A shorter and much-altered version of this post is featured in the Lonely Planet Jordan (2024). Find an extended account of my experience along the Wadi Rum Trail on BBC Travel.
The afternoon sun was sinking into the tops of the ochre cliffs as we slipped out of Wadi Rum village, headed south, bounding along a highway of tracks in the sand in Salman’s old 4×4 truck. While subtly shifting the wheel to dodge dunes and shrubs, he scrolled and poked at his phone, looking rushed. The network wouldn’t last, he explained, and he had several more guests arriving later. In fuzzy, childhood memories he’d joined his family for weeks out here, delving deep into the desert. Now, in full charge of the family’s tourism business, internet connection was vital.
Rounding the enormous granite plinth of Umm Ishrin, the Khor al Ajram opened up to reveal a sprinkling of clustered camps on the horizon, some far more conspicuous than others, Martian space bubbles popping against the bases of enormous cliffs. There’s a lot more camps, he agreed, without much excitement. Some of them weren’t legal, he added.
The jeep tracks soon thinned and the sands turned from red to white. Salman pressed the gas pedal harder and we sped through the mouth of a particularly sheer-walled canyon, popping out onto the far, southern side: the dizzyingly vast Wadi Sabet. That’s it, he pointed at the brooding, pyramid-shaped hulk of blackened rock: Umm ad-Dami, Jordan’s highest peak.
I asked about its name. Ibex was plentiful here—perhaps the name was to do with hunting? No, the story had escaped him at the moment, but he guessed it was linked to the ancient Bedouin code. Known simply as damm (‘blood’), serious (violent) disputes are traditionally brought before the Bedouin sheikh, overseer of the unwritten, eye-for-an-eye law to uphold the tribe’s values of justice and honour. In Jordan’s Bedouin strongholds, the code still has a few teeth to this day.
I’d first met Salman ten years prior, while lending a wholly unqualified hand on the family’s tourism website. He’d been generally buried in studies, so his brothers more often would join me on desert jaunts: tending to camels, gathering wood, spending nights in the family’s permanent goat-hair tent camp. The coarse, black fabric was straight from Maʿan’s souq, stacked high with all manner of manufactured supplies, sparing what had amounted—in the not-too-far past—to several years of strenuous weaving.
The camp’s new bathroom block was fitted with solar panels, affording hot showers to guests. We had dinners of zarb, meat chunks cooked in the sand, providing tourists with a stylized taste of tradition. Salman’s brothers would pluck at the oud and we’d sleep under the stars, bounded by the blackness of the cliffs, or squinting at the dunes beyond for the flitting of desert foxes or jinn.
Salman appeared enlivened as his jeep closed the gap between us and the crumbling peak, not another 4×4 in sight. Perhaps it was the apparent desolation around us that led him to recount a recent trip to Bali, infusing him with glee at the memory–a whole new world, he said, recounting the greenery, the shower-force rain. When he cut off the engine, we were less than a mile from the Saudi border.
Bedouin Icons
Comprising a full half of Transjordan at its founding, the Bedouin have since then been seen as the Kingdom’s ‘backbone’, loyal to the Hashemite crown for generations. Thanks to a century of government efforts, a vanishing few remain truly nomadic. Most have settled in towns or along outskirts, taking up sheep and goats as camel herds dwindle.
While the vast majority of the country’s Bedouin hail from the endless steppes of the Badia, it’s the relative handful residing in Wadi Rum that are perhaps best-known. As their ancient predecessors, Salman’s Zalabia clan was lured to the area by the springs that tumble at Jebel Rum’s base, etched in faded Thamudic, Greek and Nabatean scripts.
Prince Faisal famously enlisted the various tribes here to take up arms in the Great Arab Revolt. Soon afterwards, Salman’s grandfather was among the very first enlisted in the newly formed Hashemite force. A few decades later, in Lawrence of Arabia, the dreamscapes that enchanted T. E. Lawrence were broadcast on the big screen. When filmed, today’s village was little more than a huddle of hand-woven tents.
The road and the permanent village it linked arrived later. Salman’s father was among the first to attend the boy’s school. His children followed suit. Unlike him, however, Salman didn’t need to scour the desert after school, schoolbooks strapped to his back, in order to re-join his wandering family. A two-minute walk brought him safely—along with his brothers—to their home on the village’s eastern end.
The tourism wave of the late 20th century continued its swell into the next. Despite the vicissitudes of regional unrest, the spectacular landscapes here ramped up their cinematic presence, further wedding in the world’s imagination the legendary Bedouin to Rum’s soaring cliffs.
Among a spate of films, the desert here starred in the sci-fi blockbuster Dune, which didn’t stop there: its fictional Fremen were a transparent phantasm of the Bedouin themselves. First-time visitors should be forgiven for packing a raft of exoticized notions of Wadi Rum’s people, the Bedouin–as settled civilization’s perennial other, emblems of a separate world.
Ascending Umm ad-Dami
The family’s website was broached for a moment on the hike up the mountain’s eastern slopes, cloaked in shade (nevertheless, my sweat took minutes to seep through my shirt). Most camps now had far better sites, he admitted. Booking sites ruled, though he still preferred the old site himself, however badly out-of-date.
But some things hadn’t changed. His young daughter, he mentioned as we climbed toward the light, had recently received the old protection against venemous stings—her maternal grandmother had mixed the charred remains of a scorpion with oil to place on the child’s tongue. Religious faith remained firm as well. In tourism, Bedouin women remain almost entirely out of sight. And they’d kept a few camels on the family lot, however crammed with new homes and parked SUVs it had become. Recalling another of his grandmothers’ painstaking, barefoot treks for potable water, however, Salman seemed to sigh at the distance in space and time between her life experience and his. The past was a dream–in some ways perhaps a nightmare. Indeed, there was plenty to spark real gratitude today. He was thankful to call this stunning corner of Jordan home—in the 21st century. His daughter would study. God willing, she’d see a fair bit of the world.
Stepping into the sunlight, I fastened a scarf to my head as he donned a khaki, rimmed cap. The clouds burst with color as we scrambled the final stretch up the ridge, each choosing a boulder to stand atop. Looking west at the series of golden ridges, I wondered if the mountain’s name—Umm ad-Dami—had as simple an origin as the burnt-orange tinge of the rocks at this hour. The peaks faded into the blinding sky at the western horizon, towering over immaculate sands far below. The wind picked up, warm but still very much welcome and I could feel my eyes’ corners were damp.
Our phones buzzed. The message: ‘Welcome to Saudi Arabia’. I smiled to Salman. He was now standing tall on his rock, facing straight toward the wind, his smart phone held high in his hand.
