Our last day in the south of Jordan turned out to be fraught for a variety of reasons but most of all due to the mercantilism of the country’s taxi drivers. Once you are in a cab you are fair game and they will try to get as much money out of you as they can without openly stealing your belongings and throwing you out of the car onto the road’s rocky shoulder.
The day started with breakfast, as usual, after which we went to the visitor’s centre to ask about buses for the following day. On the way in we stopped to talk with a taxi driver whose name, it turned out, was Khalid. We told him we wanted to go to Wadi Rum and he wanted us to get in the cab immediately but we told him to wait ten minutes so we could go inside and get some information. He agreed to meet up at the prescribed time and when we came out of the compound we talked with him about the price. The information board at the site entrance said 45JD but this was only for the journey to Wadi Rum. Khalid told us it would cost 70JD for the round trip and this would include his waiting at the visitor’s centre at Wadi Rum for two hours so that we could go on a tour. We agreed and got in his three-year-old Hyundai Elantra to start our journey. The wind was from the east at a gusty 10 to 15 knots.
Kahlid told us he lives with his sister and mother and he displayed a frightening propensity to get angry with other drivers. On one occasion this involved stopping the car, winding down the window, and having a heated verbal exchange with another driver. At 10am we stopped at a lookout to take photos. We were in the Sharah Mountains and as we went along I saw a big black bird flying near the car. I asked Khalid what kind of bird it was and he said it was a crow. Then he said something like “hang your chances” when you see a crow, which I translated as “make a wish”. This turned out to be apt in the circumstances.
After driving for 30 minutes or so we turned off south onto the High Desert Way and past a certain point drove near some irrigated crops which Khalid said were cucumbers, tomatoes, and potatoes. At 11.20am I saw a sign saying that Aqaba was 46km distant and at 11.25am we turned off toward Wadi Rum. Khalid drove along a road with a single carriageway until we reached a building with a parking area out front that was filled with cars. He had been pestering us to get him to call his associate so that he could organise a “jeep” tour for us, but we wanted to see the visitor’s centre first, so declined his offer. This made him agitated and he started asking if we trusted him.
When we arrived and parked he got out of the car and walked over to a man and spoke with him. He brought the man back to where we were standing beside Kahlid’s yellow car and Kahlid introduced us to the driver of the jeep (which turned out to be a Toyota Hilux diesel with a modified tray that had welded and riveted seats and a canopy on it). I gave the man, who wore a grey kameez and white shalmar, 50JD as instructed (35JD for the tour and 10JD for the entry fee for two people) and we went inside the compound where I asked for 5JD. I went into the store and bought a Coke and a bottle of water with the note he gave me.
We walked back to the Hilux and he got out a grey plastic step from the tray and put it behind the vehicle so that we could climb up onto the tray. After driving for a short distance my travelling companion said she wanted to sit inside the cab so I knocked on the glass partition in front of me and Mohammed stopped the car, got out the plastic step, and let her descend to the safety of the earth. Mohammed turned out to be a very good driver and we drove across a sandy wasteland that had tall rocky outcrops scattered here and there that made for a strange landscape. “Wadi” means “valley” and “rum” is a kind of horned herbivore that might be an oryx, I could not ascertain its identity for sure. Khalid had said it was a kind of deer, which was typical of the people of the area.
Online there is no trace however of this etymology anywhere but the same kind of logic had the magnificent monuments inside the ancient town of Petra labelled as the “Treasury” and the “Monastery”, even though the edifices in the case have never had anything to do with what the names used for them might suggest.
Stopping periodically we took scads of photos in a landscape made famous by the Hollywood movie ‘The Martian’. It wasn’t a valley but it was certainly strange. At the third site where we stopped there were some ancient Nabataean carvings on the face of a grey rock cliff that might have shown evidence of civilisation for tens of thousands of years. There is no information sign in the vicinity of the artwork although there was a garbage bin close by. At 12.45pm we set off from this site and at 12.55pm we arrived at the fourth site. Here I spoke briefly with a Polish man with (like me) traditional Jordanian headgear on, in an effort to find out where he had come from. At 1.05pm we left the spot and drove to the fifth site where, at 12.20pm, we drank a cup of tea made from cardamom, sage and cinnamon. There was a carving on the face of a rock near a Bedouin tent that was what Mohammed told us was a likeness of Lawrence of Arabia.
