My friend Anna and I joined our friend Casey on a trip to the Wadi Rum to visit the family she did work-exchange with for month during the summer. Though we didn't meet the entire family, we met three of the brothers (Khaled, Ali and Mohammed) and three beautiful Bedouin children. We spent the weekend with Khaled, who has his own adventure and trekking business in the protected area at Wadi Rum, which means that he and his brothers take people out to Bedouin camps, cook for them and take them around the desert in Toyota 4WDs. As guests, though, and with Casey, who knew her way around, we spent most of our time there scrambling barefoot up and down porous mountains (which were once under water, by the way), finding fresh water springs, lying directly beneath the stars and basically absorbing the amazing landscape. Even riding in the truck was, at the very least, exhilarating despite my fear that, at 120kph over the unexpectedly unyielding bumps in the sand, that my breasts might actually fall off and be lost forever in the Jordanian desert.
We spent the evening hours with the other tourists in the camp who were, for the most part, Japanese. Here's the first part of the mindfuck: most of them spoke Arabic as a second language instead of English. Casey and I had fairly fluid conversations with these tourists about why they were there, why they were learning Arabic, etc., filling in the holes in Japanese knowledge with Arabic knowledge. Here's the second part of the mindfuck: while they all spoke quite good Arabic, they still spoke it with Japanese accents. Words with l's, such as Laysh (= why) became words with r's, such as 'raysh.' The even stranger thing to contemplate was the idea of a foreign language book in Japanese and Arabic. Does this make me sound sheltered? Maybe. Does that stop this situation from being really fucking cool? No.
Unfortunately, though, I had to push my companions to return early in order that I might make it home before being shut out of the house for Qur'an study. We left, thus, at around 10:30 or 11 instead of at 1 or 2 as we had planned. This proved to be difficult to plan as buses usually leave from Aqaba frequently, but that was about an hour away from Wadi Rum and an additional hour and a half away from Amman. In an effort to make things easier, we figured that we would wait by the highway for a minibus going to Amman to pick us up. The first bus that passed was full to the brim, heading to the wrong place and tried to pick us up anyway. The second bus was going in the opposite direction. After only five minutes, though, a car with an older man, two teenage girls and a little boy pulled over. Upon learning that we were going to Amman, they invited us in for the ride. Having just come from tourist-filled Aqaba and Wadi Rum for the weekend, they apparently saw three obviously-non-native girls thought that we had been stranded by an evil and malicious tour group. The two girls spoke perfect English, they all were dressed as beach bums, the 7-year-old boy was phenomenally sweet and the whole three-hour ride culminated in our being taken out for Indian and Chinese food (though that makes sense because we talked about food for about half of the ride). We played card games, Casey gave the two girls Henna, we learned new words (happy coincidence = sutfeh s3eeda) and we got a direct ride back with lunch.
And that's the story of my first time hitchhiking!
love,
anneke
p.s. Mom and Dad: remember that time when you told me to tell you about things like this /after/ doing them? Well, here you go.
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