On the rocks

Jordan - Wadi Rum - 1 Jan '02

Text: Murali K Menon
Photos: Murali K Menon

“You married?”

“No, how about you, Mohammed?”

“I’ve got two wives. One here in Aqaba and another at my village in Wadi Rum. It’s better you’re not married,” said Mohammed, my Bedouin guide, with the sad wisdom of a man hit on the knuckles twice over by experience’s stinging cane.

The Red sea in Aqaba was a deep blue, the mountains behind me a sandy brown; there was the Israeli town of Eliat to my right, Egypt straight ahead and Saudi Arabia to my left.

Laid low by a bout of loosies, I spent my time in Jordan’s only outlet to the sea drinking yoghurt, and water and taking short walks in and around the touristy little town. The climate was pleasant and the big hotels gave travellers smouldering, discount-filled looks.

Surely, even Lawrence of Arabia’s tummy must have played hooky, I thought as we waited for our Landcruiser to arrive. My journey here was in a way a backpacker’s homage, however insignificant, to his idealism and his experiences in Arabia.

Welshman T E Lawrence (the English were quick to appropriate him) had spent some time in Wadi Rum (wadi denotes a dry valley in Arabic) during the course of the successful Arab revolt against Ottoman domination around 1917. Lawrence of Arabia, as he was glorified later by an enterprising American jack-of-all-trades called Lowell Thomas, journeyed from Cairo to Mecca, Hejaz and Yenbo in Saudia Arabia, Jordan, through the Sinai Peninsula and then on to Damascus.

Seventy years ago he lived among men for whom, in his own words, the “joys of life were a fast camel, the best weapons, and a short, sharp raid against his neighbour’s herd.”

Seventy years on, my Bedouin guide Mohammed smoked Viceroy cigarettes, drank Amstel beer (with a little bit of arrack), drove a Toyota pick-up, and spoke about flying to London next summer to meet his girlfriend named Caroline who’d been in the Rum sometime back.

Suleiman, his Palestinian Man Friday, whistled at every woman on the road, talked endlessly about an Egyptian diva as our hardy Toyota creaked its way out of Aqaba.

“How old is this vehicle, Mohammed?” I enquired while pointing the Landcruiser at an open stretch of road, its rear door held together by a piece of cloth, and interiors ablaze with gaudy, furry little snake dolls.

“Twenty years ago, it was new,” he said, adjusting his red-and-white checked keffiyeh and flashing a nicotine-stained smile.

The sandy brown mountains I had seen from afar filled the horizon now, appearing like humps of distant, reclining camels. The broad highway from Aqaba soon slimmed into a scrawny, gaunt stretch of road, beyond which lay the immense desert extending all the way beyond Saudia Arabia towards the east.

Ten minutes later, I saw the first of the sand stone and granite cliffs rise out of the sand and a little while later, as the Landcruiser tackled the sticky sands, it was all there was. Huge chocolate brown cliffs, chasms that wound their way through them, and sand with tenacious pale yellow shrubs clinging onto dear life – a landscape as empty as a skull’s sockets.

“We’re in the Wadi Rum, the Valley of the moon,” said Mohammed in typical guide-ese and proceeded to take the wheel while I got off every now and then to shoot pics. It was afternoon and the sun was pouring molten gold on Wadi Rum, and the mountain faces were almost obscured by an iridescent haze. I walked around aimlessly among the sands savouring a distant, detached solitude only travel affords.

With its grand canyons, towering massifs, and their dark, cool shadows, the Rum comes a close second to the Himalayan desolation of Ladakh or Zanskar when it comes to the sheer scale of nature’s austere grandeur and in its quiet way of striking a human being speechless. And while lying there in the shadow of a cliff, I sensed the different trains of thought that criss-cross the worn-out tracks of my mind grinding to a steady halt. In a matter of minutes, I was thinking of nothing, precisely nothing, and it was a joy. The kind of joy that makes travellers endure stuffy airports, delayed and dehydrating flights and finally accept tourisms’s contradictions.