A group of about 30 Italians arrived in three “jeeps” and piled into the tent we occupied. The man in charge of the operation at this point went around the whole collection of tourists placing a dab of myrrh on each person’s hand. This was an invitation to browse the shop’s wares, which included such regular tat as scarves and necklaces. The country is saturated with this kind of stuff. The Italian guide translated the word of the scent for the benefit of his charges.
We left after about 20 minutes and in the Hilux meandered our way through the alienating landscape toward the visitor’s centre where, at 2pm, I bought more drinks for us. We got back into Khalid’s car to the sound of his grumbling at our lateness. It was 20 minutes past the time agreed for us to rejoin him and he wasn’t happy although we said we had had no control over the itinerary once we had got inside Wadi Rum. He brightened up when we agreed to go to Aqaba. At 2.40pm we arrived at the highway and turned west toward the coastal town. At 3.05pm we arrived there.
The town is situated in front of giant cream-coloured hills made of igneous rock and it is a sprawling settlement now, much changed from the 1960s when the film ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ was made there. Khalid took us down to the shore of the Red Sea and we looked out on a rocky bay with, in the close distance, the Israeli settlement of Eilat and, further south and west, the coast of Egypt. We were told that you cannot cross in a boat to Israel as police patrol the waters but that there is a land border with a no-man’s-land in the middle separating Jordan and Israel.
Then we got back in the car and went in search of food. Khalid said he would give us some food and he proceeded to ask a series of people if there were any restaurants open that would agree to serve us at this time of day. He asked the people working in restaurants and even a man in a car that stopped in the road. The man had a beard and gave a long explanation that ended up coming to nothing. We eventually parked outside a KFC and Khalid got out of the car (it was still 38 degrees C outside) and went up between two buildings. He came back and said he had ordered a pizza for us and we waited about 10 minutes then Khalid got out of the car and wandered off again, then came back with a flat box with the food inside it. We drove to a park and ate standing up in the shade of a tree.
At 4.05pm we left the spot in the car and drove back north toward Wadi Musa, from where we had started out in the morning. At 5.15pm we turned off onto the Kings Way again and close to our destination I asked Khalid how much I still had to pay him. I had told him that I didn’t have enough cash with me and that I would have to go to my hotel room to get more banknotes and he had agreed to take us on the strength of this promise. Now he told us that he wanted an extra 100JD in addition to the 50JD I had already given him. The trip to Aqaba had been promised in exchange for 60JD and there was still 20JD owing for the trip to Wadi Rum but now he said he wanted 20JD more for the food.
This caused a lot of problems for us and an argument ensued on the basis that he had said that he would give us the food. A shawarma had been the article in the initial offer but that had not eventuated due to the constraints of Ramadan. Now he wanted us to pay for what we had thought was a treat. We eventually got back to the hotel unscathed but it had been a very trying day with the combination of extreme heat in Wadi Rum and the long drive on a road teeming with slow trucks and speeding light vehicles. In the end I only gave him the agreed-on additional 80JD even though, after I had gone to my room and brought the cash back to his car as it stood by the kerb, Khalid tried at the last minute to get an extra 10JD out of me. I told him I didn’t have any more money and left him frowning at the bunch of banknotes in his hand. But he was immediately engaged in touting his services to a pair of tourist who were walking on the pavement toward uptown.
The two of us rested in our rooms for an hour or so then we had dinner later in the hotel restaurant, which offers a buffet. I also ordered a Petra beer. The tab came to 30JD for both of us. After eating we went out and got some more dinars to use during the rest of our stay in the country. We still had to get back to Amman and I wasn’t certain the regular passenger bus would eventuate.
