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Here are photos on Google+ from the half day walk we did up Wadi Feynan. They look better and you get a photo sphere :-)
Similar to Jarash Hippodrome, I found out about Feynan Ecolodge by watching CNN. It's usually not a trustworthy news source but ended up being quite good for tourism advice! Continuing the story about Karack Castle, I did end up meeting a guide at Feynan the next day who had participated in diggings there as part of his archeology degree. He said the castle actually has 7 levels but only 2 have been excavated. It was surprising and heartening to encourter a Bedouin, our tour guide, who had a university degree. He spoke excellent English and knew quite a bit about Western lifestyle and used that to great effect in furnishing his descriptions of local customs and other things with compelling analagies for us. For example, he showed us an oleander bush the leaves of which can be boiled for an hour or so and then if you dip your goats or sheep in the liquid it will fix their dandruff. He compared it then to Sunsilk shampoo!
This illustrates another fine characteristic of our guide, Ali, he had an excellent sense of humour. A fellow Bedouin of his that we met on the half day walk he guided us on also showed he was a joker by asking on of the girls with us where she was from. This is a man who has lost most of his teeth and looked about 80. Our guide translated, saying he thought he had met her before, causing a lot of laughter. It was great that this man who from our Western perspective was living in poverty as a nomad surviving off the land should see nothing wrong with his life, even that things were going so fine as to make jokes with perfect strangers with a laugh about it afterward. All of the Bedouin we met had a cheeky sense of humour like this and it made them very approachable and fun to be around. A lot of their jokes had a frankly sexual bent, the number of different plants and drinks that were described half seriously as some sort of aphrodisiac or Bedouin viagra was hilarious. On our guided walk for example he mentioned that if you drink camel milk consistently for five years it has a viagra type of effect, along with a couple of other plants that I forget the names of. It was all done in a very playful way often combined with comments about Bedouin men taking more than one wife and the struggles, chortle, this brings.
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