… reminded us of the drive to Laguna del Inca in Chile

Today, we saw a train carrying… well, just open carriages!

It was a memorable desert stay. If any of you ever come to this part of the world, please look up Orbit Camp. We had simply the best time. Great staff. Awesome service. To give you an idea, when we said our wine and beer was getting hot in the camp, they got us a new, small fridge and put it in!!

Off to Petra. Not high on my list. I am not big into archaeology or long dead people for that matter. But Her Highness wants to. So, here we go!!

After all the tiring trips into the desert, there is even more tiring job of picking pictures, blogging them and posting them in Facebook.

I am sure you are far more tired of reading the posts.

The solution is for you to block me and save you all the tiredness. Meanwhile, I am going to jump into the hot tub in my desert camp (I mean glamp) to get rid of my tiredness.

We had live music today. The Bedouin singer has come from Yemen. He played the ubiquitous Bedouin instrument (the “Oud”) and sang.

The second difference is after all the Arabic and Turkish coffee, today, we had American coffee – also known as wine and beer!!

What a luxury in life!! Our local driver’s (Awad) wife had cooked chicken for us which Awad and his cousin heated up in the fire they lit. And we sat around and made a meal out of it. I asked Awad’s cousin why he was not joining us. Seems like he had gone to school and then come back home early (Thursdays are early school off days), finished his lunch and then met us at that spot to help heat up lunch and make chai.

“How old are you?”, I asked him.

“Sixteen”, he replied thru my translator friend Mahmud.

He lives in the desert, studies and then helps the family with earning income.

Had to reflect on how easy I had it growing up, let alone my own kids. (all our parents wanted was that we kept studying)

… some of us were laying down like a Queen waiting for the tea to be served!!

But first, of course, karak chai!!

We found a spot in the shade of a large mountain, lit a fire and started making tea.

Not sure what the material was but the red fine rock particles were coming off when we rubbed our fingers against it. This, we were told is used to make cosmetics.