Feet the romance of the Arabian desert in the spring-time…or anytime, at Wdi Rum in Jordan. Let the fabled T.E. Lawrene come alive, whether through memories stirred from the screen version or from the pages of history and the actual exploits of the legendary British officer.
Wadi Rum is like a moon-scape of ancient valleys and towering weathered sandstone mountains rising out of the white and pink colored sands. Much of David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” was filmed there and it was also the location where T.E. Lawrence himself was based during the Arab Revolt.



The powerful fan blows a gale of air and the bright nylon begins to billow. Minutes later, propane burners roar out a furnace-blast of heat—enough to warm an entire house in half a minute—and the flaccid, earthbound shape fills out, slowly sheds the shackles of gravity, and pulls itself upright, pointing skyward with increasing eagerness. Soon after, the teardrop of colored nylon, harnessed to a wicker basket, soars silently upward, propelled by a silent principle of physics and carried on the whims of the winds.


Hot-air ballooning, now an international sport, has found a dramatic site for meets in the Middle East: Jordan's ruggedly beautiful Wadi Rum. Floating dots of color set against rugged red hills and an azure sky, some 50 "Montgolfieres," as they were originally called, from 15 nations recently filled the horizon over that breathtaking landscape.
Ballooning has been around for 209 years, and now commands growing popularity both as a sport and as a marketing tool in Europe and the United States. It is not a sport for shallow pockets, however: A good-sized craft with elaborate markings will cost upward of $75,000. Thus many balloons carry advertising for sponsors ranging from car makers to—appropriately—propane gas bottlers; others are owned by corporations and flown by the companies' enthusiastic executives. Virgin Atlantic Airlines' Richard Branson had three 747-shaped balloons entered in the competition at Wadi Rum, and Malcolm Forbes flew a bright yellow Sphinx in Egypt almost 10 years ago (See Aramco World, July-August 1984).
Other balloons at Wadi Rum had the shapes of castles, rolled-up newspapers and Smurf heads as well as the traditional teardrop: Whimsy—or advertisement—has free rein in that regard, since odd shapes are not a disadvantage in balloon racing. Once airborne, the balloons fly with, not through, the wind. Nonetheless, a good balloonist knows how to utilize the varying air temperatures and currents at different altitudes to direct his balloon to the desired target.
The meet in Wadi Rum consisted of three stages, one flown each day. Each stage was a different sort of race, testing differing elements of a balloonist's abilities. Competing were some of the best balloon pilots in the world, who reveled in the rugged beauty of the wadi even while they dealt with the challenges of navigation through its rocky crags and swirling winds. "There is no other place on earth to fly like this" .



Valley Of The Moon

There are places on earth so weird yet so beautiful, so forbidding yet so irresistible that in his efforts to describe them man runs out of commonplace similes, gives up on his earthbound metaphors and turns instead to the unknown. Such a place is Wadi Ram, a great valley in southern Jordan, a vast silent place, so wild, so strange that it came, eventually, to be called the "Valley of the Moon."
The Wadi Ram is actually a great fracture in the surface of the earth, the result, probably, of some titanic upheaval that cracked great slabs of granite and sandstone like so many shards of pottery and heaved them upward in the form of great cliffs. It runs northeast to southeast in what is roughly a direct line between the lower end of the Dead Sea and the upper end of the Gulf of Aqaba.
It is only 35 miles from Aqaba to Wadi Ram and much of the distance can be covered swiftly on the smooth pavement of the Desert Highway that links Aqaba, Jordan's sole seaport, to Amman, Jordan's capital. About halfway between two villages called Kweira and Khirbet al-Khalidi, a dirt track strikes off across the desert. This is the road along which, it is thought, Colonel T.E. Lawrence led his raiders in World War I and along which, 40 years later, an American film company made its way to recreate the life of that colorful man amid the actual desert in which he rode and fought. For those who take that track it seems as if they have suddenly entered another world. As in many areas on the Arabian Peninsula, the traces of the unknown forces that battered the earth back in the dim past are still plain and inevitably they evoke the imagined emptiness of lunar plains and mountains, and the dry cracked beds of ancient seas.
Most mountains from a distance are shapeless, drab and identical. Not those at Wadi Ram. There, drenched in pale purple, they rear up off the valley floor, instantly and vividly alive. As distance lessens, the purple gives way to the tawny hues of sandstone ridges that tower a thousand sheer feet in the air and are topped with dome's worn smooth by a constant wind. The skies are pale and colorless and the sand underfoot and the fragments of rock at the base of the cliffs are dry and crisp with age. All around is emptiness and silence, the silence, it seems, of a land that man has not yet set foot upon or, having done so, has trod with quiet caution. The sound of a Land-Rover is suddenly loud and the size of it presumptuous amid spaces so immense they dwarf man and vehicle into insignificance.
To penetrate to the heart of Wadi Ram takes but an hour. Yet it is so far in time from the Desert Highway that the sight of a small settlement is startling. It is a cluster of tiny buildings standing in the center of a vast plain that lies between Jabal Ram on one side and Jabal Um Ishrin two thirds of a mile away on the other. Both are great segments of the high cliffs that Lawrence described as "crags like gigantic buildings along two sides of their street." There is a fortress there manned by a sergeant and five patrolmen of the Jordan Desert Police. There are a school and two small shops to serve a small settlement of Bedouins who, more or less regularly, set up their black tents nearby. The Bedouins camp there for the same reason that dictates the location of all their encampments—water. Up and down the wadi in the shadows of the great escarpments are small springs without which the valley—with summer temperatures of up to 140° F and no more than four inches of rain a year—would be uninhabitable.
The policemen, in the tradition of the Bedouins, which most of them used to be, are friendly and hospitable to all travelers. Each of them is assigned to the small outpost for a minimum of a year and although each man has a short leave every two weeks, life tends, eventually, to develop into a pattern of repetition and monotony that is broken only by the biweekly truck roaring into the stillness to bring supplies and pick up a man due for leave, or the approach of the rare visitor who has come to see the Wadi Ram. Thus they welcome company, offer coffee, answer questions willingly and, obviously aware of their splendidly romantic uniforms and their dashing headcloths, pose with enthusiasm against a spectacular backdrop.
One cannot go far in Jordan without coming across antiquities, and Wadi Ram is no exception. Half a mile from the police post, on a small hill, are the remains of a small temple, probably Nabatean and probably built in the first century. Excavations on the site started in the late fifties, but came to a halt when other projects were given precedence. There are also slabs of rock throughout the valley with inscriptions in early Thamudic writing, mostly the names of travelers of long ago, who were apparently moved by what Lawrence called "this
processional way greater than imagination," and who vowed to leave some mark of their passing before they dwindled away and vanished in the vastness of time and distance.