The campsite hosts quickly figured out that we weren't the target audience for jeep tours, unlike the rest of the tourists, and didn't try to upsell us. Instead, they happily agreed to give us a ride to the visitor center. After a tasty breakfast, we tossed our bikes into the back of the pickup and climbed in after them. There was no room in the cab because we were riding in one jeep as a tight-knit crew: the Australian women, the Montenegrin, and us. These folks offered to squeeze together, but Alexander and I took the rare opportunity to ride with the breeze in the back of a pickup without any threat from law enforcement.
If anyone needs it, here's the number for a cool guide, Ahmed
The camp from the outside
Us riding atop the jeep
Camels
The cliffs of Wadi Rum
Ten minutes later we arrived at the visitor center, said goodbye to Suleiman and the Westerners. The Australians drove Veselinka to Wadi Rum village, which we still had to reach via good asphalt, while they headed back to Amman.
The beginning of the road was calm: it was hot, and we were going uphill, but on asphalt. Nothing foretold trouble, except for the tiny detail that the desert awaited us ahead, and we already had experience navigating it yesterday.
Soon we reached a shabby village that didn't even have a shop. Oh well, we had already stocked up on water from the Bedouins: a dinar a bottle, and for food we had to polish off our Joylent so we wouldn't have to lug it across the desert.
Shortly after the village, our favorite pastime began: hiking with a bicycle as a weight
The camels showed some interest in me, but posed no threat.
Alexander is not happy
The desert is full of speedy bugs with super long legs so they don't sink into the sand. They dash around like crazy
Our travel speed dropped to 2-3 km/h. The thing is, the bike bogs down in the sand so much that it's hard to even push it, let alone ride. And even if you come across a hard patch, it's very difficult to tell where it begins and ends, so you end up getting on the bike only to fall off it five meters later. Sasha started anxiously estimating that we still had 40 kilometers ahead of us, and at this pace, it was unclear when we'd finish at all. For some reason, I was as calm as a cucumber: probably because I knew we only had a few kilometers of climbing left to reach the highest point of the route, and after that, we'd lose a kilometer of elevation, since Aqaba is a seaside resort and sits at about sea level. This knowledge definitely gave me strength, although for some reason it didn't impress Sasha.
If you look closely, you can see a sand-colored lizard that took an interest in the bike
The very watermelons that just grow like this out in the middle of the desert
We were still trying to ride, but it ended badly. The problem is that even if you find a stretch of relatively hard rocky ground (which is almost invisible under the windblown sand), it can suddenly end, and your wheel gets stuck at speed in sand that's almost like a beach. The handlebars get violently ripped out of your hands, and you tip over onto your side. If you remember, we use clipless shoes that snap into the pedals with metal cleats, and for the whole year this hadn't caused me any inconvenience. Only once, in Cyprus, did I crash onto the asphalt without unclipping my foot, but only because the cleat fastening on the shoe had gotten loose, not at all due to problems with the pedal design.
To the critics of such bindings and the doubters, I can confidently say: there are no serious problems with them, and the benefits are massive.
Of course, in this particular case, the jerk and the fall are so sudden that you genuinely might not have time to unclip your foot. In all fairness, it's worth noting that even with regular pedals, wiping out on rocky sand is a piece of cake. Which is exactly what happened to me. Fortunately, all these days I'd been carrying not just antibiotics, painkillers, and bandaids, but also hydrogen peroxide. Finally, those extra hundred grams paid off! Foresight rules!
As you can see in the photo, my mood was good, and I felt pretty cheerful. By the way, I hadn't had a fever for a few days, even though I periodically felt a little shaky. Soon we rolled downhill, although "rolled" is putting it loosely: the gradient wasn't as steep as we'd have liked, but at least the ground became solid in places, not for ten, but for a whole hundred, two hundred, or five hundred meters, with only small patches of sand mixed in.
Eventually, we reached someone's little garden with a few stunted bushes and one tree, fenced off with barbed wire. We ate our Joylent there, and discovered that our water supplies were melting away rapidly: we barely had a liter per person left. We still had ten to fifteen kilometers to the edge of the desert, but now we were confident we'd make it, although most likely by sunset as usual (not the worst option, considering we were even prepared for midnight).
A sea of sand
We couldn't resist and cut open one watermelon to study it. It really is a watermelon, and it smells like one too
Along the way, we saw a couple more funny scenes.
First, a woman dressed to the nines (meaning in a burqa) was riding a sled tied to a jeep across the sand. I didn't take a picture so as not to embarrass her. And then an even funnier one: a dude brought horses in a truck, and was riding them around the desert.
Because of the tall cliffs all around, we could feel the dusk rapidly closing in, and our water was a drop in the bucket. Luckily, we only had a few kilometers left to the road. Some Bedouins driving by asked if we needed anything, but the only thing we were interested in was water, and strangely enough, they didn't have this precious liquid. That's what cell phones and jeeps do to desert dwellers — they make them forget the values of their ancestors. In the end, the guys solemnly handed us a banana, and rolled off on their business.
Half an hour before sunset, we made it out onto a flat (according to the map) road, which we were hoping would be paved. Instead, we got a concrete one, which suited us perfectly fine. For some reason, we started riding uphill, but a kilometer later we came to our senses that since we're riding bikes, it's better to do it downhill, changed our direction to the right one, and finally headed towards Aqaba in the absolute shadow of the tall cliffs on both sides of it.
The GPS announced that during the day we had descended only three hundred meters out of the planned kilometer. This meant that the next 20 kilometers on the asphalt would be a continuous and very steep descent, unless of course NASA is wrong, which as we know, doesn't happen often.
So, our struggle, difficulties, unexpected discoveries, and miraculous escapes were behind us. Willpower, planning, luck, and teamwork had led to victory over Jordanian nature and the route. The highway, mountains, off-road, and desert were behind us, and although one shouldn't always look too far ahead, it was clear that we were at the end of the trip, and of the quests, only three remained, most likely not the hardest ones. They were crossing the border, finding boxes to pack the bikes, and flying out.
It was slightly nerve-wracking that we had to cross the border on a Saturday, meaning the Jewish Shabbat, when everything possible is closed in Israel, and we had to find boxes at the exact time when all the bike shops would be closed.
But right now, a well-deserved rest awaited us in the sleazy resort town of Aqaba, where we were arriving on Friday evening — meaning the weekend of Muslim countries, equivalent to Saturday in Europe.
Whether everything will be peachy, you'll find out in the next part.