A couple of years ago, I found my Grade 7 and 8 teacher on social media and have enjoyed his posts and sharing memories with him. He recently posted a meme of a man on a desert island writing his letter for the bottle and trying to decide whether to spell it desert or dessert. That brought up a memory I shared with him of his telling us that we might want a second helping of dessert but only one of desert. As I said to him, the time we spent in the desert of Jordan during four years there was the “best of times” and, to this day, leaves me longing for the desert.

The best piece of advice Sahib and I have ever had was given to us by the British husband of a Dutch diplomatic colleague at the first ever diplomatic reception we went to after arriving in Jordan. Mark told us “buy a 4-wheel drive vehicle and come out with the Jordan 4×4 club”. How right he was and how grateful we were, throughout our four years in Jordan, that we took his advice.

We had a modest car budget (for those wondering … our own personal funds – we were not “given” a car!) and were allowed to buy only one duty free vehicle by the Jordanian government. The transport manager at the embassy took us out to the “customs compound” on a hot day where we looked at many vehicles within our budget range. Most were pretty sad looking and many were far over our budget but we eventually selected a 7 year old Mitsubishi Pajero with a 4 cylinder engine with HI/LOW four wheel drive and wheel-lock. We were soon to call her Pajjie and came to love her dearly – she took us everywhere we wanted to go (okay, sometimes we needed a winch from the 6 cylinder vehicles to get to the top of a dune) with panache and verve.

This photo was taken just before we left Jordan 4 years later and shows some of her bumps and scrapes. We did get an injection carburetor as well as a second mounted spare tire – and used that second tire on more than one trip!

The Jordan 4×4 club met, in those days, at the Royal Automobile Club who also gave us meeting space in return for volunteer work on the Jordan International Rally and the Jordan National Rally – days that are still remembered as highlights of our four years in Jordan.

Our first trip with the Jordan 4×4 club followed soon – a dozen cars headed out early on a Friday morning (the weekend was Fri/Sat) to Qasr al-Jilat, a Roman Dam 70 km southeast of the airport in Amman that still held water! Learning to drive in formation both on the highway out of Amman and through the desert to the dam was challenging but between the day’s “group leader” at the front of the column and “tail end Charlie” at the back to ensure no one left behind it was always safety first – if someone had either mechanical issues or, more likely, a flat tire, we all stopped and worked together to get things done and on the road again.

The dam was made of huge stones and had a pond about 100 yards square behind it. It was obviously still in use because while we were there, one of the local Bedu farmers arrived with a water truck and hose and sucked up water to take back to his farm.

Once a month the 4×4 Club went out and spent a day (or, about every other month, a weekend camping) in the desert. The “shebab” (not the terrorist organization but a group of (usually male) friends as the term is used in the Arab world generally) was a great group. The foreigners like us were few but the Jordanians were the friendliest, nicest group you could want to travel with.

The highlights of the year were the rallies at which we, and the club, volunteered doing the officiating. The International one was a two day affair. We would head out to our assigned spot on a Friday morning and spend the day doing “flying passage control” or “stage safety officer” duties and late afternoon would regroup and find ourselves a camping spot near the next day’s rally location and set up our tents (or sleeping bags in the back of the pick up trucks!) and make a campfire, cook our dinner and generally josh around. The companionship was wonderful.

We took our dining shelter with us when officiating at the rallies for shade! This was one of our first rallies when we did “flying passage control” where we had to take note of each rally car passing us – after the first two years, the rallies got GPS units for each car and any variation from the route could be easily seen. We then switched to doing “stage safety officer” duties instead.

We got to so many places out in the desert and took so many photos that it is hard to choose a favourite photo or place – they were all wonderful. But here are a few:

One of our favourite, and frequent, places to offroad was Wadi Rum. Here, the group is near the Hijaz railway (no longer working) under the 7 Pillars of Wisdom. Note the thorn bushes growing in the sand that were often lethal to tires – we had one day when a thorn bush branch threaded itself through one of our tires like a darning needle through cloth. There was a good reason to have two spare tires although I think we only used the second one on two occasions!

In addition to our second spare, we always went out loaded with equipment: our 20 litre bottle of water with pump top to ensure we had lots of water (the highest temp Pajjie told us about on her dash was 51 C one day!), food for the day or weekend if camping, ropes, jumper cables, car tool kit, toilet paper for those necessary trips into the distance to a toilet spot with the most beautiful scenery, tent, dining shelter, towels for soaking and removing the dust that caked our skin, a really good car lift jack. The club ended up purchasing sand ladders – that would be laid on the sand to give traction when somebody was stuck, shovels for digging out sand and mud for – again – traction, tire irons or crowbars for removing and sitting tires on wheels if worst came to worst or for moving rocks and boulders, a gas can to get gas in the desert where you looked for a gas can hung in a tree in front of a bedu tent or near a track in the desert which you followed until you found the local with gas to sell. Yup, fully loaded. We had a storage room attached to our apartment where we kept all of our off-roading equipment so that we could be sure we got it all since we were loading the car before the coffee had taken effect!

We soon got pretty good at changing Pajjie’s tires – I would remove the spare cover and work on the bolts while Sahib and some of the shebab would assess the damage and start to get the jack under and bolts on the wheel removed. Eventually it took us about 5 minutes or so to change a tire! This photo was on a camping trip and was near the planned campsite below the hill on the right at Hemeimeh (spelling optional!) – a place where we camped a couple of times.

Our group spread out quite a bit but this was our campsite at Hemeimeh.

We often had views of the Dead Sea from the hills above the Rift Valley. Amman is at an elevation of 770 meters while the Dead Sea is 440 meters below sea level – and you can drive from one to the other in half an hour or so. That sea is kilometers away – and the group was moving along (at a very, very sedate pace) a cliff edge!

During the rainy season (from November to March) we often went off “mudding” in the eastern desert near Azraq. As you can see, the cars got more than a little muddy – in fact, there were often mud clots on the roof of poor Pajjie! My office building had an Egyptian caretaker who lived in quarters in the basement, spoke little English but was friendly and worked very hard. For 4 JD (not much at all) a month, he would wash our cars twice a week. When we had been off-roading, I gave him a couple extra JD for all his hard work. It also used to leave a mud puddle on the floor of the garage where we parked. My boss told me he knew about the mess that lasted a few days but considered it a part of good relations with our host country!

One of the places we got to camp twice was Lake Burqu – well north (off road!) of the Desert Highway – where there were the ruins of an old castle and the largest freshwater lake in Jordan.

Sunset over Lake Burqu from our campsite.

Another place we often off roaded was to Little Petra – in the hills between Petra itself and the Dead Sea were Nabatean settlements outlying Petra itself where houses were often built into (out of?) caves in the hills and the road was rocky and the views were spectacular. Late in our stay in Jordan, Sahib and I got pretty confident and often went out by ourselves to offroad and camp in the desert which was heavenly. We often said that Jordan was a “village of 5 million people” and proof came to us one day when we were camping by ourselves in a box canyon in Wadi Rum. A couple of local bedu, in a beat up pickup truck, stopped at our campsite and while our Arabic was as minimal as their English, while we were having tea (no matter what or where the first rule of hospitality in Jordan was offer water then tea) we soon understood their question asking us if we were the Canadians who recently had been out with a group at little Petra! We sure had to behave ourselves in Jordan…

Needless to say, getting stuck in the sand was a frequent occurrence. In this case, sand ladders were not enough and one of the shebab used his winch to get us out!

Pajjie, a good companion who made all of our desert adventures in Jordan (and, in those days, Syria) possible.