Befriending the Bedouins

My first impression of Wadi Musa, the town nearest to the ancient Nabatean city of Petra, was of a town built for tourists, with the slightly depressed feeling one gets in British seaside towns in winter, when the main reason for the existence of the town is in short supply.
Becka, Emlyn and I set off from Damascus on Monday morning and did the 6 hour bus trip across the Jordanian border to Amman, followed by the three hour bus ride to Petra in one long, long day. We arrived in Wadi Musa at around 7 in the evening after our twelve hour journey, and were immediately bombarded by touts from various hotels offering us ever lower prices for three bed rooms. We ate dinner at a roadside ‘restaurant’ in the town centre, and were slightly horrified to find that it cost twice as much for a main course and a coke as it costs in Damascus for a three course meal in an expensive rooftop restaurant. It is rather a shock to go from 75 Syrian pounds to one British pound to Jordan where it is almost one for one. So when we were offered a three bed room in the Musa Springs Hotel up the hill outside the city for only 4JD each we were massively relieved, despite the grimey walls and strange soviet style metal wardrobe placed conveniently in the centre of the room - until we got to bed and found that the sheets, which were too small for the single beds, were mysteriously sticky. Emlyn cheered us all up with merry jokes about how we’d probably all get syphilis and we passed a long night trying to remember to sleep curled up in a ball so our legs weren’t touching the ambiguously coloured mattresses.

First thing in the morning we packed our bags and checked out, leaving our stuff at the front desk while we took the free taxi service back down the hill to Petra. Like everything in Jordan Petra was expensive, 26 pounds for two days entry, but this was definitely worth every penny. I had no idea the site was so enormous, I think the city extends over an area of more than 10 kilometres, and when we walked down the Siq, the narrow natural passage through the rocks which leads to the famous Treasury, the site of Indianna Jones and the Last Crusade, and saw the morning sunlight on the red rocks of the façade it was the most incredible feeling, despite the thousands of other tourists milling around taking photos and speaking every language under the sun.
We decided not to go up to the monastery on our first day, as it is supposed to be one of the best things to do in Petra and we wanted to wait for Everitte who arrived a day late after spending a night with his unofficial girlfriend in Paris. Instead we climbed the 750 steps to the High Place of Sacrifice, where we befriended a small boy named Abdullah and his sister and laughed a lot at the big group of French tourists who were totally at a loss after one their number passed out from the heat and milled around saying ‘Café? Biscuiiits?’ which reminded me of what I say to snap myself out of it when I’m hot and tired and catch myself moaning, which is ‘I’m tired. I’m too hot… I want a biscuit’.

The view across the mountains from the top was spectacular - in many ways my favourite parts of Petra were the natural rock formations and views over the countryside and surrounding mountains, rather than the facades themselves. We went down the other side of the mountain, and because we’d spent so long on the top and it was the hottest part of the day everybody else had already left, so we had the most beautiful walk down the deserted mountainside, passing rock carvings and temples, and I bought a weird Bedouin doll from Abdullah’s mother for £1.75, which rode around looking vaguely creepy in the side pocket of my rucksack for the rest of the trip!
We had finished our water and had no food with us, so by the time we made it back to a café, after walking around the side of the mountain across the desert in the blistering heat, we pretty much collapsed in the shade and paid the £10 for three cokes and a bottle of water without complaining (much!).