The mountain sides change their colour with every slant of the sun’s rays, the wind hums an ancient tune as it carves its way through a land which Lawrence termed ’vast, echoing and godlike’.

Moses must have spoken of the Promised Land to the tribes of Israel some where around here, a lot of Pagans must have roamed here before Christianity took birth and the first trickles of Islam would have surely passed through the Rum before engulfing the Middle-east.

Caravans and armies, kings and commoners from the Nabateans to the Romans and Byzantine people must have all rolled across the Rum, which, geologists tell me, emerged as a tertiary area over 30 million years ago, at a time when our blue planet was still in its diapers.

After lunch, Mohammed took me on a trek through the Rum pointing out cave paintings, Nabatean, Greek and Arabic graffiti, and a little Nabatean temple in the middle of the valley. We stopped by at a Bedouin tent, right next to which was a boulder with an image of Lawrence made by Bedouins in 1917. It was at the Siq Al Bareah, the longest canyon in Wadi Rum, that Lawrence met with King Feisal to discuss the revolt of the Arabs against the Ottomans.

Later on he would camp here for a final assault on Aqaba, joining hands with a desert raider and his men, planning guerrilla attacks in the clearness of the Rum’s dawn and executing them in the cover of its misty nights.
We pitched tent at around four in the evening, and by five the sky was brooding and a biting chill had descended cracking my dry lips further. The silence of the Rum became all the more palpable. The firewood crackled as the chicken got roasted, and Mohammed invited me to dinner.

Suleiman had just broken his Ramadan fast and wolfed down most of the food, even licking the wrappers, while Mohammed animatedly discussed Bin Laden (he very nearly looked like him), America, the situation in the Middle East and the Muslim population in Hind (that’s what Mohammed called India, just like his ancestors a couple of thousand years ago). Suleiman would pipe up every now and then – Hitler great, he kill Jews – and go back to his eating. We settled down around the cosy campfire, with Mohammed lighting up a hookah and passing it around to me and Suleiman. The tobacco had a very apple-ish flavour due to a dry apple paste Mohammed mixed with it, and there were endless cups of black tea to go with the post-prandial smoke.

Some time later, Mohammed got up and said he was going to his village to meet his wife and would back in an hour. I asked Mohammed whether I could accompany him and a red blush coloured his brown cheeks. “Excuse me,” he uttered sheepishly, “I haven’t seen her for three days...don’t worry, I’ll be back soon.”

Spraying a bit of the deodorant I had, Mohammed left. Suleiman drove off in the Landcrusier to find some more firewood, leaving me all alone in the Rum, which echoed with the barks of Suleiman’s dogs, and the gurgle of my hookah.
The tall, dark cliffs had now been swallowed by the night and I had discomforting thoughts of spending my time here with two strangers, having a stereotypically treacherous Arab dagger thrust deep into my guts, my passport and 200 dinars stolen. All this under an eerily beautiful Wadi Rum moon.

Mohammed and Suleiman came back from their respective chores, and we were joined by the former’s friends, Egyptian music blasting from their pick-up, from across the Saudi Arabian border 30 km away. The desert version of the urban show-off. A game of rummy later, they departed.

“Tell me,” said Mohammed, “how was the hookah?” I said it was pretty nice. “You mean nothing happened to you?” he enquired.

I replied in the negative. Mohammed smiled, “I’d got some hashish, very little from Kuwait, which I mixed with the tobacco. It gave me a great high. I hope you don’t mind...” I smiled at him and said it was all cool, but nothing much had happened to me. “A ha, the Rum’s already got you,” excalimed Mohammed.

I slept all alone in one tent, keeping furtive tabs on my companions who chattered late into the night. My dinars were tucked away at the back of my collar, and my passport was hidden in a tear in the mattress.

