Tag Archives: Tourism

Day 9 – Oh, Dana! *

Monday 23 May 2022 – The only item on our agenda today was simply to get to our next accommodation, the Dana Guest House, described as “simple” accommodation in the literature we got from Audley, our travel organisers. Since it is billed as being in the Dana Nature Reserve (or even the Dana Biosphere Reserve), and egged on by other information I had looked up online, I was expecting something that served no alcohol (correct) and was short on anything more than basic facilities (not so correct, as it turns out; TripAdvisor, for example, mentions that there is an internet there.) I wasn’t expecting there to be enough information to fill a day’s-worth of blog entry, and I was wrong there, too.

Saeed was due to pick us up at 10am for the three-hour drive to Dana, which meant we had a relatively relaxed start. Since we had not thus far wandered extensively around the Mövenpick, we elected to take a stroll around the resort before heading to the restaurant where they serve breakfast.

Yes, we were Only Making Plans For Najel ** . Thank you. Thank you for reading my joke.

The resort is impressive, but very resortish

and the breakfast is only moderately to our taste – not a good selection of fresh fruit, for example. At least they had Earl Grey tea so we could conserve our own stocks. Amazingly, there was no Marmite on the breakfast buffet.

We were able to get away promptly and were soon buzzing along the Desert Highway. It’s a motorway, but that doesn’t mean that there are no speed bumps. It also doesn’t dissuade the entrepreneurial spirit that marks out Jordanians, as there were several roadside sellers touting mainly watermelons out of the back of pickups.

Saeed bought a 10kg example. There practically wasn’t room for it in the boot.

We were just beside Wadi Rum and I caught sight of this lonely figure trudging along in the developing heat of the day

which made me thoughtful about a culture which, in torrid heat, makes women dress from head to toe in black and simultaneously approves of men dressing in white dishdashas.

The journey proceeded swiftly with only the usual sort of diversions one gets in this part of the world

and after turning off the Highway, Saeed shortly pulled up and suggested we take a look at the view.

In the middle, on the left, is Dana Village.

So we were soon there and checked into the Dana Guest House.

We were in luck in that we were accommodated in a room in a recently-built wing that featured (a) such modern amenities as air conditioning and

internet access; (b) a simply staggering view;

and (c) en suite facilities. Even the shower has The View.

Our expectations had been set correctly in that there was no food available until dinner at 1930. There was a kettle in the room and so I asked reception if there was a chance of milk and got some powdered stuff which, to be frank, took us a while to develop the courage to try (it turned out to be powdered milk and not too unpleasant). However, there was instead some rather nice-smelling herbal tea in the room, so we made a cup of that and, it being about 1330, settled ourselves down in front of That View for some world-class relaxing to build us up for our hike tomorrow.

The only thing that detracted from the peace and quiet was the wind, which was ferociously noisy.

We had resigned ourselves to being hungry until dinner time, so to distract ourselves, and because the wind seemed to have died down somewhat, we decided to take a walk around Dana Village. The Guest House employs a chap called Ali who is very helpful, but cannot, for some reason, speak. He furnished us with a little booklet with some details and off we went.

It’s a strange place. It was originally a ghost of a village that Arabs lived in until the 1800s, but corners of it are flickering back into life as eco-tourism becomes more and more popular. The information we’d been given was specific that there were no restaurants in the village, and it was wrong. As we started walking around, Jane spotted a couple of people sitting on a roof terrace, and it turned out that they had been served at a very much functioning (albeit basic) restaurant.

They offered us coffee, hummus and moutabel (also known as baba ghanoush, a sort of aubergine-based version of hummus) and so we went and joined the people on the roof

who were taking advantage of The View. We elected to sit in the shade. Pardon the photo of food, but it was such an unexpected pleasure, I feel compelled to share.

Afterwards, we strolled around, past some typical scenes

and discovered that there were other places at which we could also have got food. There are other hotels,

a shop

and several picturesque scenes which show at once its crumbling nature and the signs of restoration/development.

There’s even an EV charging point.

We speculated about the route for tomorrow’s hike, which takes us down the mountain and along to Feynan Ecolodge. We think you can see the trail going up from the bottom right here;

yes, there.

We’ll find out, possibly the hard way, tomorrow morning.

At 1930, as often happens around that time, the sun set

and we went for dinner in the restaurant, which gave a good sunset view.

The dinner was a buffet, of course, and included a good variety of local dishes – good nourishing stuff. Afterwards, we went back to our room and relaxed for the rest of the day.

Tomorrow is The Hike – 15km from here to Feynan Ecolodge, mainly downhill but sometimes steeply so. We’ll have a guide and we’ll see how our progress compares with the guidance time of six hours. But we should be there in time for me to update these pages with whatever adventures we encounter en route, so please come back tomorrow and find out, won’t you?

* Thought I’d better explain this. “Oh, Donna” was a 1973 song by 10CC
** “Making Plans for Nigel”, XTC, 1979

Days 7 & 8 – Coralation

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Saturday 21 and Sunday 22 May 2022 – Reader, I offer you a respite from having to wade through dozens of photos, similar to the respite we’ve had over the last days from having to Do Stuff All The Time. This entry will be mercifully short.

For the week up to and including yesterday, my Garmin Vivosmart calculated that I had exerted myself for 762 minutes at moderate intensity and 138 at vigorous intensity. This has been the hardest week since September last year when, you’ll remember because you read these pages, Jane and I were walking a couple of hundred miles around Menorca. However, yesterday and today registered a big, fat 0 on the Garminmeter mainly because we’ve not done much. Here is what we have done.

Before our departure from Wadi Rum at an entirely reasonable 9am, I took a few more snaps of the site, including the view through one of our bubble’s windows.

You’ll notice that the silver sun-deflecting coverings have been taken off the bubbles – they are put on during the day and staff remove them in the late afternoon. The site has expanded over the last few years; Jane found a couple of aerial photos which show its growth from pre-pandemic

to now (I’ve ringed the one we slept in).

There are reviews from May 2019 which mention (OK, complain about) construction work being done, which gives a good idea of what’s been going on. I guess it must have taken quite a lot of confidence to carry on the development during the pandemic and hope that the tourists would return. I don’t think the site was anywhere near full, but one hopes that the owners have made the right call for the future.

We were transported back to the entrance in Rum Village and managed to find Saeed among the slightly shambolic goings-on that inevitably surround trying to reunite punters with drivers over a reasonably large parking area. And then we were off to Aqaba. The countryside we passed through was granite and striking.

Saeed gave us a quick driving tour of Aqaba, which is a small city, but busy because it was the weekend (the Arab weekend is Friday and Saturday, remember, so it’s chaos arriving on Thursday evening and leaving on Saturday evening or early Sunday). One thing we noted was the ubiquity of a wonderfully colourful tree by the roadsides.

Jane looked it up and confirmed her theory that it is called a “Flamboyant Tree”, for some reason or other. We also noted an unfamiliar thing:

a bag of bread left hanging on a tree. Saeed explained that people often hang their left-over bread like this for others to take if they need, for example to feed animals, which is rather lovely.

He then dropped us off some 16km further south, at the Mövenpick Tala Bay Resort, which is very substantial and very resortish.

We checked in and had the luxury not only of having nothing to do, but also of knowing we had a relaxed morning the next day. So we headed almost immediately for the lobby bar and had a welcome injection of gin before stumbling about until we found a restaurant for a late lunch – it really is quite a large place – the walk from reception to our room is (according to Garmin) 0.16 miles – and we found it a bit confusing trying to locate the best route from A (where we were) to B (where lunch would be). But we managed it because we’re triers and had another welcome injection of western food – steak and chips in my case. I like Jordanian food and have enjoyed eating here. But – steak and chips, you know?

The rest of yesterday was spent bringing this blog not quite up to date and we got a reasonably early night with, as I say, the comfort that comes from not having an alarm set for the morning.

A small diversion: please excuse the schoolboy ignorance in me that caused me an inward snigger when I saw this at the breakfast buffet.

Today’s activity, agreed with Saeed on the way down from Wadi Rum, was a trip out on the Red Sea on a glass-bottomed boat to look at the coral for which the sea is renowned. Saeed has a friend with a boat. Who’d have guessed, eh? So he took us to the harbour, just by the fish market,

where it became clear that glass-bottomed boat trips are definitely A Thing in Aqaba.

We met Omar and his boat

and headed out at a gentle pace, consistent with not tearing the glass bottom out of the boat which would have been regrettable. There is plenty of coral growing naturally along the coast here, but The Powers That Be have undertaken a rather unusual initiative to give the coral extra places to grow. Because it grows well on steel, they have dumped various objects – ships, old military tanks, that kind of thing, so that coral can grow on them and also in some cases as targets for divers to visit (Aqaba is also a big diving centre on account of it being rather nearer the sea that almost anywhere else in Jordan). So he headed out to the first one and told us to grab our cameras. At this point, it became clear that all was not clear.

It was very difficult to take decent photos with my Nikon through the glass on the bottom of the boat.

In fact, it was easier to get an idea of the ship and its coral by, erm, looking over the side.

When we got to some coastal coral a bit further on, I tried also using my mobile phone, and this was the best I could do

so I tried some video which at least gives an impression, even if the quality is, frankly, poor.

We had lunch on the boat – Omar had brought fish and chips (Jordan style) for us all with him, and the fish was sea bass, which was delicious. After that we headed back to Aqaba and I took one or two more snaps on the way:

this, for example, is Eilat, on the opposite shore of the finger of the Red Sea that reaches up to Aqaba. To me and Google Maps, Eilat is in Israel, but Saeed and Omar described it as being in Palestine. I offer no further comment, mainly because the sensitivities and complexities are beyond my ken. From Aqaba, not only can you see Eilat, but you can see into Egypt on that side of the finger (marked by the big Hotel Taba); and the border into Saudi Arabia is only 25km south of the city. This proximity to many nations has a great bearing on Jordan’s culture, as I’ve mentioned before.

Having had only Lipton’s Ice Tea as refreshment with lunch, we found the siren call of the lobby bar irresistible, and treated ourselves to a couple of drinks before heading back to our room. There was one final point of interest en route – the Mövenpick Chocolate Hour, which was an opportunity to grab a couple of treats to have with the cup of tea that I am drinking as I type this. But because they were free, we could be reassured that they contained no calories at all. No, really.

And that’s about it for Aqaba, and the blog is up to date. We have another relaxed start tomorrow (yay!) as we depart at 10 for our next adventure which will take place in the Dana Nature Reserve, about three hours northish of here. It’s supposed to be really great for hiking in, which is good news, since our itinerary specifies that we will undertake a hike there. We know that, like Wadi Rum, there will be no booze served with our meals over the next couple of days. What I’m not sure of is the amount of internet there is, so you may well find yourself having another short respite from my deathless prose. It’s Sunday now and I will definitely be back online on Wednesday; I hope you’ll join me then.

Day 6 – Wadi, but no Rum (no internet, either)

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Friday 20 May 2022 – Woo hoo! Another lie in! We merely had to get ourselves up, breakfasted and checked out for 9am, when Saeed came to take us on the next destination. En route, he took us to a couple of viewpoints. The first gave us a good sight of Umm Sayhoun, the village near Wadi Musa, where the bedouin who had been living in tents and caves on the Petra site had been forcibly relocated by the Jordanian government.

Apparently, they were not in favour, but there they are. By the way, don’t think of bedouin as poor nomads scraping a living by herding goats; some of them are indecently rich, it appears, often from the sale of huge areas of land previously owned by the family.

Our next stop was the viewpoint I mentioned in my last entry that gives a view over Wadi Musa and bits of the Petra site; I was hoping to be able to make out some details to give context, but I’m afraid I can’t. Instead, here is a good view of the very substantial town of Wadi Musa itself, which actually curls around the hill to include the area behind where we stood to take the photo.

Before we departed the area, we also visited Little Petra. The original idea had been to hike from here back to the Monastery on the main site, but The Powers That Be put the kybosh on that by closing the trail (we never found out why, but suspect someone was having a bad day at the office). Little Petra is in many ways like Petra, only smaller, and cheaper to get into. For example, they have a mini Treasury,

(with the obligatory retail opportunity in front of it)

and some creative display ideas facilitated by the geology of the site,

a mini Siq

and some fancy tombs which are, though, on a smaller scale than the main site.

The stone is mainly sandstone which is much softer and prone to erosion, so many things have vaguer outlines, but you can also see that sediment has built up to cover much of the lower floors

(the aperture on the right would be something that someone stood in front of in order to wash their hands, for example).

What Little Petra has that is unique, though, is some surviving painted frescos from Nabatean times, i.e. around 2,000 years ago.

on the ceiling

of a biclinium (those who studied Greek will know that this has one fewer sides with seating than a triclinium).

Retail opportunities were rife, but there was much less importunism on the part of the operatives; this chap, for example, only made occasional entreaties to pay him for his musicianship on the rababa.

Although there isn’t the striking stone colour you find in the main site, there is no shortage of impressive rock formations.

We carried on via an unusually honest piece of marketing by the roadside

which gave us the last major viewpoint before we headed for Wadi Rum and its dire prospect of access to neither internet nor gin.

There were a couple of photo-worthy pauses en route: the roadside was dotted with bedouin camps, for example;

we got an overview of Wadi Rum;

there’s a railway that goes through the desert;

and, amazingly in the middle of a desert, a railway station. With trains.

The railway used to support trains that carried potash across Wadi Rum, but is now just a museum (and occasional film set).

At this point, Saeed stopped, doffed his baseball cap and donned a keffiyah, a traditional Arab headdress. To get help with this, he called in at a place that, would you believe it, was also a retail opportunity. Which managed to sell us one each by the charming Jordanian sales skills that accompany such a welcoming nation.

(Yes, I bought one as well and I use it to bolster my assertion that selfies are a bad idea.) We never quite got to the bottom of why Saeed made this change – but it was noticeable that at many of the stops we made in Wadi Rum (see later) many of the westerners were wearing something similar. Funny, that.

(I guess it’s good to support the local entrepreneurs; the chap who sold us ours told us that the current nastiness in Ukraine was pushing the price inflation of essential stuff like wheat and bread beyond 100%, and reading the papers, which I did just before the internet went dark on me, bears his story out – the whole region is suffering badly.)

So then we headed for the Inner Darkness that is Wadi Rum, a place that has neither internet access nor gin. You can bring the latter with you if it’s that important, although you are charged a tenner corkage to drink it in the camp we went to; and I tried to bring the former, in the shape of a Skyroam Solis Lite, but the mobile signal was so rubbish that I had to make do with being offline for almost 24 whole hours. The sacrifices I make, eh?

Wadi Rum is a protected area in the Jordanian desert, so as well as no alcohol sales and no internet there is no normal road traffic on account of there being no normal roads. There’s a village where punters are dropped off and taken to their various camps within the area on 4x4s driven typically by local bedouin drivers. We stopped off and had lunch at the village, which gives a view over Lawrence of Arabia’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, apparently.

I can see six, if I look at it carefully.

So we climbed on board a 4×4 and were taken to the Aicha Memories Luxury Camp. Our specification for luxury level accommodation was an important part of our itinerary, because, you’ll remember, I hate camping.

We had a couple of hours to relax before our afternoon/evening entertainment, so took a stroll around the site

(our accommodation was inside one of those fancy-looking geodesic jobbies, and I have to say it lived up to their website claims that it’s just like a luxury hotel room only in the desert. And with no internet.)

And then it was time to go off on a jaunt around the area, driven by Salim, a young bedouin who (praise be to Allah) had not only good English but a sense of humour as well. Wadi Rum is 280 square miles and we covered a total of 17 of them bouncing around on the back of Salim’s aged Toyota Landcruiser (not comfy, but very much suitable for the terrain). This was our route, in a sort of anti-clockwise direction – the slightly darker area is the extent of Wadi Rum as a whole.

