The magical Wadi Rum – exploring and sleeping in the desert

On average, there are 14 rainy days annually in Wadi Rum, and I was there for one of them. My friend and I often joke we have the tendency to bring rain everywhere we go together, and I suppose the prophecy was once again fulfilled. It is not often that you can say you were in the desert and it rained.

This rain was a gift, as it always is in places where rainfall is rare, and the flora and the fauna survive with those unique drops of water falling from the skies. Yet, for the eyes of spoiled, humble humans like ourselves, this rain was magnificent. The rain was brought to us by grand thunderstorms. We saw the heavy clouds on the horizon, heard the vibrant sound of thunder from afar, and listened to it approaching. We were not about to have a starry sky in the desert, but we were not missing out. Instead, Nature was granting us with a spectacle of lights.

After seeing Petra, I assumed it would be hard to be impressed. Oh how wrong I was. Yes, humankind has been able to build fascinating cities and monuments throughout the millennia, but nothing will ever compare to the masterpieces built by nature itself.

Wadi Rum is also known as the Valley of the Moon, but I would say that the image that comes to mind is really that of being on a planet such as Mars ( I’m yet to see the movie The Martian, as it was actually filmed there). The moon isn’t bright orange and red like this place was.

Wadi Rum is a journey through the geological evolution of Earth but also through the evolution of Humankind. This whole area used to be covered by water, thousands and thousands of years ago. Huge rock formations pop straight up from the sea of sand that Wadi Rum is nowadays, a result of tectonic movements. Sand and water ended up gradually smoothing over the valleys and the gorges, shaping the red sandstone. These became the canvas for humans to leave their mark, recording what is thought to be 12,000 years of human occupation in this area. There are approximately 25,000 rock carvings and inscriptions, showcasing the evolution of human thought and early forms of communication, including the first forms of the alphabet. A lot of these inscriptions shed light on how people used to live back then.

At that point, I couldn’t even think about the technicalities. Wadi Rum is simply breathtaking. I kept having this feeling that what I was living wasn’t real. It was too stunning to be part of real life, to be part of this world. It was almost too much for my human eye and brain to bear and process. The rain had only made the colours of the sand more vivid. A part of me wanted to simply un without a destiny throughout that apparent endless territory of nothingness. Another part of me wanted to make sure I was breathing and living those moments, afraid that I would wake up from the most stunning dream of my life. In fact, a lot of it looked like a movie set. I had been transported to a movie, I was inside a screen, and all of that had been made with human imagination.

Except that it was not. It was real. Very real indeed.

I had never heard such loud silence as I did the night I spent in the desert of Wadi Rum. Imagine a place the size of New York but without people in it. That is the kind of peace you can experience there. A d this was probably one of the best experiences I have had in my life thus far.

Desert camps in Wadi Rum are mostly run by the local Bedouins. We stayed in one of those. I could not believe the brilliant view we had from our little tent. It is impossible to describe with words – and I must say the photos I have here barely have any edition (no colour enhancements!). At night, we were served a traditional Bedouin Zarb – cooked in an underground oven. It was a pretty cool if not eerie experience to see them digging out or cooking food from the ground on a rainy, stormy night. It wasn’t Halloween yet, but it was a nice prelude to it!

They dig a hole in the soft sand, cook down wood to coals, place the food over the coal and cover the hole with sand again. The food is left like that for several hours (about 4 hours). I can tell you it was delicious!

At night we could not see the stars, but as I mentioned we were instead granted with a magnificent show of thunder. We were hoping we could witness a beautiful sunrise, so at 6:30am we were up. Unfortunately, it was still quite cloudy but I managed to take some good pictures of the moon that is full on the opposite side. The cat of the camp, which we baptised as Lawrence (as per Lawrence of Arabia) kept us company – he was very well fed, and despite his blind eye he seemed to be having the best time of his life, likely spoiled and fattened by cat-lover tourists like ourselves.

It was soon time to leave, and honestly, I didn’t want to. A part of me wanted to savour that peace a little bit longer, at least one more night. In places such as this, it really hits you the irrelevance of everything. Our lives are so little, in significance and in time. We are born, we live, we die. We have a few decades to live, and we spend so much time worrying about such insignificance. None of it matters. The Earth will continue to go one, rotating around itself, rotating around the sun, transforming. It was certainly the kind of inspiration I needed to kick off this new chapter of my life, which still feels so daunting, so reckless, but so much needed.

Love, Nic