After an early start for the second visit to Petra, we were done at Petra by lunch time. After a quick stop at Wadi Musa for lunch and grocery shopping, we continued to our last stop in Jordan, Wadi Rum. It’s an easy two hour drive from Petra. There are regular buses running from Wadi Musa bus stop, located next to Petra entrance to Wadi Rum village. Renting a car for a week, gave us the flexibility to take off the beaten roads and stop to enjoy the view, whenever we wish to. For more information on organizing transportation in Jordan read this post.
After spending three hours instead of two by taking more rural roads passing through olive orchards and wheat plantations, we got to the Wadi Rum village. There are lots of wind farms on the way and few military checkpoints but we haven’t been stopped at any of them.
How to enter Wadi Rum reserved area:
There are two stops before getting to the actual reserved area. First stop is the Wadi Rum reception center, where lots of tourists park their cars there and being picked up by someone from their accommodation. No matter you want to leave the car there or going further into Wadi Rum village you need to stop here and pay for the entrance fee for the reserved area, 5 JD per person and you receive a ticket for that. Make sure to bring enough cash in local currency in the area as there’s no ATM inside the village and definitely not in the desert. Most of the desert camps accept US dollar and Euros but not with the good rate and return the change in JD.
Our accommodation guidance was driving right into the village and gave us a GPS point to get to. After passing through the Wadi Rum reserved area gate and paying the entrance fee, there will be another 5 km before getting to Wadi Rum village. Right at the entrance there’s a big car park on the right hand side and another man stopped us to check why we are heading inside the village. After checking our accommodation details they let us in.
We booked our camp online before our arrival, but it looked like, if you haven’t booked anything, it’s not that easy to wonder around and look for some. There are lots of locals hanging around in reception center and offer accommodations but once you got into their car and drive few kilometers in the desert, there’s no chance of getting back if the camp is not what you expected.
Wadi Rum village is really small and it took us two minutes to find the address we were looking for.A dead end alley packed with old and new Toyota pickups and someone showed us where to park our car and get inside. We got seated in a big lounge with few other tourists sitting around and some locals sleeping at the back of the room.
How to sort out accommodation and activities before arriving at Wadi Rum:
I have spent quite a lot of time looking at the prices for the camps, what they include in their packages and how much the daily tours and activities cost in Wadi Rum, We got the exact same as another British couple in our camp, and we paid 150 US dollar less!!!!
Few facts to consider before looking at different options. All camps are located in the desert and require local transportation from Wadi Rum village or wadi Rum reception center to the camps. So from location point of view, there’s not really any prime location in the desert. The only important factor to consider is how close the camp is to the main route that pickups pass, as it might be slightly noisy during the rush hour 😉 How close the camp is to Wadi Rum village is not a bonus point at all at least it wasn’t for us. 90% of the camps are including breakfast in the cost but check and make sure that it is included.
And nearly all the camps won’t include dinner in their package and it looks like the cost of the tent is really cheap but once you got there, you realize that you need to pay for dinner as well and it’s most of the time twice the price of your stay in the tent!! There’s no local restaurants around and you have to go ahead and pay for the dinner. All camps serve Zarb, the local bedouin dish prepared under the ground in a massive fire pit and is standard all across the camps, more expensive camps have more variety of meats and vegetable as part of their Zarb dish.
The other big part of the expenses of staying in Wadi Rum is the activities packages which are again pretty standard, camel riding or off road tour at the back of the pickup, you can pick the private option or a group tour and then select, you want half a day or a full day tour. But based on which accommodation you pick, you kind of need to arrange daily activities with them too so check their activities cost before booking any accommodations. Pretty much their main income is from activities and dinner, that’s why the camp prices are as low as 10 to 20 US dollar for two per night but no one will leave there without spending 200 US dollar on site!! So it’s important to be prepared for how much money will be spend and have enough cash available.
Getting back to the first place that we started. We were sitting in a reception room in our camp office in Wadi Rum village and waiting for our camp owner to come and pick us up. lots of people were coming in and out. Some ready to leave the village, some others were ready for half a day off road trip to visit the sunset and some like us just arrived. Finally the camp owner showed up and asked to see each group separately in his office. The interesting part was if you just arrived or you were leaving, you had to go to his office before proceeding to the next step. We waited for half an hour before it was our turn. It felt so much like waiting to visit a doctor!
