get grit in their togas or experience weathering in their nether regions like we do.
Of course we’ve never actually been to any of these places when a movie is actually being made but despite the privations, like the stars, we at least have nice hotels with airconditioned bars to return to at day’s end. Returning to a tent perched on a rock in the middle of nowhere after a hard day’s extra..ing does not appeal. You wouldn’t be a Bedouin for all the camels in the Middle Eastern sand belt8
Speaking of Wadi Rum, we saw a lot of it. We did not one but two trips round the traps in the back of a hilux. And I don’t mean in the back seat of a dual cab I mean right in the back – bench seats in the tray. The first expedition – five hiluxes each with six people precariously perched in the back with a few lucky ones inside the cab, took us….somewhere, through spectacular scenery to a location where there was a table covered in glasses and a man pouring champagne into them. That was the most “and now for something completely different” Monty Python moment I have ever experienced.
Later, after checking into our desert glamp we headed out again. Incidentally there are dozens of these desert camps scattered round the hundreds of square kilometres of Wadi Rum. It’s like the Sahara desert camps in Morocco. When the sun goes down, you aren’t disoriented. Those lights aren’t stars, they’re the many other camps in the same area. Common as bums. Like resorts in Bali.
Coming back in the dark our driver obviously thought we needed to get back 30 seconds before the other four vehicles so regularly went off-piste, forging his own track through hitherto undriven rocky desert and I have the bruises to prove it. Fortunately none of the six of us in the back finished up in the dirt but I came within half an inch of nutting the bloke sitting opposite me and him me as we were flung towards each other at one point. The driver seemed very pleased with himself when we got back and oblivious to the bruised arses he had caused so I told him “fuck you very much”.
Before we leave Wadi Rum, just a short comment on the topography. It’s a moonscape – masses of pink sandstone and granite forming impossibly steep high and twisted mountains cut through by numerous metres thick, green-black glassy dykes (as we say in the geology biz). The road we were on snaked through huge mountains of rock precariously balancing boulders as big as houses which would come crashing down with the slightest seismic encouragement. Speaking of houses, if you build one round here you’re basically in a giant’s bowling alley.
Seeing huge rock formations poking up out of a predominantly flat sandy floor reminded me of Halong Bay in Vietnam except the sandy floor there is sea. And the wadis down which water flows, hurtles more like, on the odd occasion when it rains were like jagged U shaped valleys which once accommodated glaciers. In this case we’d have mud glaciers travelling infinitely faster than a Greenland ice flow and you don’t want to be in the way when it arrives.
So as mentioned, the hotels have been a sanctuary from some pretty inhospitable landscapes and climate (weather actually). This part of the world is a political Housewives of New York at the best of times. Now it’s like an all-in brawl 5 minutes into a grand-final with an awful lot to play out before the dust settles, so security is ubiquitous. Every hotel we’ve stayed in has had a security machine at the entrance but appearances can be deceiving. At Aqaba the security attendant was staring at his phone and not even looking in the direction of the screen as bags either side of mine went through. We obviously didn’t look at all threatening.