I'm not gonna lie, the tour isn't exactly the most exciting thing in the world. There's the national museum which mainly consists of a lot of old rocks laying around where you can touch them...although I have heard that it's one of the nicer and more organized museums in this part of the world. But the cool thing about the museum is that you can actually walk into the ruins. They just excavate temples and things from the middle of the desert, then bring them here and put them in these tin buildings. Then they charge 50 cents to walk through them where you can actually touch the hieroglyphics and stuff. At first it felt kind of strange...these are the kinds of things that, back home, they don't even let you take pictures of in the museum, much less get close enough to carve your name into the wall! Random thought, but speaking of carving your name in the wall, the oldest name that we found was from 1861.
So here's a picture of me under this walkway that's from BC. If you look closely, you can see the pictures engraved in the stone.
After the museum, we did some other stuff, a little handicraft shopping, some lunch, and then it was out to the camel market. I had heard that the camel market was a ways out, but I didn't realize that the Sandbox definition of 'a ways out' was so much different than the Texan definition of 'a ways out. Basically, we drove to the end of the city, then to the end of the paved road, then to the end of the dirt road. You would think that at this point we might be close, but no...we still had another 10 miles to go through the desert. It was a rough ride, especially given that there are no roads and if you slow down too much, you'll sink into the sand and get stuck, so you just take the bumps and keep going.
This is a picture of us on our way. We had to stop and check something so we 'pulled off the road' so we wouldn't be in anyone else's way and then took advantage of the photo op. Our tour guide seriously made sure that we pulled off the road. He also kept telling us things like 'turn on that road' or 'at the next road we'll make a left'....what road???? Once we got out there, it was crazy. There weren't a whole lot of camels...apparently this is the off-season. But we did get to see a few camels and be the center of attention for a while.
When we got there, there were maybe 3 camel-herder guys. All the sudden, they just started coming from the middle of nowhere...seriously, you can see that we're in the middle of nowhere and I never figured out where they came from...they just kept appearing from the horizon. It was just so wierd to be the only foreigner. Here in the capital, there are tons of NGOs and foreigners so people don't tend to be surprised. Out here, kids were running away from us b/c they were scared. We let our tour guide do most of the talking for us, given our limited Arabic skills, but they were trying to figure out what language we were speaking for about 10 minutes before they finally asked. When we told them English, they were amazed. Then they asked if we were Chinese, to which we replied 'No, American', and then they were just awed to actually be seeing Americans.
The guys wanted to ride them, but these camel-herder guys wanted to charge an outrageous amount just b/c we're foreigners, but we live here, so we know that it should really be free, so no one rode, but they did let us take a picture for no charge. And then on the ride back, our tour guide took us a different way through some the refugee areas. Supposedly, these places used to be actual recognized camps but someone just decided that they didn't need the aid anymore and they closed them. There are still UNCEF compounds out there, but they're not being used. So now there's just a lot of really poor people living under tarps and in houses made of pretty much anything that they can find. Villages like this one are also full of people who are displaced from the war in the west. 
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