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From The Sunday Times

July 20, 2008

Bikes and bedouins in Jordan

Our intrepid reporter cycles 280 miles across Jordan and reveals six more epic two-wheeled adventures

Vincent Crump

One can book lots of lovely bicycle holidays. Some of the nicest are called things like Cycling for Softies, and usually involve a slow wobble through the sunflower fields of Provence, with regular breaks to top up your drinks bottle with pastis, or perhaps to string some onions from your handlebars.

So how come I find myself cycling across an entire Middle Eastern country? In less than a week? In June?

As travel miscalculations go, this could prove a biggie. In a mad moment of intrepidity, I’ve signed up for the inaugural Back Roads of Jordan tour with the adventure company Explore – an epic 280-mile ride from Amman to Aqaba through the Great Rift Valley.

This will entail cresting mountains, conquering deserts and swerving our bikes around gaping craters in the road – all in 35C heat.

It will involve army checkpoints where pimply teenagers point big guns in our general direction. And Bedouin villages where boys run out barefoot to shout hello – then chuck rocks at us as we ride past.

As far as I recall, this last bit did not feature in the brochure. “Stunning landscapes ... most meals included ... risk of death by stoning.” I know that we’re in the Holy Land, but I didn’t expect the trip to be quite as biblical as that.

MORNING TWO, 8.26am. A long, downhill sail on a snaking black road towards the River Jordan.

All around us, jelly-mould hills sparkle under the swollen sun, and the West Bank blushes pink in the distance, looking remarka-bly pretty for one of the most fought-over scraps of territory on the planet. My feet are off the pedals and it feels tremendous. All my pretrip anxieties abate. Then Jinny from Abertillery, riding beside me, hollers above the breeze-blast: “Lovely road surface, isn’t it?”

That’s when I know I am out of my depth – an enormous skyful of scenery, and the proper cyclists are admiring the tarmac. There are 18 of us in all, a mixed-nut assortment of cycling-club mileage monkeys, mountain-bike racers and sinewy triathletes. There is Phil, the off-road triallist: “I ran over my mate last week. He came off in a ditch and I just went straight over him.” There is “Colin the Computer”, who rides with a bespoke bike-mounted laptop so he can plot graphs of our mileage, ascent and speed. There is the plain-talking Sarah – so tough that, when smitten by sickness yesterday, she executed a full vomit without breaking her pedal rhythm. And there’s me – possibly the only participant to have a grocery basket on his handlebars.

And what a gaudy group we make. Leading from the front is our pacemaker, Ahmed, a Jordanian cycle champion with a maniac smile and an electric-blue spray-on body stocking. He looks like a psychedelic Smurf. We also have a 48-seat coach to scoop up fallers-by-the-wayside; a lorry stacked with suitcases, spares, mechanics, guides, cooks and their cousins; and a pickup truck just for the bottled water.

Oh, and did I mention our own private police car, ready to quell any perceived danger from the military checkpoints and boulder-wielding toddlers? Every so often, our cops stop the traffic so we can cross the road and have a cup of sage tea, brewed in a huge golden teapot that looks as if a genie should come out of it.

The main attraction, though, is us – a Lycra-clad carnival on wheels spinning into tumble-down towns that have clearly never seen the like before. Judging by the wide-eyed reaction of the locals, we are the most astonishing bunch to have turned up here for centuries, possibly since Moses came through with his Red Sea pedestrians.

IF YOU’RE planning to ride 55 miles in hairdryer heat, you may as well do it to the lowest place on earth. Our day-two destination is the Dead Sea, all downhill – yet it leaves me feeling properly worn out, as if I’ve wrung my lungs through a mangle.

True, there is no shortage of roadside incident to distract from the huffing and puffing. Farm hands wave to us from their tidy tomato fields and olive groves. Sad-eyed goats clank past with their sad-eyed goatherds. Boys bash their donkeys with sticks and race us through the villages. Dogs, possibly rabid, charge out from scrappy gardens to harry our bikes. And we occasionally dismount to view a ruined Roman citadel or crusader castle, pitted with spooky passageways and torchlit dungeons.

But yikes, it’s hot. When we finally arrive, my legs loll limply over the crossbar, like a baby’s in a highchair. Which is appropriate, as I’ve spent the afternoon dressed in a foam nappy and eating mushy bananas, with drool all down my chin.

The Dead Sea has been a health resort since biblical times: King Herod liked to holiday here during his downtime from baby-murdering. Given the wilderness we’ve just pedalled across, our hotel feels like a mirage, flickering palatially beside the hazy water. We dump our bags and stagger straight out to the beach for a bob in the saline slop.

There is something surreal, ritualistic even, about the scene we find there. The beach is a thin arc of silver sand, glittery with gobstopper salt crystals. Waist-deep in the water stand several bald men with white torsos and face packs of greenish mud, staring out at the sunset like Antony Gormley sculptures. A woman scurries among the shallows, scooping fistfuls of gloop into polythene bags, presumably for some private therapeutic purpose.

Continued on page 10 Continued from page 9 And a male Jordanian spa hand smears mud over a beached German Mädchen – nice work if you can get it in a country where even married couples are discouraged from touching hands in public.

