Shamelessly Being a Tourist

“جاهزة؟” (“Ready?”), the man asked me as I tried to balance myself on my new friend, a large camel in the desert of Wadi Run. I hesitated only slightly before nodding, bracing myself for the camel to stand up. With the nudging of one of the Bedouin guides, my camel launched leaned forward first, picking itself up on its back legs, and then backwards, standing straight up, causing me to thrust forward and backward with each motion. As I let out one yelp and then another, I realized that I had definitely not been as ready as I thought. Still on the camel, though, I adjusted myself again on the saddle and held on tight, finally ready for the ride to begin.

Riding through the Wadi Rum desert was the most surreal experience I have had yet this semester. The orange-brown of the sand contrasted perfectly with the bright blue sky, and the mountains jutted up so high and so randomly that they seemed much more like two-dimensional representations of mountains than real, honest-to-goodness towers of rock rising up from the sand. After struggling to climb through the sand to get to the top of one of them, though, I quickly learned not to doubt what I was seeing. Our camels took us to the Bedouin camp where we would be spending the night, sleeping in a tent without any electricity. We sang and danced and ate played cards, and before we went to bed, I was again blown away by the sight of the starts in the sky. I have never in my life seen so many stars as we were able to see in the sprawling desert. Typically, I have to search for the constellations, but they were shining brightly right in front of me, with a million other stars scattered in between them. As much as I love Amman, this was by far my favorite place I have visited in Jordan.

One of my professors, though, had never been to Wadi Rum. As a Jordanian, there are so many places he has not seen. I suppose it’s slightly like how I had never been to Washington, D.C. before I attended a summer program during high school, despite the fact that I am from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, just a four-hour drive away from the nation’s capital. In the past two months here in Jordan, though, I have seen more ruins and natural wanders and beautiful scenery than I ever thought could possibly be contained in a country the size of Indiana.

Wadi Rum as I was given the opportunity to experience it was not the same experience as a typical tourist would have, staying in a special tourism tent with electricity and a lot of other Westerners. Because of this, I was at first turned off when I first arrived at Petra the next day. Petra is a city built into the mountains in the south of Jordan, partially made famous by the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Looking past the mobs of tourists, though, and avoiding the men trying to sell us horse and donkey rides, it was easy to see why so many people visit this site each day (and why it was one of the few places my professor had visited in Jordan). Sometimes when people tell you how amazing something is, it is easy to get your expectations up so high that no matter how wonderful the actual thing is, it could never compare with people’s elaborate descriptions. Petra, however, was just as amazing, if not more so, than so many people have described it. The intricacies in the carving of the Treasury building and the sheer amount of space the city and the carvings occupied (making it so that we could not see everything in the four or five hours we were there) were simply astonishing.

I have visited ruins that are thousands of years old, stepping in the exact same spot as ancient civilizations. I have also floated, entirely weightless, in the super salty waters of the Dead Sea (again, so much cooler a feeling than one could possibly describe), and slept in traditional Bedouin tents on mats on the ground. I have seen more than most Jordanians have of their own country, and I have absolutely fallen in love with it. One woman I met in the JFK airport on my way to Amman asked me bluntly, “Why Amman, Jordan? Don’t you want to be somewhere more exciting?” Recent events in the Middle East, the surrounding excitement, and the relief I feel about being in one of the few safe and stable countries in the region at the moment aside, I am realizing that Jordan is more than just a wonderful place to live. It is also full of fascinating sites to see, and though next week, I will begin my adventures of traveling throughout the region (as much as I can, given the current political atmosphere), I am so glad I took the opportunity to really see all that Jordan has to offer.