The café was run by a group of Bedouin men, all of whom were wearing Western clothes, t-shirts, trousers and sandals, but with the traditional Bedouin scarves tied around their heads, and lots of black eyeliner, so they all looked like close relations of Captain Jack Sparrow (and yes they are pretty damn smoking hot). An old Bedouin man selling cheap bangles, with lots of gold teeth came up to us and gave us a huge shock and a bit of a laugh when he started talking to us in English with a strange cockney accent, a bit like Michael Cane. It was bizarre, but he turned out to be fascinating, and sat with us for ages talking to us about the Bedouins. He was born in Petra in a cave and lived there for 21 years until in the government moved him out and up to the modern village up on the hill where most of the Bedouins now live, except a few families who still live within Petra itself. He pointed up to the hill and said ‘See that big white house? That’s mine. I’ve been building it for three years, and they just turned the electricity on today. It cost 350 thousand pounds’. I think we all gaped a bit because he looked so much like a poor old man who sold crappy jewellery to feed his family, but it turns out that a lot of the Petra Bedouin are absolutely filthy rich. He explained to us that a lot of Bedouins we given land by the government and that they sold it to rich Iraqi refugees for 10 times its value, and made an absolute killing, and then the Jordanian government promptly reclaimed it and gave it back to them. He also told us that the Captain Jack Sparrow lookalike who owned the café was very rich (who wouldn’t be at £2 a coke) and had four wives and made over £500 a day just from that one café. It was fascinating, especially when he started talking about Bedouin culture, and how there are loads of Western tourists who have married Bedouin men and now live among the Bedouin. I asked if it ever happens the other way round, and he didn’t understand what I meant until I said do Bedouin women ever marry Western men, and then he said no, Bedouin culture didn’t allow it and that anyway ‘Bedouin women like Bedouin men’.

After talking to him for an hour or so we went for a wander around some of the caves and then came back to the café at about 4.30 and the café owner with the four wives invited us to sit down and brought us strong sweet tea (‘Bedouin whisky’) on the house so we could sit and drink with him and his friends, a young guy called Attala ‘the last Bedouin samurai - my nickname is danger’ and his friend Kasab. We sat with them for over two hours and drank two rounds of tea, and they talked to us about Bedouin culture, and the old man came back and joined our conversation until dusk when all the other tourists had left and it was just us and our new Bedouin friends. The Bedouins certainly are hospitable even if other things about their culture seem to have changed due to constant close contact with Western tourists, and too much money to know what to do with. Attala was talking about how he’d travelled all over Europe with his Czech ex-girlfriend, and once paid 170 euros to fly from Madrid to Rome for a party, and they all seem to drink and smoke a lot. On the other hand it turned out that the Michael Cane impersonator, who was probably in his late fifties, and Attala, who was 24, were brothers, and had 7 other brothers and 9 sisters, who all had the same father but were from 5 different mothers. Attala wasn’t the youngest, but when he was conceived his father was 65 and his mother was 14, and his father had his last son aged 78. I couldn’t really ask, but couldn’t help wondering what happens when they Western women marry into the Bedouin tribes - do they share their husband with other wives like the Bedouin women, or do they expect their husbands to be monogamous in a polygamous society?
At about 7pm Attala invited us to go back to the Bedouin village with him and Kasab, so we started walking back through Petra, amid all the Bedouin closing their stalls for the night, and met one their friends who let us ride his two camels along the road to the village until we reached Attala’s brand new Land Rover and he plugged in his iPod and drove us up the hill the hill to his enormous plush house, where we sat in the courtyard and drank tea with him and Kasab. I was totally fascinated by all the contradictions, and the strange marriage between Bedouin culture and the influence of Western tourists who seem to have almost turned the Bedouin culture into an Orientalist caricature of itself, and had already decided I wanted to write my dissertation on the Bedouins, so when they told us they would take us to the desert and we’d have a fire and see the stars it seemed like an amazing adventure and a chance to find out more. Becka and I were both thankful that Emlyn was with us to ensure there were no unfortunate misunderstandings, especially as Attala said to me just before he drove us back to Wadi Musa to pick of our bags ‘Your hair and your long skirts are very nice… They’re almost sexy!’ to which Becka said ‘Yes, India, almost, but not quite. Nice try though’.

