Wadi Rum

People have lived in this valley for far longer than the stone shelters and camps suggest. Flint tools, rock shelters and thousands of petroglyphs and inscriptions cut into the sandstone record hunting, herding and caravan traffic over some twelve thousand years, and the Thamudic, Nabataean, Greek and Arabic scripts on the walls of canyons such as Khazali are among the fullest sequences of desert writing anywhere. A Nabataean temple stands at the foot of the cliffs near Rum village, built beside a spring in a place that already mattered as a water source on the routes between Arabia and the Levant.

The valley's modern fame comes from the Arab Revolt. T. E. Lawrence passed through repeatedly during the campaign that took Aqaba from the Ottomans in 1917, and his account of the campaign in Seven Pillars of Wisdom made the valley famous in Europe; in the 1980s a rock formation near the entrance was renamed after the book. The Huwaytat hold land around the valley, and the Zalabia of Rum village have grazed and travelled here for generations; the village itself grew around a well and a post of the Desert Patrol.

Filming brought a second kind of attention. David Lean shot Lawrence of Arabia here in the early 1960s, and later productions used the valley as an alien planet in several science-fiction films. The valley is managed as a protected area with the local Bedouin communities, and in 2011 it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for both its landscape and its rock art. Camps and jeep tourism have grown steadily since.

The culture of Wadi Rum is Bedouin and tribal. The Zalabia, based around Rum village, and the Bedouin families of Diseh run almost everything a visitor encounters: the jeeps, the camels, the camps and the guiding. Vehicles and mobile phones have replaced tents and camels for daily life, but herding continues, and many families keep goats and a connection to grazing land alongside tourism work.

Hospitality is the strongest custom. Tea, black and heavily sweetened, is made on a fire and refilled without asking; coffee is Arabic-style, pale, bitter with cardamom and served in small quantities from a long-spouted pot. Refusing outright is awkward, and food is shared from a common tray. Evenings at camps follow a pattern of the zarb pit being opened, then music — the single-stringed rababa, hand drums, sung poetry — and the fire.

Manners are conservative and the desert is a public place: modest dress, discretion between couples, and asking before photographing people are all expected. Knowledge of the terrain is itself a cultural inheritance, with drivers navigating by rock shapes and the names of wells and passes rather than signs. Guides are licensed through the protected area authority, and the right to bring visitors into the valley is tied to local tribal membership, which keeps the income within the communities who live there.

Rum village has several hundred residents and is the only settlement inside the protected area, some 720 square kilometres of desert; Diseh lies just outside it to the north. Houses are low concrete blocks with courtyards, and the village has a school, a clinic, a mosque, small grocery shops and the headquarters of the Desert Patrol Corps. Almost every household is involved in tourism in some way — driving, guiding, cooking, running a camp or hiring out camels.

The working day is shaped by the visitors and the heat. Drivers collect guests at the visitor centre through the morning, tours run until the light softens in the late afternoon, and camp staff prepare dinner for the evening arrival. Midday in summer is spent in shade. Water is trucked or piped in from the Disi aquifer nearby, the same groundwater that supplies Amman, and electricity at remote camps often comes from generators and solar panels.

The chief current concerns are the volatility of tourism, which falls sharply with each regional crisis and takes the valley's whole income with it, and the pressure of camp building on the landscape. Employment is heavily male and seasonal, and younger residents often work between the desert and Aqaba. Goats and camels still move across the sand each morning, and families keep grazing rights that predate any tourist camp.

Cooking in Wadi Rum is Bedouin in style and built around what can be prepared with fire, sand and a single pot. The best-known dish is zarb: chicken, lamb and vegetables set in a metal rack, lowered into a pit dug in the sand, covered with a lid, a blanket and sand itself, and left to bake for hours until the meat falls apart. Lifting the rack out in front of guests is the centrepiece of most camp evenings.

Around it come the staples of Jordanian eating: rice, often with almonds and fried onions, hummus, mutabbal of smoked aubergine, tabbouleh, olives and pickles. Shrak, the thin flatbread cooked on a domed metal griddle over embers, is torn and used instead of cutlery, and galayet bandora, tomatoes fried with olive oil, onion and chilli, is a common simple hot dish. Mansaf, lamb in a sauce of fermented dried yoghurt called jameed served over rice and bread, appears for weddings and larger groups.

Drink is tea and coffee. The tea is black, very sweet and flavoured with sage or mint gathered in the hills; the coffee is cardamom-heavy and poured in a few mouthfuls at a time as a gesture of welcome. Breakfast at camps is bread, olive oil, za'atar, labneh, eggs, jam and more tea. Fresh produce arrives from Aqaba or Ma'an, and alcohol is generally absent from the desert.