Day 3 - Walk Across A Border?

We left Tel Aviv the next morning slightly disappointed, although we tried not to show it. I didn't want our weird experience in Tel Aviv to underwrite our trip. Since I had waited too long to book our flights to Eilat from Tel Aviv, we hopped on the 7AM bus for the 5 hour ride down to the southern tip of Israel, a beach town on the Red Sea called Eilat.

Geographically, Israel is roughly the shape of New Jersey. There are three places to cross the border into Jordan – one is in the north (think George Washington Bridge), but is of little use to tourists as one needs their own car (rentals not allowed and I don't believe you can go across on a bus) to get across. The second place is the King Hussein (what they call it in Jordan) / Allenby (what they call it in Israel) crossing, which is directly east of Jerusalem (in the West Bank) and directly west of Amman. You could say this is more or less commensurate to the Jersey Shore area, and the most popular crossing in Israel. The third crossing is the Eilat / Aqaba crossing, which is the New Jersey equivalent to Atlantic City. Eilat is a beach resort town in Israel, and Aqaba is the equivalent beach resort town in Jordan – both on the Red Sea. Most of the touristy sites in Jordan that we wanted to visit were in the south, thus we decided to cross through the Eilat / Aqaba crossing and move within Jordan from there.

The drive from the Poconos area (Tel Aviv), to Atlantic City (Eilat) cuts right through the Negev, which more or less is desert. Ben Gurion famously said the future of Israel lies in the Negev, not sure how that will work, but it's truly a visually stunning sight to drive though. Eilat is a party town. It pops up out of nowhere on the drive down from Tel Aviv and you can see the big beachfront resorts in the distance.

The bus ride for us, unfortunately, was a nuisance! It was full of teenagers on holiday looking to get into trouble in Eilat, yelling across the bus at friends, moving up and down the aisles to make friends, and getting ready for a fun week down in Eilat. My guess is many of these kids were ready to start their time in the IDF and were looking for one last hurrah – the adults on the bus tried to scold them a few times due to their behavior but let the rest of it slide. You can't blame them – we've all been there before as teenagers and who knows what they will experience in the IDF for the next 3 years. Hoping to get a few key hours of sleep on the bus, every attempt was futile, and we ended up throwing our headphones on to Billboard 80's Hits to drown out the absolutely annoying yelling and screaming from these kids.

We hurried off the bus upon reaching Eilat and hopped in to a cab for the border. It was hot and dusty. A good hot, though, dry and desert-like. Within 10 minutes we were at the border crossing. After receiving instructions from an Israeli border guard, we paid our exit tax, had our passports (or paper form in my case) stamped, and literally walked across the border with all of our baggage in tow! How incredible! I don't think either of us have ever walked across a border! There was a 100 yard walk through some kind of neutral zone until we reached the Jordan side of the border. Within 15 minutes, we had passed through security, procured our tourist visas, paid our entry fee, and were in Jordan. This made me think of Johnny Depp's self-defense in court in the movie Blow, when he tells the judge, paraphrasing, "What exactly is a border? It's just an imaginary line." It's the same here – the same land on either side, the same sand, wind, rocks, etc. How funny our world has made it for me to walk from one place to the other I have to get stamps in a book, fill out forms, pay fees, procure visas, put bags through an X-Ray machine, etc. – and furthermore, some people are not even allowed to go! Walking across a border truly puts things in perspective.

And was it dusty - definitely the closest thing to a sandstorm we've ever experienced. With no trees to catch the drift, a slight windstorm made it an arduous task to know where we were going. Visibility was completely cut off. Several times we had to stop because sand had gotten stuck in our eyes, and our imposter sunglasses were still not good enough to block out the storm. Even after a quick 10 minute walk over the border our bodies were caked with sand – we were hoping that our stay in the desert wouldn't be plagued with these sandstorms!

The Bedouin are Jordan's indigenous people. For centuries they have been nomadic travelers and herdsmen within the desert, mastering the art of living in such a hostile environment where scorching heat and bone chilling cold come on the same day and water is as precious as life. Living the Bedouin life has become a tourist attraction, and over decades these people have watched their storied way of life become bastardized into Jordan's favorite conduit of tourism, for better or for worse. To many it has brought more money than they could ever imagine, but has also diluted their simple way of life with the desert.

