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Another good nights sleep and was down to the cafe to meet the driver to go to Wadi Rum. We had organised the trip with a guy at the Al-wadi restaurant - it consists of an overnight stay in a desert camp including dinner and breakfast and travel to the camp and on to Aqaba and includes a tour of Wadi Rum. I believe that this is the cheapest and definitely the easiest way to do Wadi Rum but I can't get rid of the notion that we were conned at some point along the way. The cost was 50 JD each but I know that a lot of camps charge 25 jd a night to stay there anyway so with that in mind it wasn't so bad.

Martin, Aina and myself was continuing on to Wadi Rum and Paul, Maggie and Anna were leaving to go to the dead sea. So we exchanged E-mails and with a heavy heart said goodbye.

At the restaurant I met my new chum Fernando from Madrid who was coming with us - It took about an hour to get to Wadi Rum - where we were dropped off at our desert camp - apart from the people who were working there we were its only occupants. We decided to take the tour at 15:00 to avoid the worst of the heat so we had around 4 hours to kill before the trip starts - we lounged around under the bedouin tents drinking tea - I could feel my teeth dissolving. It was excrutiatingly hot - in the late 30s but the cook told us that the previous month it had been in the mid 40s.

Abdullah our driver arrived and the first thing he did was to drive us to his village where he took on provisions and brought along his 6 year old daughter along for the ride - she immediately took a shine to Aina and the two were inseperable for the rest of the trip. Wadi Rum is a desert in the south of Jordan made famous by Lawrence of Arabia in his book the seven pillars of wisdom after which he named one of the mountains there - this is the first highlight we saw on the journey.

After that we went to Lawrences spring which is where Lawrence was suppsoed to have bathed - strangely enough I am reading the seven pillars whilst I am here and only recently read the passage where he refers to this episode - I love it when a plan comes together..

We then went on to Barrah Siq which is a narrow fissure in the rocks with some nabbatean inscriptions that are supposed to be 3000 years old.

After that went to Lawrence's house which is basically a vantage point which affords superb views of part of Wadi rum.

After that we sat down in the middle of the desert and had a cup of tea, Abdullah scrabbled around to get together some deadwood to make a fire and then put the obligatory 8 tablespoons of sugar in a teapot and put it on the fire to boil after that he added a couple of tea leaves and we all had a nice cuppa to watch the sun go down - I had to ask for milk but unfortunately there were no camels nearby.

After our tea we headed back to our camp at breakneck speed we were all bouncing all over the back of the truck holding on for dear life.

We made it back in one piece and then had a surprisingly delicious bedouin meal.

After that had a very chilled out night listening to my Mp3 player under the stars, as there was no light pollution the stars came out in all their glory and even saw a couple of shooting stars.

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