After seven days in the desert without a shower, we made a beeline to a hot shower in a hostel in Rum Village. Hot water has never felt so good!

Ordinarily this would be the point where we would have a day off (or two), but with the end of the trail in sight we made the call to push on. We did some hasty washing to try and remove the smell of smoke and goat from our clothes, and restocked for the final 3 days of the trail. Well… Gill and I did some washing. Matt decided his pants didn’t quite smell bad enough and left them be 🤢.

We also managed to track down a delicious falafel sandwich, which unfortunatley has become a bit rare of late. Southern Jordan is much less populated, and so our diet has become pretty boring. Most days involve UHT hummous, bread, chocolate bars, rice and whatever meagre vegetables we can scrounge.  And since Dana, any guesthouse or homestay we have stayed in serves variations of one dish: chicken with rice.  Not being great lovers of chicken to begin with, it’s starting to get hard to swallow, and we’re looking forward to the variation and seafood that the Red Sea and Aqaba will offer.

The next morning, we set back off into the desert with slightly lighter packs, thanks to the two further food and water drops we had arranged with yet another Ali.

At one point, the sky darkened, and we watched heavy clouds rolling towards us.  Rain then started falling, softly at first, before turning to sleet. We looked at the ice hitting our jackets and started giggling.  We had done basically the whole trail with no rain, and here we were in the middle of the desert, and now the rain was falling. As it fell, the it released the most unbelievalble smell and then set off an astonishing change of colours in the sand and rocks.

That afternoon, we met Ali at our pre-aranged drop spot, and he set about making us dinner (he had insisted on cooking a free meal for us).  We sat under the open sky, cross-legged around the campfire, drinking tea and listening to the meal bubble away.  We had been bemoning the idea of more chicken, but the meal that Ali cooked us was possibly the best chicken dish we had in all of Jordan.  He marinated the chicken in lemon juice first, and then surrounded it with lots of vegetables, chili, garlic, and tomato, in a shallow pan.  He then wrapped the pan in alfoil and set it over the fire. An hour or two later, the chicken was super tender and the sauce was caramelised on the bottom of the pan.  We ate it out of the pot with bread, warmed by the coals, with some yoghurt to wash it down. 

Our penultimate (and longest) day on the trail passed in a bit of a blurr, with one exception. About 2km from our final camp we stopped for a breather, and a teenager came running across from a small bedoin farm.  “Tea, come”, he said.  We tried to politely decline, but in true Jordanian form, he wasn’t taking no for an answer.  “Tea, come”, he insisted.

Matt and Gill gave in and agreed to have “a little tea” and headed over to his house, while I waved apologies and headed on (oh the horror!).

I later found out that Matt and Gill had been persuaded to have 4 cups of tea, plied with various snacks and were shown a whole bunch of photos and videos of the boys family and friends (including some with them firing kalashnikovs).

We spent our final night on the trail in a bedoin style tent that had been set up for Jordan trail hikers – a welcome shield from the cold desert breeze (we were still up at around 1000m and nights fall to around freezing).

Our final day on the Jordan Trail involved one last mountain pass, before dropping us out into a firing range and industrial zone. Our less than glamorous route then took us through a drainage tunnel under a highway. The tunnel wasn’t high enough to stand up in, so the passing involved a lot of squatting, crawling, groans, and hysterical laughter.

Finally, we arrived at the sea. Matt and Gill had a swim and then we found some fish and chips and an impressively huge fruity drink, before heading off to a hotel room to collapse.  It seemed a bit of an anticlimactic ending for what has felt like a pretty epic journey. 

We’ve finished a bit earlier than expected, so have decided to spend a week in Istanbul for a bit of a change of pace, before then heading back home to reality. 

We’ve got really mixed feelings about finishing. Some parts of me are relieved not to be putting back on stinky clothes and eating another camp meal (for a while at least), and the other part of me will miss the simplicity of life on the trail and the feeling of my body growing stronger with each extra day of walking.  But for now at least, we’re pretty happy to be in a comfy hotel room, with clean (ish) clothes and lots of food to choose from.

Section summary:
01/02 – Rum Village to near Wadi Waraqa, 18.8km, 345m ascent, 291m descent, wild camp
02/02 – near Wadi Waraqa to Final Camp, 29km, 748m ascent, 756m descent, wild camp
03/02 – Final Camp to Red Sea, 18.5km, 528m ascent, 1485m descent, Hotel.

Final tally = 482.3km, 17285m ascent, 18222m descent.