He had all our accommodation bookings and tried to figure out how I manage to book for a tent, breakfast and dinner for both of us for two nights at that price?! Anyway I had my online booking through booking.com and he accepted to charge us as we agreed online and then gave us excursions costs and noted down how much we have to pay on return to his office and not to anyone else! Also asked us not to tell anyone how much we paid for our package as it’s lower to the standard cost. We parked our car in their parking in the village and sat at the back of the an old pickup to head to our camp with a German family with two young kids.
We got to our camp around 5:00 pm and had the whole camp for ourselves because we had no activities planned for rest of the day. We got our tent, went for a quick shower and sat on top of a cliff to enjoy the view for the rest of the day. As sun set, pickups started to bring more and more people in and by 8:00 everyone gathered in a big sitting area outside the big tent around the fire for a bedouin tea and then Zarb dinner.
After having a great dinner, lots of tea and a dance around the fire we went to bed to start early in the morning for a full day tour of the desert. I got up at around 5:00 and was confused!! I could hear rain drops hitting the tent roof but couldn’t believe that we got to a desert with less that 15 days of rains in year and we just got the first one of the year!!
We got up early and after a quick breakfast, we were picked by another pickup driver to get to the office in the village so they can put the groups together for a full day tour. Before leaving, they gave us the bad news!! we had to change our camp for the second night because the current camp was booked with a group of students and it supposed to be noisy for the night!! I mean seriously?!!! We were trying to stay for two nights just to be relaxed and don’t pack and unpack every single night for couple of weeks and they just asked us to pack and move 2 km to another camp! They took our backpacks to another camp and we headed to our full day trip to see what Wadi Rum has to offer!!!
It was an amazing day, because of the early morning shower, a nice breeze was blowing and the sands looked even more red than before. We shared our pickup with a lovely British couple in their sixties, an american couple, two Irish girl friends who were working in Saudi Arabia as nurse for two year and a Chinese guy who wasn’t speaking even a word of English. An amazing team to share the whole day with our sweet 22 years old driver, Ahmet from Madaba . There are a list of locations in Wadi Rum that depending on the hours that you pick the trip for, you will visit few of them or all of them.
When you get to each locations there are at least 20 more cars parked there and tourists are walking up an down in line to get to the point, take their photos and head to the next location. They normally all start from Lawrence spring and end it up with the big arch and then stop on a location for sunset view before heading back to the camps.
We stopped in a nice spot and Ahmet our driver cooked a nice meal for us and we sat in the shade of a big rock and enjoyed the view and lunch before heading back to the desert and see the rest of spots.
Later in the afternoon he stopped somewhere close to our camp to give us a nice sunset view then we enjoyed a pot of Bedouin tea on fire before ending up our night around the fire back at our camp and have the exact same Zarb dish for dinner and enjoy our last evening in Jordan
We liked the Wadi Rum experience but it wasn’t the best desert experience we ever had but that’s just because we have spent a lot of time in amazing untouched deserts in last twenty years and our expectation is high. Wadi Rum from the natural features point of view is amazing but the whole experience offered is so standard that it’s hard even to get surprised about anything. If we could go for a ride and just drive around between these amazing rock formations far from all the queues for the photos to be taken we had a better experience but we sort of knew what we will get and still wanted to see Wadi Rum and we are happy with what we achieved in two days there. We have spent in total 350 NZD for two night including meals and a full day tour for two plus tip for our driver. You can spend less and way more for the same activities depending on which camp you pick and who you book tours with or you can go way up and just pay 400 USD to stay in a martian dome tent for a night!! Jordan is not cheap in total but definitely worth the visit. We allowed for 7 days in Jordan and I think it’s a reasonable time in order to avoid rushing through main activities.
On our last day we drove straight from Wadi Rum to Amman and spent few hours there before heading to the airport for our flight to the next destination. Read about where we are heading in the next post. Till then, enjoy your life 🙂