The day started with breakfast, as usual, after which we went to the visitor’s centre to ask about buses for the following day. On the way in we stopped to talk with a taxi driver whose name, it turned out, was Khalid. We told him we wanted to go to Wadi Rum and he wanted us to get in the cab immediately but we told him to wait ten minutes so we could go inside and get some information. He agreed to meet up at the prescribed time and when we came out of the compound we talked with him about the price. The information board at the site entrance said 45JD but this was only for the journey to Wadi Rum. Khalid told us it would cost 70JD for the round trip and this would include his waiting at the visitor’s centre at Wadi Rum for two hours so that we could go on a tour. We agreed and got in his three-year-old Hyundai Elantra to start our journey. The wind was from the east at a gusty 10 to 15 knots.
Kahlid told us he lives with his sister and mother and he displayed a frightening propensity to get angry with other drivers. On one occasion this involved stopping the car, winding down the window, and having a heated verbal exchange with another driver. At 10am we stopped at a lookout to take photos. We were in the Sharah Mountains and as we went along I saw a big black bird flying near the car. I asked Khalid what kind of bird it was and he said it was a crow. Then he said something like “hang your chances” when you see a crow, which I translated as “make a wish”. This turned out to be apt in the circumstances.
After driving for 30 minutes or so we turned off south onto the High Desert Way and past a certain point drove near some irrigated crops which Khalid said were cucumbers, tomatoes, and potatoes. At 11.20am I saw a sign saying that Aqaba was 46km distant and at 11.25am we turned off toward Wadi Rum. Khalid drove along a road with a single carriageway until we reached a building with a parking area out front that was filled with cars. He had been pestering us to get him to call his associate so that he could organise a “jeep” tour for us, but we wanted to see the visitor’s centre first, so declined his offer. This made him agitated and he started asking if we trusted him.
When we arrived and parked he got out of the car and walked over to a man and spoke with him. He brought the man back to where we were standing beside Kahlid’s yellow car and Kahlid introduced us to the driver of the jeep (which turned out to be a Toyota Hilux diesel with a modified tray that had welded and riveted seats and a canopy on it). I gave the man, who wore a grey kameez and white shalmar, 50JD as instructed (35JD for the tour and 10JD for the entry fee for two people) and we went inside the compound where I asked for 5JD. I went into the store and bought a Coke and a bottle of water with the note he gave me.
We walked back to the Hilux and he got out a grey plastic step from the tray and put it behind the vehicle so that we could climb up onto the tray. After driving for a short distance my travelling companion said she wanted to sit inside the cab so I knocked on the glass partition in front of me and Mohammed stopped the car, got out the plastic step, and let her descend to the safety of the earth. Mohammed turned out to be a very good driver and we drove across a sandy wasteland that had tall rocky outcrops scattered here and there that made for a strange landscape. “Wadi” means “valley” and “rum” is a kind of horned herbivore that might be an oryx, I could not ascertain its identity for sure. Khalid had said it was a kind of deer, which was typical of the people of the area.
Online there is no trace however of this etymology anywhere but the same kind of logic had the magnificent monuments inside the ancient town of Petra labelled as the “Treasury” and the “Monastery”, even though the edifices in the case have never had anything to do with what the names used for them might suggest.
Stopping periodically we took scads of photos in a landscape made famous by the Hollywood movie ‘The Martian’. It wasn’t a valley but it was certainly strange. At the third site where we stopped there were some ancient Nabataean carvings on the face of a grey rock cliff that might have shown evidence of civilisation for tens of thousands of years. There is no information sign in the vicinity of the artwork although there was a garbage bin close by. At 12.45pm we set off from this site and at 12.55pm we arrived at the fourth site. Here I spoke briefly with a Polish man with (like me) traditional Jordanian headgear on, in an effort to find out where he had come from. At 1.05pm we left the spot and drove to the fifth site where, at 12.20pm, we drank a cup of tea made from cardamom, sage and cinnamon. There was a carving on the face of a rock near a Bedouin tent that was what Mohammed told us was a likeness of Lawrence of Arabia.
