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A honeymoon on horseback

Olivia Glazebrook

Wednesday, 16th July 2008

Olivia Glazebrook and her husband brave the Jordanian wilderness

Our guide was Hanna Jahshan, who has been taking travellers into Wadi Rum for 15 years. Hanna was great company (crucial, considering we spent all day, every day with him): well-informed, amusing and companionable. Equally importantly, his horses were in excellent nick, as fit as fleas, and stepped out fresh and keen every morning, not at all dulled by their years of experience. Hanna’s horse was a dappled stallion, and ours were elderly mares — leading to occasional bouts of Graduate-style flirting — but they knew their business and, given a free rein, all three went off like rockets.

Wadi Rum consists of wide, sandy-floored valleys spread between sandstone mountains which rise hundreds of metres out of the ground. It is as if a giant rock pool has been drained of seawater, and nothing but the sandy bottom and ‘islands’ of rock remain. These huge rocks are completely bare of vegetation and shaped like mounds of wax left behind by burned-down candles, or blobs of honeycomb spilled from a teaspoon on to a table: soft-edged and curvaceous. They are red, pink, crimson or white, and sometimes all these colours, brindled from top to bottom.

The views are spectacular. We rode across wide, bleached plateaux and through claret-coloured canyons, we slid down drifts of sand and scrambled up them, we saw white clouds of dust spiralling hundreds of feet into the air, we passed fig trees with livid green leaves springing from rock walls, herds of camels gloomily nibbling on carpets of tiny flowers, a Bedouin carrying a sword and searching the empty landscape for his lost goats, and even an old lady who rode a donkey and warbled into a flute. (But this was too much. She must have been positioned there by the tourist board.)