Middle-aged flash packers

It was a very early start this morning but what else would you expect when it’s time to ride a camel and see the sun rise?

I was both pleased and relieved to be given a relatively small camel to ride.

Riding a camel (or rather sitting on one) is the easy bit, getting on and off it is somewhat trickier.

It’s a two part process. First, the camel gets up from sitting position by coming up on to its knees then on to its feet. This is obviously reversed when it comes to the camel sitting down.

There are two problems for the inexperienced rider (eg me). Problem number one – camels are wide. Trying to get seated on the camel required an amount of flexibility I just don’t have. Note to self: try harder at yoga.

Problem two is remaining seated when the camel rises from its knees to its feet. This is the moment when holding onto a wooden pummel seems ridiculously inadequate and a camels neck looks more like a very steep slide that will dump you head first into the sand.

However, all was fine if a little undignified.

It seemed to take the sun an awfully long time to rise, and after dismounting we all wandered around aimlessly, patting the camels and generally lurking around waiting for the sun’s big moment. Our Bedouin camel man was quite happy looking at his phone. I’m pretty sure he was playing candy crush.

The sun did its job as it does every day and we got back on our camels, gently loping back to our camp. I was most impressed with Steve. Copying the Bedouin’s rasping camel noise he got his own camel to sit down – we have a camel whisperer on our hands.

After several coffees and some breakfast, we all felt vaguely human again and before we knew it, we were returned to our cars and on our way to Aqaba.

Goodbye Wadi Rum. A short but very sweet visit.

Next stop, Aqaba. Aqaba is close to Wadi Rum so we did have some time to kill before we could check in to our hotel.

Aqaba is completely different to anywhere else we’ve been in Jordan, mainly because it’s by the sea. The Red Sea. It felt so good to see something blue and wet compared to the scrub and beige of the rest of Jordan.

We pottered about looking round the castle, drinking more coffee, walking the promenade and hitting the grog shop. Good job the grog shop was on the agenda as we discovered on arrival at our hotel that no alcohol is served, although you can imbibe your own. Phew!

It took ages for our room at the Hotel Luxe to be ready – I think it was about 4pm before we got into our rooms – but we managed to bag some sun loungers (one for you there Mrs B) so all good. The hotel is nice ( but expensive) as it’s got a great pool and it’s own beach, but rather disappointingly although our room has sliding doors to access the beach, you can’t lock the door from the outside so it’s completely pointless. I suppose you can just sit in your room with the door open and look at the beach? There’s also no seating area outside the room even though there’s ample space for it. So definitely sitting in your room, looking at the beach. Jordanians move in mysterious ways.

Ah well, the restaurant looks good. But unbelievably we had another food incident on our hands- this time Fishgate. I can’t bring myself to go through it in detail, first world problems and all that, but suffice to say McDonalds beckons.

However, the weather is gorgeous, the sea is warm and chill time is here so it’s over and out until we set off for Amman, our final stop before heading back to the UK.