We hadn’t eaten anything all day, and were absolutely starving, and really wanted a good night’s sleep, so dug out one of the cards we’d been given for a three star hotel, where we’d been offered a three bed room for 10 pounds per person. When we arrived it was really smart, and we were a bit intimidated, but the manager came out and remembered us, and gave us the keys to a very smart three bed ensuite room, which surprised us greatly as it was pretty much the smartest place any of us had ever stayed, and all the other guests were clearly pretty rich, and paying a hell of a lot more than us for their rooms. We were jumping around the room in excitement for about 10 minutes and then got a call from front desk telling us to come down for our ‘welcome drinks’ and the manager and the guy at the desk came and sat with us and ordered us coffee and asked us our names and what we were planning to do that night. We told them we were going into the desert with the Bedouins and they suddenly became all hostile and said ‘The men from the village? They’re not real Bedouins, they’re gypsies, be very careful’. I innocently asked in Arabic ‘Gypsies not Bedouins? Is there a difference?’ to which the manager said that these people moved around from country to country, and that they were all Egyptian anyway, and then they both got up and walked off. It was pretty weird, but Attala had told us that the people from Wadi Musa didn’t like the Bedouins because they owned all the shops inside Petra, and made so much money from the tourists, so we didn’t take it very seriously. It was a strange encounter though, and Emlyn thought that the hotel staff were hitting on me and Becka, which seems unlikely, but would explain why we got the rooms so cheap I suppose!

We texted Attala and Kasab who came and picked us up from the hotel and stopped to let us buy some falafel before we all passed out, but they thought we were spending the night with them in the desert and we felt a bit bad telling them that we’d already paid for our hotel and hadn’t brought anything with us because we had to get up early to meet Everitte, so needed to be dropped back in town afterwards. They were really nice about it though, and after a stop back in their village, where Attala changed in his long robes and got his kettle and water and tea leaves, we drove out into the desert in the pitch black for what seemed like hours, until we had no idea which direction the road was in anymore, let alone the town. We parked by a big rock which we climbed up and laid the three mattresses and a big blanket on it, then the guys went looking for firewood and we tried to help, but came back after about five minutes with only four twigs between us, only to find that the Bedouin guys had somehow managed to gather five whole little scrubby bushes to burn, which was rather embarrassing. We sat by the fire and made tea over the flames in an old black metal teapot, and Attala told us that the Bedouins are immune to scorpion bites because the Bedouin women crush scorpions and rub the poison on their breasts when they are breastfeeding their children to make them immune to the poison.

When the tea was ready we climbed up onto the rock and drank it sitting up above the desert looking at the stars, which were bright enough to see each other by, once our eyes adjusted. The Milky Way was like a solid line of white through the sky, and the cicadas were whirring their music all around the rock. It was so dark that we had no idea what was around the rock, although it was probably a spectacular view, had we been able to see it. There was a light breeze blowing and this incredible sense of space around us and we were all a bit high on the excitement of the unexpected adventure, and somehow without us really noticing the Bedouins manoeuvred things so that Attala and I were lying together on one mattress with the blanket, Becka and Kasab were on another, and poor Emlyn was on the third mattress by himself. Attala said to him ‘Hey Emily, are you cold?’ and he said no, he was fine where he was, and then Attala asked if he had a girlfriend, so he said yes, back in Scotland. Attala then asked if Becka had a boyfriend and by this point we had a fair idea what was going on so she said yes, and then he asked me and I said I did too. It made no difference though, Kasab ended up trying to give Becka a hand massage, while Attala started reciting poetry to me in Arabic and telling me that if he was my boyfriend he wouldn’t let me go away alone. It was actually less sleazy than it sounds mainly because of the amazingly romantic location (and the fact that he was pretty gorgeous) but it was kind of sad to see how practiced they clearly were at hitting on tourists, and to realise that all the Bedouin hospitality had in fact been an attempt to get laid, rather than genuine friendliness, and I felt a bit stupid that we hadn’t realised earlier - I guess I just wanted it to be genuine.
Becka and I ended up sitting up to avoid the attempted hand holding, so we had bit of an awkward chat with us sitting up and the three guys all lying down looking at the stars, and at about 1am we said we had to go, and Attala drove us back to our hotel. When he dropped us off he invited us to go to his brother’s engagement party the next afternoon and to stay the night with them in the village, and we said we’d think about it. I actually felt quite sad that there was clearly a condition to us accepting their offer, as it would have been fascinating to attend the party, had it not been a way to send the wrong message. We spent half an hour hopping around the hotel in a fit of outrage and mild hysteria apologising to Emlyn for the fact that he had to sit through our attempted seduction while freezing to death, and reassuring each other that we were right not to spend the night even though sleeping on a rock in the desert with some Bedouins from Petra would have been quite an experience.

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