"The View The End Of The World [sic]."

The Middleman

beecycles — Tue, 13 May 2014 21:40:15 GMT

Strong desert winds tear at the Jordanian flag outside Ajed’s mountaintop abode. The sound is a violent one, but the atmosphere inside his blanket hut is the essence of tranquility. We sip another cup of tea and gaze down at the imposing Monastery facade. Despite the rusty sign touting it as “The View The End Of The World,” few of the tourists milling about the ruins of Petra below will make the final trek up to this spot.

It’s like looking onto another world through a timeless window in the clouds. The past commingles with the future, eclipsing the fleeting and irrelevant present. Digital cameras memorialize remnants of an ancient civilization for future scrapbooks, while modern coins are exchanged for oxidized copies of those from a lost Nabatean age. The middleman is hardly noticed.

I was there with my camera hours ago. Now I am paused in the present, deep in conversation on unlikely topics with the living, grinning, chain-smoking Petra. Born in a cave in a nearby Bedouin village, Ajed has spent his twenty-four years peddling donkey ‘taxis’ and fake artifacts to the daily tide of tourists. When I showed up this afternoon, he pushed a “Jade-stone necklace, nice with my eyes.” Soon, though, we were sharing a pot of tea and our thoughts on love, trust, sexism, and how windswept pinnacles can transcend it all.

The sun is turning in for the day, and Ajed suggests we witness it from the Monastery roof, so we descend from his home and scale that of the bygone monks who shared these sands. Sitting cross-legged atop a world wonder, we watch the famed pink hues of the Rose-red city filter through flapping huts dotting the horizon.

As the light fades, one hut blazes brighter than the rest, and we realize it’s on fire. We scramble down and run towards it, but Ajed’s uncle intervenes. We’re not to approach it, he shouts in Arabic dialect from an adjacent peak. That hut belongs to a drunk and a member of the opposing tribe. Our presence would bring trouble and suspicion.

While the winds escort most tourists out through the Siq, here the flames and chaos pick up. The only high-plateau local with a cell phone, Ajed instantly becomes the relay point between silhouetted, red keffiyeh-clad men shouting across the darkening desert and technology-laden youth spotting smoke from the valley below. Stuck in a limbo all my own, I watch as the life savings of a Bedouin family from the wrong tribe disintegrate into the night air, becoming just another vestige of these lands.

Photos: "A rose-red city half as old as time." --John Burgon

beecycles — Tue, 13 May 2014 19:45:00 GMT

New discoveries in a very old place: an amazing day in Petra.

Photos: Bee Business, among other things

beecycles — Mon, 12 May 2014 22:29:00 GMT

Conducting final dissertation research in Israel on the ecology of native bees with the US-Binational Science Foundation.

Rescued in Yosemite (or "Single Woman in the Wilds")

beecycles — Tue, 1 Apr 2014 00:15:00 GMT

Note: This story was published on the website for the periodical: "High Country News: For People Who Care About the [American] West" in April, 2014 as part of their "Travel Horror Stories" contest. Since it's travel related, I wanted to also share it here.

It was supposed to be my comeback trip. A boyfriend of nearly seven years and I had called it quits, and sometimes it felt like I didn’t know how to do anything by myself anymore. I wanted to re-establish my wild, feminist spirit, and reclaim backpacking for me, on my own terms. So I got a map of Yosemite National Park and a permit for a four-day loop around the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir area.

I swear I checked the forecast and saw no risk of rain. But on the first night, an hour after I nestled triumphantly into my new one-person tent at Rancheria Falls, it started to pour. And it didn’t stop for 20 hours.

When morning arrived and the sun didn’t, I packed my drenched gear and went to confer with my neighbors. Someone with a radio reported that the trail back to where I'd started was closed, the waterfall crossings lethally high.

I couldn’t just sit in the rain-drenched camp, so I resumed my route. I hiked through Tiltill Valley, mud past my ankles, shimmied along a wet log stream crossing, and powered up 2,000 vertical feet of switchbacks. Only once, when I tripped and was being pressed face-first into the mud by my heavy pack, did I wish I wasn’t alone.

When I reached the summit, the sun came out. I spread everything out to dry while I boiled water for tea. That’s when the salamander-monitoring crew arrived. They had been radioed to return to Rancheria Falls, where a boat would evacuate everyone the next morning. They strongly suggested I join them, lest I become the last person marooned in this area of the park. For a glorious moment, that sounded like a real opportunity to up the ante on my solo survival quest.

Hiking out through the night with the salamander crew felt like unraveling a sweater I’d worked hard to knit. There I was, back at camp, waiting to be rescued by a boat. Who gets rescued from backpacking by a boat? Certainly not strong, single women of the wilds. But as I enjoyed a unique view of Wapama Falls from the skiff on the reservoir, I realized that my disastrous attempt at independence had yielded an unexpected tale of multifaceted adventure. Who gets rescued from backpacking by a boat? I did. And it’s a great story, all my own.