I kept a list of the things your body does on long hikes:
Put one foot in front of the other
Swing round a backpack with ease
Refuse the backpack if you failed to pay sufficient attention to the weight distribution inside it
Lose weight
Use its abs when riding a donkey in the middle of the night.Interestingly, donkeys’ bodies appear even more perfectly attuned to a life of trotting. Their legs find a steep way in the perfect dark, with ease. It’s because their hind legs take the exact step they’ve already felt out with their front legs.
Sleep. Which donkeys can do standing up.
Trek notes: November 20, 2019.
The last day. It’s weird packing up my stuff for the last time, but nevertheless satisfying to see all the things I’ve needed over the last four weeks fitting in that same one pack. I retrieve a pair of dirty socks from the bathroom of our Amman hotel room. I find an abandoned T-shirt under the bed, where it has apparently gone unnoticed by the establishment’s stafffor several days. In the six days we have stayed here, between contentedly wandering the city and visiting the Zaatari refugee camp, we have turned room 211 (the ‘Petra Vault’) into its own world. The same possessions that have been given carefully weighed-out places on our backs have now become all strewn about.
And to think that most of the people we met at Zaatari had fled with literally just the clothes on their backs and the children on their hips. Over years in the camp they had bought the rugs and cushions they had beckoned us to take a seat on, and the pans and washing brushes that adorned their ramshackle caravans now. And they had expanded their families and their lives. A person’s universe can be fitted into as tiny a space as can be found to be safe, apparently - but a home is something else, as we have heard repeatedly from so many people on this trip.
If the hotel room had been a tent, we’d have found similar comfort in laying those things out as far and wide as the canvas walls would have allowed. When we slept outside in Little Petra I had known a similar sense of purpose in throwing the mattresses and sleeping bags in the bed of the truck at dawn and in folding myself once more on the back seat of the vehicle to be driven back to town - an adventure well spent. In the Dana Biosphere Reserve, nights under the stars had become the most routine breaks from walking.
