Views from a camel's back

“You’ll be crippled for life!”

Genial laughter filled the creaky minibus on its way to Wadi Rum as the young backpackers found out I was planning to ride a camel across the wadi before my night in a Bedouin tent. “They’ll have to carry you into camp!” The gauntlet had been thrown; this 50-something woman would have to show them that mid-career moms can be true travelers, rather than tame tourists.

The youngsters split off for their day of 4-wheeler dune bashing, and I joined Attayak Ali and a family from Europe for our imitation of T.E. Lawrence’s epic journey into Wadi Rum.

On its knees, a camel is a lot easier to mount than a horse. But the Bedu don’t use stirrups on their wood-and-carpet saddles, and so I was tossed steeply forward toward the ground and then jerked backward as my camel stood, hind legs onto knees first, then front legs fully extended, then back legs straightened. The young boy on the camel next to me shrieked as his slight body was tossed back and forth; then he broke into delicious giggles while watching his mother from the indelicate rear viewpoint.

Following the example of Ali, I quickly got the knack of crossing my right leg in front of the pommel and locking it with the left leg as we rode with a rocking motion, which wasn't uncomfortable if you relaxed into each roll. Woe to those who ride with their legs hanging down the camel’s sides, however, as that option transforms rocking to miserable jarring and pounding!

Wadi Rum from camelback is both larger and smaller than imagined.

Larger when plodding up a steep crimson dune, with miles of undulating desert stretching to the horizon and the pre-summer sun seeming to fill every angle of the sky. Larger when passing beneath towering sandstone and granite rock formations on the way to hidden Nabatean petroglyphs in Khaz'ali Canyon. The movies filmed here don’t adequately convey the immensity and grandeur of the 1,000-foot-high jebels (mountains) piercing the desert floor in clumps like so many sand castles scattered along a beach.

Rum is smaller than imagined as one lumbers across ruddy sand flats at a gait that allows you to see ethereal desert blossoms and scampering lizards underfoot. Smaller, in the silence that lets one hear the hiss of windblown sand rivers, and smell the tingle of desert sage mingling with Ali’s Arabian perfume. And Rum is comfortingly small and intimate upon stopping in the shade of a rampart jebel for a Bedouin lunch of pita, dates, and cardamom coffee made over a fire of twigs, while Ali lounges in his white thobe and red keffiyeh, chain-smoking pungent Gauloises and telling us the history of his family.

Hours later, in the muted glow of early evening, I walked contentedly and a little triumphantly into Ali’s goat-hair tent, to the good-natured cheers of the backpackers who now begged to hear about Wadi Rum à la Lawrence of Arabia.