Palatial Camel-Humps

Expectations are everything.

Like, when you expect to get an adventurous camel-back tour of one of the most beautiful places on earth atop your trusty white camel (which, of course, brings to mind the possibility of rescuing your beautiful and ever-thankful princess-wife from the tallest tower of some Sultan’s desert castle) and you end up spending the majority of your Wadi Rum tour stuck staring at a camel’s ass. Yes, that was me and my albino steed, Shorban, tied to the back of Daphna’s much taller camel for a lack of guides. Desert mountains towered out of the sand on every side but forward, where Haran’s camely-tail swung back and forth in the smallest arc, like a small unsteady paintbrush wavering in the wind.

It had been days of ecstasy, and of shattered expectations. Traveling with our friends Mark and Ken in Israel had brought us to many of the holiest places on Earth (be you Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or even Bahai) and to some of the best falafel stands in the world. Crossing the border though, wanting to show off the best of our experiences from our time in Jordan, we had been led astray. Daphna was beaned with an apricot in the Irbid Suk (which simply doesn’t hold a candle to its Jerusalem counterpart). We were mislead in a restaurant in Ajloun. Finally there I was, my view of heaven obscured.

Our tour led to “Lawrence of Arabia’s spring,” a beautiful location sadly lacking a spring (though there was a camel troph – I almost asked Daphna to water my camel a la Rebecca, but Shorban did it himself). And on the way back, we camel-trotted, which was marvelous save for the bouncing up and down in an uncomfortable position on a wooden saddle. Everyone else did have fun, though.

I was still sore when we pulled off the road on the way home to take pictures of the sunset over Wadi Araba, the desert just north of Wadi Rum. We missed the turn for the lookout spot and pulled into what appeared to be an extended driveway. As Ken scampered to the ledge of the mountain, his new SLR camera in hand, I waddled to the edge of the road and joked to Daphna and Mark that the gate at the end of the driveway had three crowns on it because the King was about to walk out.

It was then that we noticed the two men walking down the mountain towards us in coats despite the evening’s intense heat. At that point I would have been happy to head out quickly – as much attention as Daph and I attract walking around Jordan it is nothing compared to the four of us together, and while much of it is well-meaning, endless shouts of “Welcome to Jordan” can begin to feel invasive. But the two men walked up to us, and introduced themselves as Ali and Hamdan, local Bedouins that summer in Wadi Araba. They asked about where we had come from, and then announced that we were outside Prince Hassan’s (the King’s uncle) desert palace where their friend is a guard.

“We are going to have tea,” they said, and with that, they escorted us into the gate, and to the guard shack immediately behind it. We sat as more Bedouins joined and brought out their famously sweet tea (“Bedouin Whiskey,” as they call it). Ali regaled us with tales of hunting gazelle and hyena, and of his travels in Israel and Egypt. About an hour later he announced, “We are making dinner.”

It wasn’t a question, nor an invitation – it was simply a series of unstated but assumed facts: we are cooking a local delicacy, you will stay here and join us for a meal, and that is that.

“Thank you, and we are very happy to join you,” I said. “But I should warn you that I don’t eat meat or fish or dairy or eggs or honey.”

Ali stared at me.

“Why?” he said, as if I had just told him that on Mondays I do everything while doing a moonwalk on stilts, which in his mind might have been a similar statement. All of the other Bedouins in the room laughed.

I tend to try and avoid being in group food situations where I am not in control of my menu, or when I have not at least had the opportunity to bring my own food. Here, I had accidently walked backwards (alas, it was not a Monday) into a sticky situation – the Bedouin culture is an intensely hospitable culture, but it is also one where a guest’s actions can easily be insulting. When the food arrived it was kibsa, rice cooked with vegetables on a large tray, about three feet in diameter, topped with chicken. Spoons angled out of the side of the dish towards the four of us, and the Bedouins dug in with their right hands (truly never touching the food with their left), and covering it with a goat-milk yogurt.

I did my best not to insult our hosts, picking at the rice I could get to that had not contacted the meat or the yogurt and eating dry bread and the cucumber that they handed the four of us (I think I did enough to please Ali, but the chef seemed frustrated that there were several pieces of chicken left at the end of the night, mostly in the area towards Daph and my corner of the dish). It was a difficult thing to do, an odd personal balance beam of uncomfortably stretching my own boundaries while alert to the way I was stretching the borders of our hosts' hospitality. The majority of the Bedouins finished very quickly and commenced egging the four of us on to eat more, to the point where Mark and Ken began, in turn, insisting that Hamdan continue to partake. Finally, one of the men took away the tray, and replaced it with more tea, and apples and oranges, and then we turned in time to see a man carrying a gigantic watermelon through the gate to the palace. They sliced open the watermelon and left it on a tray under the mostly-full moon, telling us that it needed time to cool because it had been in the sun all day (still attached to its plant, of course).

It is amazing the power that a single person’s actions can hold in defining a broader group. Until we met Ali and Hamdan, I had felt that Mark and Ken had no good reason to have a positive impression of the Jordanian people. Between Ali and Hamdan and Fadi, a Bedouin living in Petra who invited us to join him in his cave for more Bedouin Whiskey and some fresh fire-baked Bedouin bread, they had plenty to write home about.

We left shortly after partaking of the watermelon, Ali offering to escort us around the Wadi Araba desert if we finished with Petra early enough the following day. We didn’t have time to meet with him again, but that night’s visit (a desert palace, perhaps, but lacking its prince, a rescue attempt, and, thankfully, my noble white steed) will remain a highlight of our time here.