On The Road – TKH – Jordan Trail Part 4

This is the exit of Wadi Ghwayr as the water running through it enters Feynan valley. Somewhat downstream from this location the stream is dammed up and the water is piped through 4″ PVC pipes into the fields in the valley. Alittle bit of water makes it past the dam but then just disappears underground into the sandy/gravely stream bed.

An illustration of why I say “lush” rather than lush. For the standards of the Jordanian South there is a lot of green here.

Higher up in the valley the drainage narrows considerably to become a slot canyon for a couple of hundred of yards.

I then returned the way I came and hiked into and along Wadi al-Malaqa.

This is the mountain range on the East side of Wadi al-Malaqa. Very steep, bone dry. There is exactly one pass going over the range, an old trade route and camel path.

On this day my GPS did not work at all owing to jamming. My location indicator had me in a suburb of Amman, where I definitely was not! I managed to find the entry to the pass just by dead-reckoning. I was pretty pleased with myself. There was some luck involved and probably more luck than skill because I had assumed that I would be able to see the switchbacks of the camel route from below and would know that I was in the right spot. No such luck! I did not see anything but found myself at the bottom of the route anyway.

It was a day of finding one’s way through fields of boulders. When I was lucky I could latch on to a goat/sheep trail for a while, but of course the animals and their herders are not en route to Petra, so one has to stay alert and leave the animal trail to stay on course for one’s own objective.

A look back across Wadi al-Malaqa. I had come form the right for many a mile along this feature-less landscape. The rocky outcroppings you see are most often not high enough to appear on the (lousy) map I had at my disposal, so they are useless for finding one’s position by triangulation.

This image is of the pass that makes it possible to get through the chain of mountains shown earlier. It must be a long time that camels were going over here. I saw no camel shit for one and the young camels these days would just refuse to climb the trail the shape it was in. It was good enough for a hiker, and for donkeys apparently as there was donkey shit everywhere.

I stayed at the top of the pass for the night behind a rockwall somebody else had built to break the wind.

This is a  look ahead into Nabatean country in the direction of Petra. Immediately to the left of the dead bush at the right margin of the image you see a wadi, Wadi Fayd, with some greenery in it. Next morning I would be following this wadi to a very welcome spring where I could rehydrate in the shade (yes!) and load up with water for the next two days.

In the right half of the picture, just below the horizon, you see a mountain sloping up from left to right. This was my next objective, reach that area and find a way up on that mountain.

At the top of the sloping mountain from the previous image I had a look back to where I had come from. I had come across the mountain range at a location to the right of the frame of the picture.

At the right you see a giant drainage cutting through the mountains and going out to Wadi Malaqa. As large as it is, there is apparently no way to get from there to where I am standing.

Continuing on from here there was a very challenging contour across an extremely steep mountainside an a very rough “trail”. Very uncomfortable, but these stretches get dealt with like a giant salami, one step/slice at a time and before you know it, it’s done.

After the contour I reached a karstic area where the limestome is eroded in bizarre formations. Such areas are typically orienteering nightmares as the lines of sight are very short and you never know whether the path you decided to take 50 ft back will be going through.