Scorpian Hunting in Dana

The month of December is 50% holidays for us. We spent the last one, which was the Eid in honor of God letting Abraham slaughter a sheep instead of his son (Ismail or Isaac), at one of Jordan's National Parks - Dana. This is about an hour north of Petra but with the same sandstone cliffs (but no carved tombs).

On the first day, we did a not very fun hike - because it was straight down and then straight up.




The rooms were quite plain but as you can see the view from our balcony was beautiful.


We got up early the next day - ready for our guided hike. V ery few (read almost no) trails in Jordan are marked and so if you go hiking you usually need to hire a guide to help you find the interesting things. Our guide Khalid started the day telling stories about quail hunting including wearing a mask that apparently makes it easier to catch quail (this point was confusing since I assume quail don't like coyotes either).



Our first break during the day. Some of the trees that were pointed out to us were 800 years old - I can't remember if this was one of them - but all of the old trees looked pretty scraggly - this is a desert so no majestic redwoods.





At our second break, Khalid started a fire and made us sage tea. He also passed around date cookies that his wife had made.

Part of our hike was through the Valley of the Scorpians and Khalid acted as though his tip was a function of the size of the scorpian he was able to locate for us. The first scorpian he found was a black scorpian which he dismissed as not very dangerous. He then proceeded to find half a dozen yellow scorpians which he said would all kill a child. He also spent time poking them with sticks so they would walk around. This seemed foolhardy to me - but this also seemed to be part of what hiring a guide got us (in addition to date cookies)