When I woke up, my stuff was safe and so was I. Feeling incredibly silly, I walked out of the tent removing the sand the wind had blown into my shoes during the night. The sun had just woken up and his thousand lazily stretched arms coloured the sky as pink as a spanked baby’s bum. Down below, the mighty cliffs looked to huddling together anticipating the mighty orb’s warm embrace. Here in Wadi Rum, it is a wonderful world.

Arabian Knight

Inspite of 40 biographies, a hundred websites, and a classic David Lean film, the real Lawrence of Arabia will always continue to elude us. Maybe, that’s what Welshman T E Lawrence always wanted.

An illegitimate child of an illegitimate child, Lawrence, whom the Economist rates, along with James Dean, as the most widely publicised folk hero of the 20th century, revelled in attracting attention, and also displayed a desire to breach the limits of human endurance (he practised going without sleep for days, rode hundred miles a day on his bicycle and built muscles; some call it a very masochistic trait), something which would stand him in good stead during his time in the harsh Arabian desert. An alumni of Jesus College, Oxford, Lawrence was highly interested in archaeology and spent some time in Egypt supervising excavations. WW-I saw him being commissioned in Cairo as an interpreter and mapmaker. His knowledge and interest in Arab affairs soon helped him get a posting with Britain’s Arab Bureau, specialising in the Middle East.

Britain, eager to retain control over the Middle East in the post WW-I world and thwart Russian advances, contacted Hussein ibn Ali, the Turkish-appointed Emir of Mecca, who eventually was expected to be a puppet leader of the British. The British, who until then had cordial relations with the Ottomans, fell out with Turkey due to the latter’s alliance with Germany. While the English did not believe in Arab nationalism one bit, they unwittingly aided the process. In June 1916, supported by Abdullah, Feisal, and his other sons, Hussein proclaimed the Arab Revolt. It proved to be a dud. Hussein, it turned out, had no following at all. Moslems did not respond to his call, nor did Arabs. Some months later, Lawrence went along with another officer named Storrs to review the situation in the Hejaz (a province in the west of what is now Saudi Arabia. Mecca and Medina belonged to this province).

For the next two years Lawrence, along with Feisal, unified Bedouin tribes from the surrounding provinces, waging a guerrilla campaign against the Turks. Their object was to take the city of Medina, which lay to the north of them and blocked the Hejaz forces from riding north to Palestine, where the Middle East war (between the imperialists) was to be fought. To force Medina’s surrender, Feisal’s forces raided the single-track railway from Transjordanian Palestine that was Medina’s sole source of reinforcements and supply and dynamited it repeatedly. But Medina, inspite of their efforts, never fell to the Arabs, blocking their land route to Palestine. So Lawrence thought of another plan. Since Feisal could not take Medina, he would go around it. Like others, Lawrence had noted the importance of Aqaba, but also realised that it could only be taken from behind: from the land, not the sea.

Lawrence therefore purchased the support of a bedouin sheikh – a desert raider of local renown – who executed the plan. When Aqaba fell to the sheikh’s war band, Lawrence, who rode with them, performed feats of endurance and courage in crossing enemy-held Palestine and Sinai to report the news to the British commanding general, Edmund Allenby.

The Royal Navy brought Feisal and about a thousand followers to Aqaba. There they were fleshed out by about twenty-five hundred Arab deserters from the Ottoman army to form a camel-cavalry corps that harassed the Turkish flank when Allenby’s army invaded Palestine and marched on Syria, and in effect, completely loosening the Turkish stranglehold on Arabia.

This, in essence, is the story one normally hears about Lawrence of Arabia. There are hundred conflicting versions, which downplay his role in the Arab revolt, which in any case was staged to further British interests.

To Lawrence’s credit, he was the only one among the British officers who believed in total Arab independence.

