Wadi Rum :Trip report by Michele, April 2000 The rocks were so much bigger than I had imagined - it was hard to judge distances and sizes and when you did actually see someone climbing - a little speck on the rocks nearest to us, you suddenly realised how out of scale everything is... The people were brilliant - I had been a bit apprehensive about the differences in culture, but the people that we talked to seemed really open and friendly - one of the local guides, Abdulla talked to us quite a bit and invited us back to his house for tea one night, and we also talked to a climbing guide, Ateeq and the restaurant owner, Atta. They told us some stories which had us in stitches - the sense of humour over there seems one that British people would really appreciate, dry and piss taking! :-) The weather was brilliant - quite hot, but dry, so it didn't feel uncomfortable and sweaty, and you quite often got a nice little breeze to cool things down - it was a little bit overcast on a couple of days which gave us a chance to get used to the heat and it was cold at night. The climbing was fantastic - it is very varied with room to find something to enjoy for most people - the rock varies quite a lot from place to place - some of it is quite crumbly and fragile, but a lot of it is pretty good. We had thrutchy gritstone style routes, fingery limestone style routes and long cracks, scrambles, slabs, chimneys.... Even the short routes are pretty long, but we were up quite early most days and so the only benightment we suffered was due to having to partake in the rescue of two Russian Isralis after a bit of an abseiling accident. They rewarded us with loads of beer, which was quite nice I must say. Highlights for me were the traverse of Jebel Rum - we took a jeep around to the West side, scrambled up Sabbah's Route with sleeping bags and food and water - this took us about 7 hours! We didn't go particularly fast though and did lots of stopping and photography on the way. The way up was up a big siq - the rocks on that side were all orangy red and carved by water into the most fantastic shapes - like a huge Gaudi building, with streaks of different colours glowing in the rock, and amazing pillers and fingers of rock making one huge sculpture. We found our way by following cairns which were just three little rocks piled up - we would really not have been able to find the route without these as it winds backwards and forwards up the siq. We spent the night on the top in a little desert with sand and a juniper tree - no stars as it was cloudy that night, but still pretty atmospheric - and then continued over the top in the morning, across a moonscape of white sandstone domes - completely surreal and impossible to imagine. The route down (Hammand's Route) involved a few abseils and more complex route finding, but we had got more used to the landscape by now and were working well as a team with people scouting the way ahead which speeded us up a bit. We also had a jeep ride out into the desert to watch the sunrise at the Rock Bridge of Burdah - speeding throught the desert in the dark and watching as the sky gradually became lighter and the shapes of the various mountains appeared out of the darkness of the sand and the sky. Abdullah - our guide - scampered up Jebel Burdah in his bare feet to show us the start of the route to the rock bridge, and then left us to find the rest of the way ourselves. We then went climbing in Burrah canyon - excellent routes - Gary, Carrie, Dave and I made an attempt on Le Remours de la Pluie - like a 5 pitch Cenotaph Corner (we only ended up doing the first 2 pitches)- and Pete and Steve did Merlins Wand - a huge enormous crack line. Anyway - this is getting far too long - but there were plenty of other things which were pretty good too - all in all a 5 star holiday... :-) Oh yeah - I met Kate - a girl who had given me loads of information about Wadi Rum by e-mail while I was there, and we also met Tony Howard and Di Taylor who wrote the guidebook! love Mich