My wife and I packed our son and our kit into my trusty Mitsubishi Lancer and drove the 3 hours down the Desert Highway to the turn for Rum. After another 40 minutes we arrived in Rum Village and pulled into the car park where I saw that Khalid, the owner of the camp we were staying in, was waiting for us with his Toyota 4x4. After brief introductions we loaded our kit into his vehicle and headed into the vastness.
As we left the village the rising rock walls on either side of us opened into the vastness of the Wadi itself which is imposing to say the least but the best is yet to come.
Very quickly it became apparent that Wadi Rum is massive, really massive. Rock features that looked big from the village seemed to grow as we drove into the wadi and found points of reference. 4x4s and camels could be seen like ants at the base of the towering cliffs. We like to measure things using a London bus for scale but I don’t think there are enough busses in London to measure just one of the features in Rum.
As if the size wasn’t enough the colours, shapes and textures aim to overload the senses. Dull red sandstone cliffs flow into the brighter red sand of the wadi bottom and that gives way to sand that is so white that is hard to look at and nearly impossible to make out bumps and depressions, which I’ve since found make riding tricky. The face of the cliffs look like a Hollywood director has carved out nesting ledges for a creature in a sci-fi movie. In reality it’s the result of erosion over thousands of years.
I spent the 20 minute drive looking from one feature to another in amazement, trying to commit everything to memory.
My wife looked on with the amusement of someone recognising their own reaction to the place in another. She had ridden (a nag) through Rum some 5 years previously.
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| Wadi Rum from Khaleds camp. |
Breath taking views.
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