Becky, the Explore tour guide, had warned us not to shave that morning, because super-brine tends to sting. Unfortunately, she forgot to warn us about spending six hours chafing our nethers on a sharp bit of saddle-shaped carbon fibre. The Dead Sea is about one-third salt, and every grain of it attaches to my saddle sores on impact. There follows a tragicomic moment when we all flail about in a doomed bid to defy natural buoyancy and wallow belly down, our burning bottoms sticking out of the water, like a pod of embarrassed hippos.

I’D PREFER to draw a polite veil, a hijab, if you like, over the next couple of days. We spend them riding the King’s Highway, a squiggly mountain road designed by Satan. One especially sadistic hill takes me half a day to climb, though it does bring a fleeting reward – the madcap plummet down the other side, easily the fastest I’ve travelled on two wheels. Colin the Computer records a top speed of 57.4mph – but he’s a nutter. For the rest of us it’s mainly a case of not falling off – brakes jammed into handlebars, eyeballs jammed into skulls – until we touch down at the bottom in Little Petra.

You don’t have to arrive at Little Petra by bike – but it does help the feeling that you’ve stumbled on a miracle. Chiselled into the sides of a skinny sandstone canyon 2,000 years ago, this is a sort of bijou suburb of (big) Petra, the fabled troglodyte city of the Nabataeans, which we’ll be visiting tomorrow. It is astounding, and we’ve got it to ourselves – just us and two little girls from a trinket stand. They wear bullet-shaped headdresses made of silver charms, which may or may not be 1st-century Nabataean cycle helmets.

There is plenty more magic to come. We get a day off to explore Petra, which utterly lives up to its status as a “new” wonder of the world. And our final night is spent camping out in a big Bedouin tent made of animal hides, in a sandless desert of sharp, shining pebbles and sunset silhouettes. Wood smoke rises, Abdul the guide shares stories of Jordanian life, and some rather beautiful bonding goes on over the campfire kebabs. It’s the Arabian Nights with knobs on. A few of us decide to bed down outdoors, under the spangliest black blanket I’ve ever seen, and count the shooting stars.

We are all pretty knackered by now. Over breakfast, somebody pulls out the Explore brochure, and we have a giggle at the official trip grading for Back Roads of Jordan. “Moderate to strenuous,” it says.

“If this has been moderate to strenuous, what the hell is strenuous?” wonders a sinewy triathlete. “Unicycle the Amazon in a long weekend?”

THE LAST day should be horrible: our longest leg yet, 70 miles through the furnace-like Wadi Araba desert, where even the camels wear factor 50. It’s not horrible, though, it’s a blast, a helter-skelter hurtle through the donkey-racers and the Bedouin traders under yet another frieze of red-hot mountains to Aqaba.

Important parts of my body have gone numb by now, leaving me free to revel in the Tantric sameness of the desert. For someone who’s addicted to the dappled, pastoral countryside of England, it feels surprising to be in such thrall to nothingness, but the crinkle-cut horizon of arid hills, the interplay of shadows, is mesmerising. The spokes turn, the desert sings ... I never want the road to end.

And we’ve done it. There, up ahead, twinkles the Red Sea, with its promise of hot showers to frolic in, orange coral to snorkel around and, with any luck, a big pyre onto which we can hurl our bikes, helmets and Lycra nappy-pants. I’ve made it here in one piece, a piece 7lb lighter than before, and I’ve achieved something. And, if you don’t mind, I must mention the road surface on this final ride: impeccable.

Travel details: Explore’s 10-day Back Roads of Jordan tour (0844 499 0901, www.explore.co.uk) starts at £1,024pp, including flights from London, all transfers, nine nights, B&B (one in a Bedouin camp), most meals and bike hire. There are six cycling days, with distances of between 35 and 70 miles. Forthcoming departures include October 4, October 18 and November 1. Or try Exodus (0845 863 9600, www.exodus.co.uk).

Six more wheely big adventures

Here are more freewheeling adventures in far-flung places – we’ve given each a star grading out of five for strenuousness, and, unless stated, all are guided group departures, with prices including bike hire, backup vehicles, flights from London and transfers.

WINE AND WATERWAYS IN SLOVENIA

Sounds like a challenge: cycle four countries in six days. But Inntravel’s new self-guided cycle in the Slovenian borderlands is a doddle of a pedal, a gentle wobble along bucolic watersides from winemaker to winemaker. It starts picturesquely, in Ptuj, Slovenia’s oldest town, which crams its riverside with Roman ruins. You won’t want to leave, but the vineyards are calling, and the next four days are spent spinning slowly through the timeless back country of the Stajerska region, Slovenia’s “secret corner”. You’ll cross briefly into Croatia, Hungary and Austria, even visiting Jeruzalem – a town whose wines are said to be so good, the crusaders who lodged there never made it to the Holy Land. Best check for yourself, though, eh?

Details: departures any time until October 11; four days’ cycling (20-30 miles per day); from £687pp, B&B, including route notes and three dinners, but not flights or transfers;01653 617946, www.inntravel.co.uk.

