The end of the trip
The last stage: all that was left was to make our way from the depths of the Wadi Rum desert to the tourist town of Aqaba. We woke up early, as we had to get through a very sandy area, and we were going to do it by 4x4.
Once past this sandy stretch we would reach a track used by the 4x4s, with a firmer, rideable surface. The terrain was very, very beautiful, with sand and camel grass. On either side, the mountains, and ahead, sand. This kind of terrain always caught my eye when I saw it on the Paris–Dakar, back when it was raced in Africa, and now I was pedalling across one very much like it.
After several kilometres on these tracks, and after I’d kept on asking to be allowed to ride on my own for a while, he tells me: off you go, and wait for us at the tree. How funny: with directions like that, in Asturias we’d be lost for sure. But curiously, as you make your way through Wadi Rum, you can see the tree in the distance. It’s the only tree there is, so special that it’s even easy to find on Google Earth or any other program with aerial photos. A special place in the middle of the desert.
From there to the end, nothing special. Wadi Rum came to an end and we moved onto a road, and a little further on onto the motorway (yes, in Jordan you can ride on the motorway by bike, although it’s still a bad idea). From one of the most beautiful places to ride to one of the ugliest (and most dangerous). We would ride quite a few kilometres along this hateful motorway to the city of Aqaba. It’s one of Jordan’s few coastal towns, on the Gulf of Aqaba, in the Red Sea. I don’t know what to say about this city; I think a cyclist I met recently, called Oriol, would call it guirilandia, tourist-land. A tourist town, private beaches, beer a metre from the water… very nice, yes, but not my style.
And that was the end of the trip, short but intense and very beautiful. I like Arab countries. A lot.