Wadi Rum: Life with the Bedouins or Walt Disney of Jordan?
…this, sadly, is pretty much the impression we got from Wadi Rum.
We had heard great things about experiencing a night with the Bedouins in Wadi Rum, so we were excited to go there. Maybe we got unlucky with the company that we chose, maybe going there right after being wow-ed by Petra was a mistake, maybe hearing so much about it got our expectations too high. We thought it'd be an authentic opportunity to live with the Bedouins in the desert and envisioned ourselves riding camels deep into the middle of nowhere desert, pitching tents in a real Bedouin village, and sitting around a fire experiencing their traditional way of life. We did do part of this, but the experience was not as authentic as we had hoped.
We took a local bus to Wadi Rum and met up with a guide that our hotel had recommended. He brought us to his office in town to explain our options and prices for the day. The prices and options were considerably higher than we had been led to believe, but we decided to do the four hour jeep-tour of the major sites plus spend the night at their Bedouin desert camp. The other options sounded touristy and too pricey for our budget.
We met our driver and headed to the desert with another couple. The jeep-tour basically involved following a set of tracks to the major sites in the desert. The scenery was really beautiful, but you could tell from the tracks and crowds, that this was a very cookie-cutter circuit. And the driver didn't say much, so unfortunately we can't give much insight into what we saw, but... here are the pictures! :)
Our first stop was at a spring that comes out of a mountain, which they refer to as "Lawrence's Spring". You can't really see the spring… just the plastic hose sticking out from a crack… but the view from the top was quite stunning :)
Wadi Rum is a desert, but it's more of a rock desert… so one of the major attractions was... a sand dune!
Not far from the dune we stopped at a canyon.. nice for cooling down, but greatly pales in comparison to the canyon in Petra!
Next stop: a cool rock formation that they call the "big arch"...
Along the way to the last attraction, we stopped at what "used to be Lawrence of Arabia's house"… uhm.. ok...!
And lastly, the rock formation they call the "little arch"...
Then our jeep followed the tracks to the Bedouin Camp… 5 semi-permanent tents, 1 big dinner tent, and fairly permanent toilet and kitchen buildings. The Bedouin tribe... consisted of one guy assigned to cook us dinner there. But at least he is a Bedouin (or so he claimed... but he also later admitted that everything he says is a lie).
Overall, the scenery was nice and we had fun. But it did really feel like a cookie-cutter attraction rather than an authentic Bedouin experience.. we learned absolutely nothing about their history, culture, way of life.. etc. Prior to arriving we considered spending extra nights at the Bedouin Camp, but there was nothing really there for us.. so we decided not to extend our stay continued on our way down to the border town, Aqaba.
To finish off our stay, they crammed all 14 of us in (and on) this little truck so that they could take us all back to the main town in one trip.
