Night fell on the desert. The campfire sank low. Banking up the hard-packed sand behind my head, I lay down on the slope of a dune and gazed up into the infinite. More stars than I had ever seen before speckled the expanse above me, strata of pinpricks overlaying each other. The night sky here above Wadi Rum was no blank, black two-dimensional backdrop. It was crowded  and alive, like the stalls of a theatre seen from back stage as the house lights are dimmed. And on cue the show started. From right to left a bolt of fire streaked the heavens before guttering and dying. A second followed, then two at once, flaming trails hanging in space after their heads combusted in the atmosphere. It was August and there was no better place to watch the Perseid meteor shower than in the stillness of the Jordanian desert.

I visited as part of a tour, leaving Aqaba in the morning, overnighting in Wadi Rum, and then setting off for Petra the following day. And I would encourage everyone to spend the night beneath the stars here – Perseids or not. But the day itself was superb too: my diary records it as ‘A genuinely excellent day.’ The scenery is breath-taking, real Criteria vii stuff. A thick carpet of sand, here red, here white, here black, blankets the landscape, each hue clearly delineated against its neighbours. Great sheer reefs of rock thrust up hundreds of metres, their surfaces eroded and whorled into fantastical shapes. The rock forms arches, peep-holes, shelfs and chasms, overhangs and bays. At the visitor centre opposite the iconic ‘Seven Pillars’ formation I climbed into a dated Toyota 4WD with three friends and trusted to our driver Mohammed to take us on safari. Camels ambled alongside or sheltered in the shade of a tree beside ‘Lawrence’s Spring’. Indeed, the entire area plays up its links both to the historical T.E. Lawrence and to the film Lawrence of Arabia for the tourists, though is this location is easily identifiable from Lawrence’s own writing: “In front of us a path, pale with use, zigzagged up the cliff-plinth to the point from which the main face rose, and there it turned precariously southward along a shallow ledge outlined by occasional leafy tress. From between these trees, in hidden crannies of the rock, issued strange cries: the echoes, turned into music, of the voices of the Arabs watering camels at the springs which there flowed out threehundredfeet above ground.” The ‘threehundredfeet’ line is an exaggeration, there was no ‘music’ and there is now a water trough for the camels on the wadi floor but otherwise the scene confronting me was that witnessed by Lawrence 88 years earlier.

The next stop was a dark goat-hair tent were we were served ‘Bedouin Whisky’: hot tea steeped with sage, cinnamon and cloves. On to the shade of a sheer cliff to picnic, Sinai rosefinches chirping above our heads. A cleft in the rock, a pre-taste of Petra’s legendary Siq, revealed ancient (~300BC) Thamudic inscriptions, images of men and goats. In a different location we were shown petroglyphs of men driving camels, a legacy of the trade routes between Petra and Yemen. I have an almost exact copy of Els’s third photo above. This demonstrates the ‘Cultural’ component of Wadi Rum’s ‘Mixed’ site.

But for me Wadi Rum will be about the natural wonders. Forging my way on foot up a huge sand dune heaped against an outcropping by the wind until the 4x4 below was the size of my fingernail. Scrambling up to a natural rock bridge. Piped sails of sandstone rising up on either side as we passed, making me feel like a fish in an aquarium. The location for our overnight camp was equally stunning, up a rise and sheltered by the arms of a rocky cove. A climb of the cove faces took us to a spot where we could look down over the central wadi. Across the other side we found a ledge from where we could watch the sun go down behind the distant hills (photo).

Even without the cosmic entertainment offered by the Persei meteor shower I would still be raving about Wadi Rum. I love deserts anyway. Something about their serene harshness (or is it harsh serenity?) appeals to me. Mountains may be majestic, forests vibrant, oceans dramatic. But the spreading sands of deserts have always helped me to forget the ‘white noise’ of modern life and find a space to order my thoughts. I woke early, even before the guides. I clambered up to a comfortable spot half-way up a nearby reef and gazed eastwards as the first light of dawn cast shadows across the sand and turned the rocks the colour of tawny port

World Heritage-iness: 4

My Experience: 5

(Visited August 2009)