Or try: an easy-going tootle among the “fairy chimneys” of remote Turkey, on Explore’s Cappadocia Freewheel tour (0844 499 0901, www.explore.co.uk).

Challenge rating:

BEAVERS AND BOULES IN CANADA

Reached via Montreal, Lac Saint Jean is a vast inland sea in the heart of quintessential Quebec – which adds a certain je ne sais quoito the cycling experience. The lakeside scenery looks like classic

Canadian wilderness: think scudding waterfalls, snorting moose and huge lungfuls of pine-scented fresh air. In between, you’ve got cute villages with pavement cafes and pétanqueon the square. Hooked on Cycling has a nine-day, self-guided tour circling the entire lake on the 160-mile Véloroute des Bleuets, a set of flattish cycle tracks so benign, you can even consider taking the kids. There is plenty to entertain them: beach time, animal sanctuaries and lots of wild swimming.

Details: departures daily until September 15; five days’ cycling (20-40 miles); from £627, B&B, including two extra nights in Montreal, but not flights (expect to pay about £300); 01501 744727, www.hookedoncycling.co.uk.

Or try: a hairy-chested mountain-bike challenge in British Columbia or the Colorado Rockies, with KE Adventure (01768 773966, www.keadventure.com).

Challenge rating:

SKULLS AND STUPAS IN CAMBODIA

Ancient Angkor isn’t just one temple, it’s a city-sized orgy of intricate pyramids, smothered in subtropical forest. Which means it’s bang-on for exploring by bike. Your first stop, however, on Kumuka’s 11-day Cycle Cambodia trip is the capital, Phnom Penh. Next, it’s out into the rice paddies of the Cambodian back country, where babies and buffalo bathe together in the levees. You’re headed for the coast, and some tanning time in Sihanoukville. Finally, transfer to Angkor for a full-day pedal among the ghosts of the Khmer god-kings.

Details: there are year-round departures; seven days’ cycling (12-40 miles); from £740pp, including hotel accommodation and most meals, but not flights (expect to pay about £750); 0800 068 8855, www.kumuka.com.

Or try: adding Vietnam to the mix, on a 23-day Cycle Indochina trip with Intrepid Travel (020 3147 7777, www.intrepidtravel.com).

Challenge rating:

MONKEYS AND MACHU PICCHU IN PERU

Can there be a more scintillating stint in the saddle than day five of Skedaddle’s two-week odyssey through Peru? It starts at Tres Cruces, on the rooftop of the Andes, with a sensational sunrise. Then it’s helmets on and freewheeling down from the barren Altiplano into the jungle. The itinerary is a mix of Amazonian cloud forest and Andean ridge rides, cunningly compiled so that the cycling is mostly downhill. In fact, the five-day trek on foot to Machu Picchu, which completes the trip, is tougher than anything on two wheels.

Details: departures in spring 2009; six days’ cycling (25-35 miles); from £1,395, plus £120 for optional bike hire, including hotel stays, camping and meals, but not flights (expect to pay from £900 for a return to Cuzco); 0191 265 1110, www.skedaddle.co.uk.

Or try:a climb across the Andes into the Patagonian lake district, with Global Adventure Guide (0808 234 6779, www. globaladventureguide.com).

Challenge rating:

CAMPING AND KILIMANJARO IN TANZANIA

Don’t worry, you’re not cycling up Kilimanjaro – but it does make a dramatic push-off point for a bespoke nine-night Tanzanian bike safari organised by The Ultimate Travel Company. You’ll start in a bush camp beneath Kili’s snow-capped cone, then it’s away across the Masai steppe, for encounters with warrior tribesmen, gazelle herds, ostriches and possibly lions. The final ride is a cracker: from the Masai market town of Mto wa Mbu up the steep flanks of the Rift Valley escarpment, where a treat of a hotel awaits for swimming and sundowners on the terrace, gazing back at the route of your epic ride.

Details: best times to travel are September, January or February; five days’ cycling (20-45 miles); from £1,875 for a tailor-made trip, including flights, camping, hotels and meals; 020 7386 4646, www.theultimatetravelcompany.co.uk.

Or try: taking the kids on a family-friendly cycle safari in Tanzania, with Escape Adventures (00 64 21 548 991, www.escapeadventures.co.nz).

Challenge rating:

TEA AND TIGERS IN INDIA

Nothing gives your pedalling that extra push like the thought that a tiger might spring from the jungle to say hello. Exodus’s 15-day Kerala and Tropical India trip begins in wild style, with a spin through the Western Ghats, the former hunting preserve of the Mysore maharajahs, where tigers slink and elephants stomp. Next comes a mile-long slog up the hairpinning road to Ooty hill station, summer capital of the Raj – either horrifying or a highlight, depending on how masochistic you are. The second week is a seaside glide south through Kerala.

Details: departures from October to April; 9-11 days’ cycling (17-60 miles); from £1,488pp, including flights, hotel accommodation and most meals; 0845 863 9601, www.exodus.co.uk.

Or try: a hardcore Himalayan expedition in Bhutan, with SpiceRoads (00 66 2 712 5305, www.spiceroads.com).

Challenge rating: