Wadi Rum in detail

So this happened a few weeks ago but I finally decided to write about it (A little corny at times, I know):

I fumbled and dropped the small stone that I was using in an attempt to elevate my camera’s lens for a self portrait. The full moon was bright enough for me to snap the shot with just a one twentieth of a second shutter speed. I set it up successfully and set the timer to ten seconds. I walked forward and I could heard the shutter snap close and open again. It turned out pretty well with the mountains of Wadi Rum outlined by the moonlight and my kafaiya’s colors showing up as well. 

I took a few more and sat on the waist high stone fence that outlined the Wadi Rum tourist camp. I could see miles and miles ahead of me, flat gray desert with little blobs of black shadows every ten meters or so from the desert scrub. I turned back to the camp filled with rows of white tents with cots on the inside. I ran into Peyton, Gideon, Byron, and Chase on the way back and we decided to go find a geocache a little over a mile away from camp in the middle of the desert. We left camp and along the way we lifted rocks to look for scorpions. We took a turn to cross the road, and we went over a sand mound. In front of us stretched undisturbed desert, raw wilderness lit up by the lamp-shade-toned light of the moon. 

Our shadows walked with us to our right as we gradually shut up and allowed the sand to speak. Towers of crumbled, sharp rock blocked out the stars and surrounded us. We followed Peyton’s gps to the geocache in an outcrop supported by dunes. We climbed it and easily found it under a rock. We wrote our names, put it back and sat down to admire the view. The silence was so impressive. The only sounds came from the constant breeze shuffling sand. There was no life, but everything seemed alive. In front of us was rolling waves of sand with the occasional brush. Two dying mountains were on the horizon, below the moon. 

We made our way back after a while and got up just a few hours later before dawn to greet a man and his four camels for a two hour ride through the desert.

 I got on the absolutely ugliest but funny creature I have ever seen. They spit, burp, chew, chew, chew, fart, bite, gurgle, chew and throw up not stop; and they are slow and awkward. They are awesome. A bedouin man lead us to a small shady spot and made us traditional bedouin tea. We saddled back up and towards the end of the ride, the man allowed us to give the camels a bit of a giddy up and we raced back to camp. That hurt. 

Wadi Rum was, well, Wadi Rum.