Wadi Rum (translated to Rum Valley) is a protected area of the government which houses hundreds of square miles of pristine desert and mountains. Humungous "siqs" or rock formations grow out of the red sand desert and sculpt the landscape. The area was made famous by TE Lawrence, or Lawrence of Arabia, who traveled the area, wrote extensively, and fought alongside the Arabs in the early 20th century.

We researched many camps in the Wadi Rum area and decided to stay at a small camp run by a Bedouin named Obeid, one of the smallest and higher ranked camps on TripAdvisor. Obeid's driver friend Mohammed picked us up at the border and took us through the surprisingly large and well constructed desert highway from the border to the turn off towards Wadi Rum. From the turn off it was another 15 minutes or so to the Wadi Rum visitor center where we met Obeid's son, Nail (pronounced "naa-eel"). We transferred our baggage, took a few snaps of the "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" (a landmark siq made famous by TE Lawrence), and hopped in the back of Nail's truck.

It was a bumpy but glorious ride through the desert to Obeid's camp. Looking around us was pure desert and siqs, the sun beating down on us but the breeze from the drive keeping us cool. We reached Obeid's camp and were pleasantly surprised. There were about 5 total tents tucked beside a few small siqs, and surrounding the camp, a humungous siq with undulating walls and valleys stretching 1000's of meters into the sky. It almost looked as if over the centuries the sun had scorched the rock a deep red, and the sand was slowly following the rocks' lead. We threw our bags into our tent, fully equipped with a gas lamp and several cushions, and joined Nail for tea.

It was so very peaceful. It seemed that there were only us 3 people in the entire desert, and for miles, this was probably true. We learned Nail was 20 years old, and was one of 7 of Obeid's children. Obeid was currently with some tourists in Amman but would be coming back later, and Nail was in charge of the camp for now. We were the only guests, and he said they like to keep it small to provide the most attention to the guests and keep it traditional. We liked that – a lot. He was a happy go lucky guy that always had a smile on his face and took great care of us – Obeid has nothing to worry about when he can't run the camp himself.

Nail ran off to go pick up some supplies at the nearest village, where his family stayed, and came back about 45 minutes later with 2 of his younger brothers and a truck full of water, food, and propane tanks for cooking and lighting. One of the sons, Salim (probably around 15 years old), started preparing our dinner while the other young buck Hamed (5 years old and a fun loving kid, I think his full name is Mohammed but they called him Hamed for short) and I played a little soccer and ran around the camp. We ate a quick snack of bread and vegetables and hopped into the back of the truck for a Jeep tour.

The next 2 hours were filled with exhilarating sights and vistas – along with a relaxing but bumpy ride in makeshift seating in the bed of the pickup. We saw the famous rock bridges, perused through the desert, all while the sun slowly made its way from the sky to the horizon and the siqs coming out of the ground. It was certainly one of those "pictures can't do justice" experiences, seeing siqs hundreds of miles away behind layers of sand and dust slowly rising from the ground. We made it back to the camp in time for Hamed to show us the way up to the top of a siq where we sat and watched one of the more gorgeous sunsets I've seen in my life, over the scorched desert and through the siqs in the horizon.

The sky transformed from an orange, to a deep red, to a brilliant purple, and finally to black – but the stars came out in full force. Never before have we seen so many stars in the sky in our entire lives. With no artificial lighting to impede our vision, the faintest glows in any other part of the world stuck out brilliantly.

Obeid made it back in time for dinner and I complimented him on what a great jobs his kids did the run the place in his absence. He took us around back where he brought a lamp light, and looking around, I didn't really see what he wanted us there for. As I started to move forward, he asked me to stop, and Salim came around with a shovel and started working on a mound which was directly in front of us. Slowly but surely, something under the mound of sand start showing up! It seemed like some sort of barrel in the ground. It was dinner! Obeid asked me not to move as sand would drift onto the food, and him and Salim opened the lid and pulled out a 4 foot tall structure with cooked chicken, pots of vegetables, and pans of biryani on it. All cooked in some sort of underground tandoor! It was brilliant. The food left nothing to be desired. I couldn't help going back for more – and couldn't decide what was more delicious, the slow cooked and season chicken, or hearty vegetables with Bedouin spice.

We enjoyed the rest of the evening talking about the rest of our itinerary in Jordan and his business. Obeid left an hour later to head back to the village and kept us under good care with Nail. We imbibed on a sheesha while staring at the desert stars, and after about an hour, retired to our humble tent – thrilled with our choice of places in the world to visit and even more so with our choice of Bedouin camp. Little did we know this was just the beginning of our tales from Jordan…
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