My father, Sheik Atieg, served as guard for King Talal and was the first Bedouin to show tourists the beauty of Wadi Rum. In 1964, after assisting the Bedouin effort for filming Lawrence of Arabia, my father guided the first tourists through Wadi Rum, hosting a British military group for a full month and showing them the area’s mountain hikes, vistas and ancient sites. By 1984, when climbers Tony Howard and Di Taylor arrived to explore and open up its wealth of climbing routes, it was again my father who hosted them and my family who guided them throughout the region.
