July 4th, 2009    Page 2

We arrived before noon and approached a lonely building on the side of the road, where guides and employees of the reserved welcomed us. We signed the necessary paperwork and were instructed to leave anything that we did not want to get wet in the car, where they will watch it. The employee even looked at me and advised that I change into shorts. My pants would get wet he said.

There are different levels of wetness, and in hindsight, the operators were very vague in simply saying we would get “wet.” Would are shoes get wet? Knees? Perhaps waist down? Or did he mean that we would get drenched, completely saturated. We had no idea, although he gave us a life jacket. Once could have simply justified a life jacket as a legal precaution.

Having donned my swimming trunks that I had packed for the Dead Sea shore, a t-shirt, a white towel (for drying whatever got wet), a bottle of water, and the life jacket, my companions and I were on our way. To arrive at the entrance of the river’s canyon, we walked across a platform and the descended a ladder into the warm river water. Starting off, we landed into the river about thigh deep, yet quickly encountered dry land again. From the outset, it seemed that the water’s depth would not exceed our knees.

How wrong I was.

The self-guided hike through the Wadi Mujib became something altogether unexpected. Instead of a light

hike with the occasional wading, the entire hike was in the river that had eroded the mountains to create a majestic, striated canyon out of sandstone. At times, we marched through the water, waist deep, but for the most part, we swam up river. Fortunately, most the trail involved slow moving water, but at some points, we were clinging to one another and to the installed ropes meant to aid travelers. Without those ropes and the lifejackets, the current would have pulled us under the river’s depths. Fortunately, the life jackets ensured we bobbed.