There is always tea with Bedouin people

Our guide was already waiting for us when we parked in Wadi Rum village, even though we were early. He was a Bedouin man in his forties, soft spoken, his English patchy but his patience endless. We climbed onto the back of the open jeep and looked around for the rest of the group. We had booked and paid for an ordinary shared tour, the standard way to see the desert, so we kept assuming more people were about to walk over. Nobody did.

This was Jordan in November 2023, and the war across the border in Israel had left the country with very few tourists. We never once felt unsafe, not for a minute, but everywhere we went the crowds simply were not there. Still, we waited for our jeep to fill up, right until the moment it pulled away with just the two of us in the back. Our guide never told us the tour would be private. It simply was, and it slowly dawned on us that we had a whole desert day to ourselves.

Even just sitting in the back of that jeep was a highlight. The drive in had already been beautiful, the road slowly turning into desert with huge red mountains on either side, and now we were bouncing along between them with nothing to do but stare. Every minute of the day felt like this, and the day had barely started.

At the first stop we were offered tea and perfume, and the tea never really stopped. Our guide had brought tea from his own house to start us off, and at every stop after that, more was on offer. At some point we must have looked surprised at how often it appeared, because he said, “Of course, there is always tea with Bedouin people.”

The day ran at exactly our pace, which is not something you can usually say about a tour. We took longer and longer on the hikes at each stop, half expecting to be hurried along, but with no group to wait for and no schedule to keep, he was simply happy to go whenever we were ready. We saw three rock arches and walked across two of them. The highest one, the iconic big arch of Wadi Rum, properly spooked Steffi, and she got the shakes up there on the narrow top. She crossed it anyway, shakes and all. While we inched across, a cat strolled along the arch like it was a garden fence, a far more impressive rock climber than either of us. Between the arches were two canyons, the first one stunning for how narrow it was, like Antelope Canyon with nobody else in it.

Around midday he told us we were going to a magical place. It turned out to be a wide canyon with beautiful rock walls, mostly sand and small bushes, with a big dune running up one side. He stopped the jeep, said we would have lunch here, gathered some wood and built a small fire. Then he told us to go and explore while he cooked, and to try the sandboard if we liked.

So while our lunch cooked over the fire behind us, we learned how hard sandboarding is. Walking up a dune is exhausting in a way that no photo of a dune prepares you for, and coming down was not much more graceful. We fell over again and again. I flew clean over the front of the board at one point and landed on my knees, and on other runs the board yanked at my ankles. Steffi hit the sand hard a couple of times too. Nothing was properly hurt except our dignity, and it was so much fun that we did it all again on bigger dunes later in the day, this time with the camera running.

Then lunch was ready, and it was worth the climb back down. He had made a thick, soupy tomato dish full of freshly cut vegetables, which we scooped up with bread and rice, followed by little date pastries. All of it cooked over a fire built from gathered wood, in the middle of the desert, just for the two of us. It was very, very tasty, and we told him so.

Late in the afternoon we climbed up to a high rocky spot to watch the sunset. Clouds rolled in and covered most of it, which was a shame, but we set up a time lapse anyway and let it run. While the camera worked, I stacked flat stones into a little rock arch of my own, a small tribute to the giant ones we had walked across. At different points in the day we had each spotted a rock hyrax, a little rabbit-like animal that lives among the rocks, one sighting each.

That night at the desert camp, dinner was lamb, salads, beans and pita bread, and it was delicious. There were other guests around, people from other tours with other companies, but our tent was ours alone, and it was absurd. A big double bed, huge windows, and a private bathroom, fully tiled, with boiling hot water, a strange and wonderful mix of tent and house.

At the camp we learned a little about life in Wadi Rum, a village of about 2,500 people with a couple of weddings a month, and about why so many dogs wander the desert. We also met a volunteer from France who was living at the camp for free, working on the company’s website and marketing. She told us the Bedouin have a completely different culture around work, laid back about getting things done, especially now that there were fewer tourists to take around. The people we spoke to put it more simply: tourists do not come right now, and it is a shame. We knew, even at the time, that our perfect day was somebody else’s quiet season.

Outside the tent, the night was completely quiet, and the stars were stunning. We stood out in the cold with an amazing view of the desert and its rocky outcrops, set up a timelapse and tried to get some good photos of the sky. Then it got too cold to keep the door open, so we shut it and climbed into the big double bed, in a desert that was, for one strange season, almost entirely ours.