A group of about 30 Italians arrived in three “jeeps” and piled into the tent we occupied. The man in charge of the operation at this point went around the whole collection of tourists placing a dab of myrrh on each person’s hand. This was an invitation to browse the shop’s wares, which included such regular tat as scarves and necklaces. The country is saturated with this kind of stuff. The Italian guide translated the word of the scent for the benefit of his charges.
We left after about 20 minutes and in the Hilux meandered our way through the alienating landscape toward the visitor’s centre where, at 2pm, I bought more drinks for us. We got back into Khalid’s car to the sound of his grumbling at our lateness. It was 20 minutes past the time agreed for us to rejoin him and he wasn’t happy although we said we had had no control over the itinerary once we had got inside Wadi Rum. He brightened up when we agreed to go to Aqaba. At 2.40pm we arrived at the highway and turned west toward the coastal town. At 3.05pm we arrived there.
The town is situated in front of giant cream-coloured hills made of igneous rock and it is a sprawling settlement now, much changed from the 1960s when the film ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ was made there. Khalid took us down to the shore of the Red Sea and we looked out on a rocky bay with, in the close distance, the Israeli settlement of Eilat and, further south and west, the coast of Egypt. We were told that you cannot cross in a boat to Israel as police patrol the waters but that there is a land border with a no-man’s-land in the middle separating Jordan and Israel.
Then we got back in the car and went in search of food. Khalid said he would give us some food and he proceeded to ask a series of people if there were any restaurants open that would agree to serve us at this time of day. He asked the people working in restaurants and even a man in a car that stopped in the road. The man had a beard and gave a long explanation that ended up coming to nothing. We eventually parked outside a KFC and Khalid got out of the car (it was still 38 degrees C outside) and went up between two buildings. He came back and said he had ordered a pizza for us and we waited about 10 minutes then Khalid got out of the car and wandered off again, then came back with a flat box with the food inside it. We drove to a park and ate standing up in the shade of a tree.
At 4.05pm we left the spot in the car and drove back north toward Wadi Musa, from where we had started out in the morning. At 5.15pm we turned off onto the Kings Way again and close to our destination I asked Khalid how much I still had to pay him. I had told him that I didn’t have enough cash with me and that I would have to go to my hotel room to get more banknotes and he had agreed to take us on the strength of this promise. Now he told us that he wanted an extra 100JD in addition to the 50JD I had already given him. The trip to Aqaba had been promised in exchange for 60JD and there was still 20JD owing for the trip to Wadi Rum but now he said he wanted 20JD more for the food.
This caused a lot of problems for us and an argument ensued on the basis that he had said that he would give us the food. A shawarma had been the article in the initial offer but that had not eventuated due to the constraints of Ramadan. Now he wanted us to pay for what we had thought was a treat. We eventually got back to the hotel unscathed but it had been a very trying day with the combination of extreme heat in Wadi Rum and the long drive on a road teeming with slow trucks and speeding light vehicles. In the end I only gave him the agreed-on additional 80JD even though, after I had gone to my room and brought the cash back to his car as it stood by the kerb, Khalid tried at the last minute to get an extra 10JD out of me. I told him I didn’t have any more money and left him frowning at the bunch of banknotes in his hand. But he was immediately engaged in touting his services to a pair of tourist who were walking on the pavement toward uptown.
The two of us rested in our rooms for an hour or so then we had dinner later in the hotel restaurant, which offers a buffet. I also ordered a Petra beer. The tab came to 30JD for both of us. After eating we went out and got some more dinars to use during the rest of our stay in the country. We still had to get back to Amman and I wasn’t certain the regular passenger bus would eventuate.
Above: The view from the Kings Way, near Wadi Musa.
Above: On the road from Wadi Musa to Wadi Rum in Khalid's Hyundai Elantra.
Above: Mohammed in his Hilux.
Above: The strange landscape of Wadi Rum.
Above: Ancient Nabataean rock carvings.
Above: The rocky outcrops of Wadi Rum.
Above: A Bedouin tent.
Above: At Aqaba looking southwest to the Egyptian coast.
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