MONKEY TICKLE RUM PUNCH

Jordan is like a cleaner, more efficiently run Egypt, with town planning, a well respected traffic code and less aggressive touts. Sure, it’s a time consuming place to enter but once you’re here it’s tops.

I’ve spent the last couple of days getting my shoes dusty climbing the rocky outcrops in the desert at Wadi Rum and exploring the sandstone city of Petra. Both places are incredible in their own way. The scale of Wadi Rum is what makes it so striking; the monolithic sandstone outcrops, the cascading red-sand dunes, the vast and dusty valley floor and the endless blue sky above, which darkens at night to reveal almost as many stars as Idaho’s Phil Daum has bedbug bites on his welted body. The aspiring amateur dentist’s sleeping bag seems to have become infested with the vicious little bastards after a night on some Bedouin cushions in Luxor. Solutions are being sought.

In Egypt they do a roaring trade in dubious booze. It’s the kind of stuff that more than likely gets brewed up in illegal stills and emits the ferociously medicinal odour of the truly dangerous spirit. In order to give this rampant death juice the veneer of respectability it is packaged up to resemble products of less dubious provenance. Gordoon’s Gin is probably the most authentic of the rip-offs available – in appearance at any rate – and for less than eighteen Egyptian pounds provides enough liquor to get the homeless alcoholic who lives around the corner from my old house drunk enough to take a shit in the middle of the street. Again.

I mention Gordoon’s because it goes some of the way toward explaining why about twenty adults were sitting around a fire in the middle of the Jordanian desert playing Chinese Whispers. And it partially explains how the phrase “monkey tickle rum punch” turned into “Mark touches wrong parts” within the space of six whispers. Sadly everyone went to bed before I could suggest a game of Duck, Duck, Goose. In hindsight, given the amount of Gordoon’s consumed, that was probably for the best. We were a long way from medical help and third degree burns are difficult to treat.

Most of the time so far on this trip we’ve stayed in guesthouses, campsites and hotels but at Wadi Rum we pitched camp in the desert and slept under the stars. There are tents available on the truck but the nights are so mild and threat of rain so slim it’s less hassle and more fun to peg down a tarp and sleep in the open. As an added benefit you also get to wake up in the open too and at four am, just as the first light was beginning to show in the eastern sky, I was woken by the flick-flack of flip-flops on feet as someone padded off to take an early morning pee. I cursed them, until through squinted, sleep-heavy eyes, I caught sight of the sunrise. The sky above was a deep, starless blue and the desert valley a dirty, heavy grey but the tips of the sandstone outcrops on the eastern horizon were a blaze of school-bus yellow. A strip of orange hovered below an ochre red and the sky graded back down the colour scale through lavender and purple, all the way to the inky midnight blue of western sky. It was worth the lost sleep and was far and away The Coolest Thing I Saw Today! Well, a bunch of days ago now.

There were a few dubious and off colour jokes kicking around the truck the other day. Some of them are probably too blue to repeat in a forum which is most regularly read by my mum (although the title of the previous blog probably undermines that assertion a little) but you can have the following;

How did Helen Keller’s parents punish her? They rearranged the furniture.

That is all,

Dale Atkinson