We are heading to the end and the bottom of the valley, or Wadi before us.
A guy from the Dana village acted as a guide. You are not allowed to do this hike without a guide for some reason. He did not speak very much English but he was very nice and we managed to have some conversation. He did himself much prefer Irak before Jordan as a holiday destination. According to him Iraq is much cheaper, especially night clubs. We had to admit that Iraqi night clubs is a bit of a blank spot on the map for us. He was also very impressed by Magnus' Iphone. Proving that men can bond over technology across language and culture barrier anytime.
Lunch break. It really did get very hot down in the valley during the day. Coming from the northern part of the world, as we do, you need to be pretty obsessive about covering up from the sun and drink plenty of fluids.
We met this guy along the way on his way to some Beduine friends with supplies. Sugar for example. The Jordanians must go through obscene amounts of sugar every day for all the sweet tea that always seem to be at hand.
These pretty pink flowers seem to be the only greenery in abundance in this deforestated and dry corner of the world. Very poisonous. Not even the goats eat them.
Jordan is not the easiest place for photography. Very hard and flat light for most of the day does not make for good pictures. And we also have sand everywhere in the camera and in the lenses.
Goats goats goats everywhere. They can not need much greenery to survive because there is none.
Stopping for a tea break in a Beduine tent. Notice how the old lady and the girl in the back is obviously enjoying speaking with someone on the mobile very much. They are using the mobile belonging to the guy with the donkey that came to visit. There is mobile coverage everywhere in Jordan.
Here an old man also gets to say a few words to the person(s) they all were chatting with on the other end.
There are some sand dunes in Wadi Finan and we drove around on them for a while (great fun) in order to find a good spot to pitch our tent for the night. We came across a patch of irrigated water melon fields belonging to a Beduine tribe and tried to find someone we could buy a melon from. When we could not find anyone our driver decided that we would just nick a melon instead saying "Beduins are very hospitable and they would want us to have one anyway". So we nicked one.
However, anyone who have seen the film "Lawrence from Arabia" and know what happen in the scene when a Beduine man is found out while drinking from a well that belong to another tribe understand why we hesitated.
We pitched our tent, put our feet up after a days hiking on a big rug in the shade of the car. All of a sudden the sky went black, it got windy and the temperature dropped. It was just like when it is about to start raining so that was what we thought was happening. To our defense we did actually reflect over the fact that rainfall must be rare events in the desert. And then the sand storm was over us! Cool and a bit intimidating. A LOT of sand, pouring down the sides of the tent like water. We ended up having to break camp very quickly trying not to inhale too much sand and move up in the mountains for the night. We had sand everywhere.
We found a new spot to camp, in the area close to Petra. Notice our small tent below the huge cliff face.
Beautiful rocks. The wind has carved holes and shapes in the soft sand-stone. Pretty coloring as well.
Very hot during the day but chilly early mornings.
