25 May 2012

I’m going to have to write about this past weekend in chunks because so much has happened, so here I day one. Friday.

We started off the day headed toward Wadi Ibn Hammad. The road down was a windy, one-lane road. Slowly we made it to the bottom thanks to the impressive driving skills of our driver. On the way back after the little escapade, he even managed to squeeze by another bus as both busses tried to turn around a corner.

Here, though, we took a hike through a river/stream. It was so pretty. It had an oasis-esque feel . I can’t explain the lighting, but it was dark and light at the same time. From the water through the rocks (minerals from where the water was coming from) colored the rocks. There were pal trees everywhere. Some areas were wider but a lot of the way included the water and then huge rocks walls that created a tunnel-like walk way. It’s actually kind of sad, though. A few years ago, several French tourists died because of this set up. There was a sudden flash food and there was no way to get out of the path. 

Our adventure wasn’t nearly as terrible. We hiked for a little over an hour before turning back making our way down and then back up a waterfall (20 ft?). It was kind of funny, on our way back, we went to go climb back p, and as luck would have it, there was a group of people that had just started to come down. I swear they multiplied. I first counted twenty, and then by the end there were at least forty. More and more kept coming down. It started to get really homey down there, almost like we were at a party. There were people of all ages, and this group of teenage guys provided a never ending source of entertainment as they played different “games.” For a while they would sit in the water and stack rocks on ther shoulders and head and see how long they could balance the towers. They also scaled the sides to see how high they could be and jump down. Eventually they helped us get back up afterward, though, which was a very pleasant surprise.

After, we headed over to the little village of Shobak. There’s a huge crusaders castle there, and that’s where we explored for a while. I thought that l liked to explore before, but castles kind of give adventures at Tech a bit of competition. Especially considering how we left the castle. There are several secret passageways that provide quick exits for people if, for example, the castle is under siege. There is such a good water supply to the castle that it could last out just about anything, but they were there just in case. (Another “funny” story about French tourists. One of the passageways was made specifically for the king and would crumble behind him so that people wouldn’t be able to follow. When going into one, this man decided that he wanted to see if it actually worked because he didn’t think that it could. Sure enough it did and he ended up locking his tour guide inside. It took six hours to get things straightened out and the tour guide out of the tunnel.)

But down we went into this tunnel carved under the castle. It was pitch black, an we had just a handful of small headlamps spaced out along the line of people. There were “stairs” occasionally, but those were few and far between and shoddily carved out when they were there, so most of the time it just included crab walking down hills. It was so cool. 

After getting out, we walked through the “countryside” to get back to the Bedouin camp we were staying at. (Before we left for the castle we had dropped our stuff off and had a quick lunch.) We stayed up for a while and just hung out. They attempted to teach us a new form of dubka, which seems so easy, but I still can’t seem to get the right beat. Then a group of us went to stay in the tent that they had along the side of the mountain/hill the camp was on. It was so beautiful. The sky was clear and you could see for miles (Abu Yazin, our pretty freaking awesome tour guide, has a laser that goes 7/9 (or something crazy like that) kilometers, so he was point out things across the valley.)It was really great.