Hamsa! The plan this morning was to get up at 5.45am to watch the sunrise and have breakfast at 7am…I woke up at 8am and realised that bright light was trying to get through the larger gaps in the thread of the cover of my tent. The sun was already proudly up and shining bright. Zayid came to check I was alive a few minutes after.
Breakfast served in the lobby tent was made of flat bread, oil, thyme, humous, falafel, jam, marmalade and tahini, with tea and coffee. We wolfed down breakfast and set off on our trek. We walked for about two hours before we stopped for tea in the shade of the rocks, we climbed rocks and mounds for another two hours before we stopped for lunch. Zayid had travelled ahead of us in the 4x4 and laid out a blanket and bought trays of prepared foods for us. After a long lunch and a nap in the shade we walked back to the camp. All in all about 17/18km in a large square shape around Wadi Rum.
It was nice to get to know the group a little better as well. Anthea and John are such kind and giving people. They spent three years living in the Philippines building houses and setting up medical systems, then onto Rwanda to try to do the same thing but felt that the ones with power were never going to work with them and lastly onto Beijing to help with HIV and aids patients. Anthea now works for the charity at head office in Milton Keynes and John (whilst being a ‘home affairs manager’) still acts as a consultant for the company in China and volunteers at an oncology hospice every Wednesday in Stoke Mandeville.
The scenery is breathtaking, it's like every western and swords and sandles film rolled into one. (If I'm being honest, minus the trickling streams for the Appaloosas to drink from). But the sky is so blue and the mountains are all shades of oranges and browns. We made it back to camp for 3.30pm and I climbed up to where we watched the sunset to read in the shade and then listened to John Denver, Glen Campbell and Jim Croce imagining Cowboys and Indians hurtling across the vast swathes of sand and ducking behind the mountains.
Dinner was served at 6.30pm and afterwards Ahmed found ¾’s of a bottle of Grey Goose! Winner winner chicken dinner! I could have hamsa’d Peter, we’d been pining for a drink during our walk, (hamsa means five in Arabic, but apparently if you say it enthusiastically it means high five. Zayid bloody loves it!) Ahmed also suggested we play a game. He tied a piece of string around my wrist and tied the loose end of the string around my other wrist. He then took out a second piece of string, tied one end around Peter’s wrist, passed the string around the string between my wrists and tied the loose end to Peter’s free wrist. Ahmed then asked us to untie ourselves without removing the string from our wrists. Peter was immediately operational, I was chocolate-teapot-utterly-useless and just laughed because no matter what Peter tried we couldn't do it. John, Anthea and Hazel couldn't do it either. We admitted defeat, and just drank more vodka. The solution is so damn simple. I'm definitely bringing out that trick when I get home. Peter decided to try out his magic tricks on Ahmed, which blew. His. Mind. Ahmad made him do them twice and insisted he try them out on Zayid, and it worked. Peter reckons his life is made now; baffling a Sheikh.
Ahmed was saying that he had received some negative feedback on the Intrepid website recently so I need to make sure that I go online to let them know how great he's been.
I'm worried that I've peaked too soon visiting Jordan first and I haven't even gotten to Petra yet.