The morning was glorious although there was talk of rain coming in the afternoon.  We drove out to an unspectacular roadside café where everybody was smoking cigarettes.  Here we were supposed to switch into a four-wheel drive vehicle and begin an adventure into the Wadi Rum.  As it turned out, the four-wheel drive was an old, banged up Toyota Land Cruiser.  With the driver and the guide in the front, we were jammed in the back desperate to keep the windows open because of the smoking.  We were on the highway for no more than a few miles when he turned off and suddenly we were in a world that I could not believe.

The landscape here is known as the valley of the moon; a valley cut from sandstone and granite rock.  It is like nothing that you have ever seen. This was a cinematographers paradise.  Lawrence of Arabia had called it, “Vast, echoing, and Godlike.”  This was his domain, his patch, and it was easy to imagine this sprawling landscape of fine sand and incredible rock formations populated by Bedouin tribes and camels.  If we had thought that we were in the desert in the West Bank or in the Negev, then this was the desert that I had imagined.  The strange thing was that there were no tourists, no other four-wheel drive trucks, just us alone in this vast landscape.   It was breathtaking.  We climbed the rocks, we saw an oasis, and eventually we came to a lunch spot.  That’s when the sandstorm hit.

The blue sky had started to disappear, the wind picked up, then it whipped up the sand, and like a tsunami, it caused us all too run like crazy back to the jeep.  We had to wait to get out of there.  It made the fog on a bad day in London seem like a clear New England day.  I got to appreciate the keffiyeh since my Boston baseball hat was not doing the trick.