Bedouin week (post 1 of a series due to the complications of borrowing a computer)

For the past 6 days I've been living in the crack in a very large rock in the middle of the Jordanian desert. According to my family we weren't actually in Wadi Rum, though it was obviously close, we were in the protected area, we were in a different sahra (desert, plural = sahara). The first day was really neat, we boarded a bus in Amman, in an area that is the closest thing to a slum I've encountered, and rode most of the way down to Aqaba. The bus system in Jordan seems haphazard at best. Drivers hang out in the bus station calling out their destinations and when they have enough, they take off. Fortunately 15 people constituted a quorom so we were on our way pretty quickly. Along the way we picked up people off the side of the road and dropped them off. At the Wadi Rum exit we got off and waited for the pickup trucks that would take us to our gathering point in Wadi Rum. The truck ride was amazing, as we were in the back ripping down the road like and Amman taxi driver gone mad. We passed a train interestingly enough loaded with closed container cars. I figured they were water but it could've been sand for all I know. In any event we reached the camp where we had lunch and tea and waited for our families, which we had recieved the names of on neatly printed index cards, to pick us up. Firstly the camp was very camp in the sense that it was built for tourists. It was made of low stone walls with camel hair tent material over them. There were two long tents and a number of out buildings including western bathrooms. In fact, as we pulled up we discovered about 40 dutch tourists there. We were eventually taken away though by more pickup trucks and unceremoniously dumped in several places. We soon realized that there was absolutely no reason for us going with the families we were going with. I was last in our group to be dropped off at an underhang in a rock far out into the desert. There were older people, younger people, sheep, goats, I wasn't quite sure what to make of them but I talked a bit with Abu Ali who knew English about as well as I knew Arabic so we got on well. After dinner and tea, in the pitch dark, I was all of a sudden taken away in the truck to other places, including two tents, who apparently didn't want to host me but shared tea with me, finally dumping me in Abu Atullah's camp about 100 yards away from Abu Ali's. Everyone was asleep when I got there except Abu Atullha and so I didn't meet them until the next morning.