Wadi Rum is famous as being a place Lawrence of Arabia visited. During out tour, we saw the Lawrence spring, a stream of running water high in a mountain (which we climbed) and the Lawrence House, where Lawrence was said to have lived. We also saw various other structures and formations (an arch, a canyon), etc, most of which we climbed. (At least today I was in sneakers and shorts. I had more than learned my lesson from Petra!)
Our tour of the desert ended at the Beduin camp where we would sleep. The camp was about 10 kilometers from base camp, so we had been instructed to bring with us everything we would need. It was recommended to us to bring warm clothes because it does actually get cold in the desert at night. We arrived to the Beduin camp at around 3:00PM and we given some time to lounge in the shade (where we, being very, very American at this point and not really caring, played hearts with a deck of cards one of us had brought. It was my first time playing, and I didn't lose. We played so that the first person to 100 points ended the game, and then obviously the person with the lowest score was the winner. So I didn't win, but I didn't lose. That should make my Dad proud because apparently Hearts is a lot like Spades, his most favorite game of all time, I think. See Dad, it only took me being stuck in the Jordanian desert with nothing to do to learn Hearts/Spades)! We watched the sun set over the mountains around 6:30PM, and it was breath-taking. (This trip was amazing in many ways, but I think I will remember most of the places I went by the sunsets I saw there).
We then had dinner, which was chicken, vegetables, and potatoes cooked using the traditional Bedouin method of cooking underground. It was a good meal. After dinner, we played some drums and other Beduin instruments, danced a little with out Bedouin guides, and then turned in for the night. And by turned in, I mean we drug out mattresses and blankets and pillows out of our tents and slept under the stars in the desert. It was chilly, but it was definitely worth it. The stars are actually their brightest in the early hours of the morning. For once, I was glad that I woke up several times during the night and was able to look at the stars.
The sun rose around 6:00AM and by 6:30AM we were having breakfast, pita (which we had been eating non-stop since arriving in Jordan), cheese, jam, honey, a peanut-butter-like substance and some type of cookies, and of course tea, which was sweetened and very good (we had it several times while we were in Jordan). We made it back to base camp by 8AM, and loaded ourselves and our bags into two taxis headed to Acqaba, about an hour away. There, the plan was to re-cross the border into Eilat, Israel, sort out our visa issues at the Egyptian Embassy there, and then board a bus for Jerusalem at 2:15PM. If all went according to plan (and again, thank goodness it did) we were scheduled to be in Jerusalem by around 7:00PM on the night of September 29th. We would be there until October 2nd, when we would travel back to Cairo. Most of us would have preferred to spend more time in Jerusalem (we only had two full days), but because Yom Kippur began on the evening of the 27th and ended the evening of the 28th, we knew we would run into some problems with both borders and sights being closed and we preferred not to risk it. That meant we knew we had two very busy and very full days of sight-seeing ahead of us!
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