Wild Wild Wadi Rum — Carry On, from Amanda Kellner Klein

In 2011, I embarked on a two week volunteer trip to Lima, Peru during which time I read Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel. One weekend my group drove south to the massive Huacachina sand dunes, a boundless desert playground for visitors. We raced around in dune buggies and took turns sand-boarding, an activity in which one sits on a small surf board and speeds down the side of a dune the size of a Manhattan building from top to bottom.

It was in the middle of that desert that I became aware of the experience of sublime places, areas of the world in which the sheer expansiveness of the surroundings create the feeling that you are one small piece of a much larger puzzle. The kind of environment where all you can see is sand or ocean in every direction and that makes the typical worries of city life seem like city life doesn't even exist. In the desert I saw de Botton's words come to life.

“See how small you are next to the mountains. Accept what is bigger than you and what you do not understand. The world may appear illogical to you, but it does not follow that it is illogical per se. Our life is not the measure of all things: consider sublime places a reminder of human insignificance and frailty.”
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

If the rolling desert sand dunes of Peru were a representation of the sublime in nature, the ancient rock formations and interminable red sand of Jordan's Wadi Rum were the ultimate embodiment.

We knew we were approaching Wadi Rum village before we saw it. The tan sand from the past hour and a half drive from Petra had started to give way to an orange palette, then undeniably red. As with many travel-related stories, the photos do not nearly do justice to the rich red hue that permeates the area.

Our friend was told that Wadi Rum means "desert of sand that gets everywhere" which, comically, is not too far from the actual definition. According to the internet, Wadi Rum translates to "valley of light, airborne sand." By valley, they mean the flat-ish sand that inhabits the space between hulking rocks, jagged and red in all their glory.

Our host at Wadi Rum Bedouin Camp, Mohammed, had previously sent us directions of where to drop our car in a shared parking lot in the village, so that he could pick us up in a 4x4 truck which he would drive across the desert sand to the campsite. We arrived in Wadi Rum Village and the ubiquitous hosts of many camps easily led us to Mohammed. It crossed my mind that leaving our rental car in a random lot overnight may not be the safest move but it seemed like the move everyone was making, so we kept on!

Some may call it a "glamp" and I wouldn't immediately contradict them. Consider the private tents with full size beds, electricity, running water, and home cooked dinner of local Bedouin food.

To me, though, it was decidedly a camp. The identical brown tents were bare except for a bed & night table, the group shared communal meals and bathrooms (albeit delicious and clean ones), and there was a chance that if you walked too far into the desert or climbed too far up a rock you could wander off and no one on the planet may know where you are.

Lack of cell phone service in Wadi Rum is a given and the red sand really does get everywhere. I managed to turn a favorite pair of Allbirds red with sand because I forgot real sneakers; word to the wise: pack hiking boots. Even so, I have no complaints. The freedom to roam around and climb became immediately apparent as we arrived in the evening, dropped our bags in the tents, and realized there is quite literally and sublimely nothing to do.

We stared into the distance for a while, making sense of the shapes of the rocks and the red sand that stretches so far to every direction that eventually it melts into the sky. After hearing from Mohammed that professional climbers frequently visit Wadi Rum for rock climbing expeditions, we naturally took it upon ourselves to start climbing.

There were no harnesses in Wadi Rum. No guides leading us in groups tactfully across the dangerously uneven rock formations. No one to tell us climbers whether to go right or left, further up or safely down. Had I not arrived to the desert with three other people, I may be fooled into thinking, at the top of the rock mountain that sat next to our camp, that there were no other humans around at all.

The desert is silent. Eerily quiet, so much so that when Joe went ahead to climb further up a rock formation the sound of our voices didn't carry and I genuinely thought I had lost him for good. Once I got over the initial fear (heights, lack of nearby healthcare should something happen), the climbing was surreal. With no one to stop us, we ascended higher, around curves and used weather-worn divots in the thousands-year-old rocks to gain sweeping desert views.