As the years go by, various sources of information have proved Lawrence to be a liar (history is but a series of accepted lies, he is supposed to have said once), exhibitionist, a man given to hyperbole, with confused sexuality. His story, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, has been denounced as inconsistent and filled with truth laced with huge doses of fiction, but at the same time, he has also been compared to Homer, Eliot and other such literary luminaries. And as a military strategist, he was rated to be as good as Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon.

Lawrence will never come back to set things right (and don’t think he can, so compelling is the evidence against him), his adventures still continue to fascinate people nearly 60 years after his death in a motor cycle accident.

While the debate rages on, lovers of travel and adventure would do well to reflect on what Aspley Cherry-Garrard, the youngest member of Captain Scott’s ill-fated 1910-13 expedition to Antarctica, had to say on Lawrence of Arabia: It falls to few men to do something which no one else has ever done. To have done so before the age of thirty is astonishing; the combination of opportunity, ability and motive power is extremely rare.


Travel log

Embassy of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan 30, Golf Links, New Delhi - 110 003. Ph: 465 3318/3099. Fax: 465 3353

Single entry visas are available for Rs 965. A personal interview, especially in the aftermath of the attacks on the WTC, appears to be a must for tourists.


Jordanian Dinar = Rs 70 (approx.)

Qatar Airways and Emirates operate flights to the Jordanian capital Amman.

Emirates : Special Return fares for Mumbai-Amman-Mumbai via Dubai: 33,000 + 1,500 (taxes)
Qatar Airways: Special Return fares for Mumbai-Amman-Mumbai via Doha : 21,500 + 1,500 (taxes)

Wadi Rum lies to the south of Jordan, in the vicinity of the country’s only port of Aqaba. Buses services operate from Amman to Aqaba (JETT, Trust International Transport) and a ticket for a one way journey costs three dinars, with the journey taking around four hours via the Desert Highway. Car rental are available in Amman and the rates range from 50-100 dinars a day.

There are two routes connecting Amman to Aqaba – the King’s Highway and the newer Desert Highway. The former is the more interesting, though longer route as it weaves its way through the heart of the country. Striking in its beauty, the Rum is an area of ancient valleys and tall sandstone mountains in the desert. Much of the Rum’s popularity has been derived from its association with Lawrence of Arabia. A major part of the David Lean classic of the same name was filmed in Wadi Rum. The main route to Wadi Rum turns east of the Desert Highway about 25 km north of Aqaba. From there the road extends another 35 km before culminating at the little village of Rum, with its goat-hair tents, a little school, and headquarters of the famous Desert Patrol. There are irregular bus services from Aqaba to Rum and several tourist companies operating in Aqaba offer expeditions on camels and 4x4s into Wadi Rum. An overnight stay in the Rum will cost you around 25 dinars (if you are with a group) and the rate might increase by an additional 10 dinars should there be just a single person or a couple (lunch and dinner included).

The Government guest house located inside the Rum village provides 4x4 vehicles with a Bedouin driver for tours of the area. The only accommodation is at the guest house, where tents are available. There are enough and more avenues for rock climbers, though it is prudent to take a guide while attempting some of the higher jebels.

Aqaba Mild temperature year round, a Mediterranean setting, and the Red sea, Aqaba is Jordan’s leisure zone. Besides the obvious pleasures of the sun and sand, Aqaba’s clear waters and ample underwater marine life makes it a playground for people interested in diving, surfing, fishing and other aquatic sports. Besides these, for the historically inclined, the city, a strategic trading location, between Asia, Africa and Europe has sites with human habitation dating back to 4000 B C. Recently, archaeologists unearthed the remains of what is supposed to be the world’s oldest church ( 3 BC). The site is on a plot near Istiqlal Street, near the JETT bus station.

Recommended hotel in Aqaba: Siq Hotel, Al Qastel – near Jordan Gulf Bank. P O Box: 480 – Aqaba Telefax: 00962 3 2022376 E-mail: SIQhotel@yahoo.com