Desert Camping

With all these holidays and not a whole lot to do we decided to go camping. Apparently that's what people do around here in the winter to keep entertained.

It went kind of like this. We headed north out of town. There are 3 paved roads all the way out of my city. If you pick the wrong one it turns into dirt and then you have to drive across the field until you get to the paved road. Then we drove about 2 hours until we saw someplace cool we wanted to go, kicked it into 4WD and headed across the desert to get to the place we wanted. We probably went about 1 mile off of the road and were completely isolated in the middle of nowhere next to these really cool rock formations. We set up camp and then climbed around for a while. (She insisted she could do it all on her own...it took us a while)

We did all the typical camping things and then went to sleep. My bed consisted of a plastic mat type thing and 2 wool blankets in the sand, sad thing is that it was more comfortable than my normal bed except that it was freezing all night long.

We got up and hung out for a while and then these 2 random nomad guys just kind of show up out of the middle of nowhere on their donkeys with their herd of goats. One of our friends went out to talk to them. Turns out, they knew exactly when we'd gotten there, which piles of rocks we'd climbed the day before, etc. Apparently that whole time that we thought we were isolated we were not exactly alone. It seems cool to imagine that there were angry Arab men spies with big machetes hiding all up in the rocks and just waiting for us to fall asleep until they could move in but more than likely they heard cars drive in and automatically knew there were white folk around, then saw the smoke from our fire and knew where we were. Anyways, if you look closely at the picture you'll notice that they're holding a football for the first time...try explaining that in Arabic! They wanted to know if we were building a house there. Too bad we didn't know the Arabic to tell them that the wise man builds his house on the rock and the foolish man builds his house on the sand...although how do you explain that when the entire country is sand?!?!

While D was talking to these guys his wife took me out and taught me how to drive a standard. When we came back to camp D said that those guys had seen 5 cars in their lives and still knew that I was learning to drive a stick. Then they asked if he would teach them to drive since it appeared that their car was for hire! Here's the 'road' that I learned to drive on.