Wadi Rum has seen the presence of human existence since prehistoric times. The Nabataeans themselves spent significant time here as well as their famous city of Petra. Today, the Bedouin people, desert dwellers in the business of herding camels and tourism, inhabit the space. In 2018, however, Wadi Rum is rarely mentioned without its connection to Hollywood and modern entertainment.

It all began with Lawrence of Arabia which was filmed here in 1962; since then, this desert has been depicted in the likes of Transformers, The Martian, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the forthcoming Aladdin in 2019. Spend a day here and it's easy to see the Hollywood draw. Wadi Rum couldn't have been a better representation for how we picture the red landscape of Mars to be. It manages to feel simultaneously extraterrestrial and ancient.

Day one in Wadi Rum included an afternoon jaunt up the closest mountain to camp, some sand yoga (led by yours truly) to stretch out our muscles post Petra hike, and a local Bedouin meal that involved cooking a 3-tiered tray of meats and vegetables 10 feet underground in the sand. When Mohammed and his team brought the campers to a pile of sand and proceeded to haul the foil-wrapped tray from deep within the earth I felt the presence of the thousands of years of Bedouins that must have cooked this way before.

Day two was our opportunity to take advantage of the camp's Jeep tour. Initially we were not committed to signing up for the Jeep tour, which is in fact held in the back of a Ford truck with seats nestled into the bed. After recognizing the vastness of the desert and its mountains, however, the tour seemed like a nice way to experience more of it than we could possibly on our own. A camp staff member, Hussein, drove us straight through the sand dunes to key points of interest imperceptible from afar to our untrained eyes; he clearly understood the terrain deeply and the history it holds.

The first stop was a rock bridge that required a bit of climbing to access and, once on its ledge, enticed some vertigo on my part. We wandered around the surrounding rocks and Hussein took our photo.

Searching for ancient Arabic incriptions

Thousands of years old Arabic inscriptions

Next we bounced in the back of the truck all the way to the canyon. Without prior explanation, it was difficult to imagine what exactly this would be. Turns out, it was an opening between two large rock formations that we carefully maneuvered into to see ancient Arabic inscriptions and drawings. There were animals and text from the Qur'an etched into the wall. We could run our fingers over the writings and feel the years and years they had existed.

A similar thought crossed my mind here as it did in Petra: there is no way this will be such an unregulated tourist destination for much longer. Meaning, Jordan has to deal with the erosion of the Petra ruins as hundreds of thousands of tourists visiting and climbing on them year after year. Wadi Rum and its inscriptions will surely need to be protected if future generations are to be able to see them. The Dead Sea, where our final stop in Jordan would be, is evaporating and drying up quicker than many realize. The preservation of these sights, I imagine, will become paramount in years to come and I felt at once guilty for having contributed to the disruption and thankful to have had this close-up interaction with Jordan's past.

Exercise for the day came in the form of a trek straight up a towering sand dune. Our friend was handed a snowboard by a local which he somehow invincibly carried with him up the steep sand dune and was able to use as his transportation back down. The view from this vantage point was beautiful; I couldn't tell from which direction we came but the complexities of the desert landscape were slowly becoming more familiar as we viewed them from different points.

Nearly half a year has passed since I traversed the seemingly untouched, historically powerful Valley of the Moon. Its enduring essence of red and millennia-worn landscape still haven't lost their luster in my memory. The simple act of standing on the ground, surrounded by sand as far as the eye can see, stays with me. It reminds me that there are places we can go that are actually getaways, away from our manufactured reality of the everyday. Places that require nothing more than two feet (and a bit of bravery) to explore their many treasures.

“A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.”

― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

As is the impulse of experiencing the sublime. After you have recognized it, you may always continue to search for the places bring the feeling back. I know I have.

Last Stop: the Dead Sea

Visit Jordan, 2018 on Film for more on our travels throughout the country.