We had some visitors this past week, which meant for lack of blogging, but a ton of traveling. The Corbats (Aunt Sallie, Uncle John and cousins Jimmy and Joey) came to Jordan for their spring break this week. We took them on a whirlwind tour of the country, including Amman, Wadi Rum, Aqaba, Petra, Jerash and the Dead Sea.

Right off the bat (Saturday morning), we headed south to Wadi Rum, the “Grand Canyon” of Jordan, a desert preserve where Lawrence of Arabia took place/was filmed. After a longer than expected ride down to the desert, we hopped on camels reserved for us and did a truncated tour of the area on camel back.

A note about camels. They stink, and they grunt, and they aren’t the smoothest ride possible, and their saddles aren’t exactly what you’d call comfortable... But they are way cool to see and be seen on, especially in Wadi Rum. The real way to travel in style in the desert is via camel.

After about an hour an a half to two hours (which was more than plenty for our behinds) on the camel, we arrived at the Bedouin Whispers camp. It was fantastic. We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing, enjoying the shade offered by the giant rock features, exploring the area, and drinking traditional sweet tea prepared by our Bedouin guide, Aodeh.

The real show didn’t start, however, until after the sun set. We trekked up to the “Sunset Sites” of Wadi Rum, places marked on the official maps as the best spot to view the sunset. The sunset itself wasn’t crazy spectacular, a lack of clouds made for a lack of color, but the scenery was astounding. All of the huge rock formations strewn across the miles and miles of sandy desert was, as T.E. Lawrence put it, “vast, echoing and god-like.”

That night, we dined in the Wadi Rum. Aodeh and the other Bedouins made us a traditional meal of grilled chicken and potato, both of which were amazing. They cooked them in a big pot in the sand, covered by hot coals. It was really interesting to see how they made food in the desert.

We stepped out of the main, congregational tent, and I looked up and was shocked. The sky was literally lit up by billions of stars. It was amazing. More stars than I have ever seen. It was absolutely amazing. With the cool air, plus the magical sky, Jim, Joe, Maggie, Sallie, John, Mom, Dad and I opted to sleep outside, with the open desert as our tent.

The next morning was Easter. I’ve never had a more astounding, moving Easter Sunday service than that one in Wadi Rum. The sun rose slowly, and the morning stayed cool with some low-lying clouds. Breakfast was served, a traditional morning meal of pita and hummus, as well as an Easter cake brought from Italy from an Italian family to share with the other campers.

After getting dressed in my Easter best (hiking shoes, lightweight pants, a “Conserve Water” T-shirt and thin over-shirt, and of course my keffiyeh headscarf), I joined my mother on the edge of the camp, out in the desert for the processional hymns and musical service. She had her iPod, full of Easter music. Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus”,  Wesley’s “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” are two of my favorites that fit the bill. We watched the sun stretch over the mountains, across the desert, God saying “good morning” to the earth. His earth. I couldn’t think of a better service.

After church, Maggie found an unwanted visitor in her bedroll outside. We had heard rumors of scorpions out in the desert, but we were surprised to find out that they weren’t just rumors... While packing up, Maggie found this little bugger hanging out with her stuff. Aodeh got the scorpion to inject it’s venom into a piece of wood, then flicked the little guy out of the camp, where it was sufficiently beat with a stick.

For the rest of the day, we went on a jeep tour of the desert. We visited canyons, natural rock bridges, sand dunes and more. At the hottest part of the day, our guides dropped us off at what we call, the “Let’s-De-Romanticize-the-Desert-For-the-Americans”. Each of us got one bottle of water and walked for two hours through the blazing hot desert to our lunch spot. Jim and I walked ahead of the group. This was a bad idea.

After a while of walking through the Burrah Canyon, Jim and I started to realize that no one else was around. Here’s the thing about the desert, along with the heat, and the sand, and the lack of water, it is silent. There is no wind, no life, no birds chirping, no flies buzzing. It is silence, and if you stand still with nobody else around, it is literally a deafening silence.

So in this silence, in this heat, in this dehydration, we found ourselves lost. All we could do was walk in a straight line until we found some sign of life or water. It was completely like those cheesy movies where someone gets lost in the desert and knows nothing about what they should do but keep walking straight. Think “Flight of the Phoenix” with Richard Attenborough and Jimmy Stewart. We started making jokes about seeing a Seven-Eleven in the distance with ice cold Slurpies, but then we seriously started to “see” a glint of something on the horizon. In retrospect it was probably a passing jeep, but still. We felt delirious and dehydrated.

Finally, faintly, we heard echoing across the silent desert, off the ancient rocks, someone calling for us. We finally saw Joey’s head, his bright red and white keffiyeh scarf poking from behind a yellow dune, waving us back to camp. We had passed a split off on the trail, and had walked way to far out of our way to get to lunch.

After lunch it was a ride back to Rum Village where we tracked down our drivers and drove south to Aqaba.