No such thing as "The Desert"

We've had a week off for Eid el Adha, and I've spent most of the time wandering different parts of the desert from north to south. The one thing I've thought about a lot this week is how different the desert is from what I was expecting - not just miles of dunes with the odd splotch of green around an oasis, but different landscapes, different vegetation and even different kinds of emptiness. So the next few posts will have a desert theme, in an attempt to get across the sense I have of the many many things that the desert has to offer; people, animals, landscapes and history stretching back and back ...

My itinerary over the last week

Just as a taster, here are a few shots of the landscapes I've been through in the last week, in my roamings ...

Point 1 on the route was in the basalt desert of the north east - very little vegetation, lots and lots and lots of dark hard rocks, and the odd oasis in an otherwise completely barren landscape, all the way to Iraq and beyond ...

Then after only an hour's drive, we found ourselves at point 2 in Azraq, which was once the largest oasis in the Eastern Desert, on the edge of where the basalt desert becomes sandstone - in fact this was a massive wetland which has been pumped almost completely dry, but there is a very small area left where you can imagine the previous lushness of it all ...

Point 3 was at one of the desert 'castles' in the sandstone desert east of Amman - the vegetation and colour have gone, and we were in the middle of many miles of light sand littered with sandstone pebbles and rocks. The very fact that there are castles here shows that once upon a time there was at least some water and vegetation here, but now it's just flat and empty ...

And then I was down south in Wadi Rum - truely beautiful, sands of every colour, mountains rising up in all directions and lots of vegetation of different types supporting plenty of wildlife and the Bedouin's flocks of sheep.

So this is why I don't just think of "The Desert" any more - there's not one big empty space, but rather a kaleidoscope of different desert landscapes, all of them with those huge skies, all interesting in their own way, many beautiful and some just endless. I always find it amazing that people manage to scratch out a living in every one of these places ... I just cannot imagine it, battling the elements every day, nothing to do but survive a lot of the time, and whenever I'm feeling sorry for myself, I remember these guys out in the middle of nowhere (REALLY in the middle of nowhere) and thank my lucky stars I was born when and where I was - although if I had to live in any one of these desert areas, I know which one I'd go for ...

Tea with Suleiman in Wadi Rum