Wadi Rum

The difficulty with this medium is its limitlessness. It is in fact not one medium at all, but a great messy collage of many overlapping possibilities. As such, the medium of the blog and the medium of life are quite similar. When one suffers, the other projects. It seems no one wants to read about this aspect of (my) experience but of course it’s there and must be levied against the inspiration.

I arrived in the Bedouin village of Wadi Rum happy as a clam. It had been two days since I left Cairo, traveling overnight across the Sinai to reach the port of Nuweiba and then climbing aboard the ferry for the four hour trip to Aqaba, Jordan. From Aqaba, it was just a matter of one night’s fitful sleep in a cramped hotel room with a snoring Spaniard and some light provisioning in the morning, then I was off.

Undeniably, in all ways and at all moments, Wadi Rum was very, very good to me. First of all, as you might infer from the picture below, it is one of the most astoundingly gorgeous desert landscapes in the world.

The village itself (sprawled out on the valley floor between the massifs of Jebel Rum and Jebel Khalazi) is a pleasant place to stay. The Bedouin people are relaxed and living quite comfortably, many of them banking heartily off the growing tourist flow. Almost every adult male of Wadi Rum owns a Landcruiser, and when they’re not using it to transport goats or building materials, or whatever, there is no shortage of tourists wishing to pay 50 bucks for a ride around the desert. Fortunately for me, the tourists don’t seem to get out of the vehicles to walk around much, so in five days of climbing and hiking I did not meet a single one except in the parking lot of the village’s only restaurant.

The climbing and hiking was delicious sweet surrender. On the afternoon of my arrival, I hiked out into the desert and took this picture from atop an outlying tower in front of the main massif of Jebel Rum. These two hours of twilight strolling and scrambling through the winding canyons were all that was needed to convince me that I had come to the right place. The desert sunk its claws into my soul on that first afternoon and from sunset onwards, all other details slipped into place as water in the sand. The most definitive aspect of my good fortune was meeting Elad and his friends that night in the restaurant. Longtime Rum climbers, they told me everything I wanted to know about the valley and suggested that I migrate over to the other campsite in town where there was a free kitchen for use as well as many other conveniences and comforts. The following day after climbing with Mohammed, a local Bedouin kid who knows all the classic routes, I headed over to the climbers camp and just as I was walking in, Elad’s friends were walking out with their backpacks on. Turns out they had been unexpectedly required to drive back to their home town of Haifa that evening, thereby leaving Elad to wait until the end of the week for his other partners to arrive. This turn of fate naturally offered me the opportunity to climb three days with Elad, who of course was not just any climber dude, but one of the strongest and most experienced in the Valley, and certainly one of the most conscientious, respectful, and focused persons I have ever met. Needless to say, I thanked my lucky stars many times throughout the rest of the week (even as I struggled hard to follow the 5.12 cracks that Elad led effortlessly) and tried as much as possible to express my gratitude to him whenever possible.

The four days of climbing was intense; full of manifest suffering at times from a mix of hot sun and cold shade, sharp sandstone whose integrity that I never fully learned to trust, painful shoes that for some reason seem to have shrunk two sizes since I wore them in Alaska, and most of all my frantic head and deflated body out of shape from two months of malnutrition and sitting on my ass. At the end of the week, when Elad’s friends arrived and it was time for me to move on to Petra, I was left with the uncomfortable sensation of wanting more but knowing that I couldn’t handle it physically. My hands were torn up and toes blistered, physically I was quite a mess and emotionally I had an overwhelming sense of deficiency, which lingered heavily for some days and never fully subsided. But as with any difficult endeavor, the rewards I suppose are inevitably worth the hardships, even if the eventuality is uncertain and hard to ascertain in the moment.

(More climbing pics coming soon!)