Taken by Frances
Today I invite you to daydream for a few minutes and read about Frances's memories of her first impression of Wadi Rum:
My eyes were still closed tight, although my ears were open and I could hear the sounds of people not too far away from me, talking. The sounds were foreign, but somehow beautiful, musical, rhythmic. The sound was Arabic being spoken, not harsh at all like you are led to believe. I remembered where I was. I was in Wadi Rum, Jordan. I pinched myself and opened my eyes. Above my head stretched the fabric of a black handmade goat hair tent.
We had arrived late in the night after a long, tiring journey from Cairo and after something to eat we had collapsed onto our mattresses on the floor inside a lovely cozy Bedouin goat hair tent.
Listening to the voices I suddenly felt shy to emerge and meet the Bedouin people my mother and I had come to stay with for a couple of days. We procrastinated, waited until they returned to the village with the departing travellers. When we came out, the first thing I noticed was the silence, my heart leaped, I cannot describe the sensation of seeing the desert stretching away into the distance for the first time. Made all the more dramatic by the fact we had come from a large, smoggy city, and had arrived in the night when we could not see the landscape, so that in that moment I felt immediately transplanted into the desert. The rich red of the sand between my toes tickled, a huge towering mountain in the distance reached for the sky, begging to be climbed. I sat for some time just drinking up the view with my eyes.
If there is such a thing as love at first sight that was the moment for me.