What we hadn’t realised was how much hard graft we would have to put into the whole thing. Today was (according to Garmin) the second-hardest-working day of the holiday, after clambering up to the Petra Monastery – in other words, more work than the High Place of Sacrifice walk. And it could have been much harder if we hadn’t wimped out of one bit – please read on.

I, ex-pro photographer that I sort of am, had taken a gimbal with me to try to give some smooth footage taken from the back of the 4×4 as we bucked and jolted across the desert. Given the results, I also tried some footage handheld with my smartphone. The comparison is quite striking, if you’re interested in this kind of thing. If not, move on, nothing to see here.

(You can see that even though there are no paved roads, there’s no shortage of traffic; there’s a lot of toing and froing across Wadi Rum and we passed a lot of camps (none as posh as ours, of course) but quite a lot of them seemed unoccupied, presumably in the aftermath of the pandemic. One wonders what the Wadi was like in full flow.)

The first inkling we had that we were not just there for the ride came at the first stop, when it became apparent that we would have to scramble up this fucker.

It’s imaginatively called the “Red Sand Dune”. Note the soft sand that makes walking hard work even when it’s flat and level. Note also, please, the gradient.

But also, please, note the view from the top, which was quite something.

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It became clear that the route was not so much well-trodden as well-driven; there were many groups of gasping, red-faced tourists struggling up this monster and being told by the smug bastards who were going down that it was “worth it”.

The next stop was less dramatic but still had its moments – the Al Khazali canyon.

There are places where it’s a bit of a scramble, but it’s not too hard and its main interest is in carvings and inscriptions on the rocks in it – some pictures and some writing. Yes, I have loads of photos, but I’ll only inflict these on you.

Shortly after this we came to a stop here.

It’s called the Little Bridge. You’ll see why later. Of course we had to scramble up it and of course I had to take a photo of a triumphant Jane atop the arch.

As she headed off towards the arch I shouted to her that she should let me have the water bottle she was carrying, because it was important not to lose it in case she fell. This seemed to amuse some of the other punters who were around at the time.

The reason it is called the Little Bridge became apparent at the next stop. For reasons which may become apparent, we decided to remain as spectators.

The next stop (we kept bumping into people from the previous one, which is why it was clear that there was a definite route being followed by many drivers) was another canyon, the Aby Khashaba canyon. “Phew”, we thought, a bit of a rest from all this dangerous up and down stuff. Wrongly, as it turned out.

The rock formation on the left looks a bit like the helmet of Agamemnon, I’m sure you’ll agree – we wondered if it is carved by natural erosion or by people..

Having gone up some more bloody soft sand, we then had to descend this.

Tricky, but we made it with no bones broken. The final stop was to watch the sunset, which is incredibly hackneyed, but still has its magic if you’re there. One chap was lying down on the job

but the colours were pretty wonderful.

If you can spare 90 seconds or so, here’s a hyperlapse (15x normal speed – I’m amused by the trails of the jeeps whizzing around in the foreground, just like the trails in a Wilson Cloud Chamber).

After that, Salim

took us back to the camp. By this time, I hope you’ve been following, it was dark, and the camp was attractively lit up

and we went for a light bite in the main catering bubble

and a lemon and mint in the cafe, where some (reasonably) locals were having a good ol’ chinwag.

and then it was time for bed. Not having any internet relieved me from the immediate need to write the day up (I’m in Aqaba as you read this) so we got a decently early and sober night, not characteristics that have particularly marked out the holiday thus far. To be honest we were both really quite tired – the days have been long and intense and so it was good to have the prospect of a decent night’s sleep. The morrow brings the possibility of even more relaxation as we head to Aqaba and have nothing organised in our itinerary! I dare say there’ll be something to write about it and I will do this in due course. In the meantime, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about our day in the desert and will come back to read more as I write it.