Duration
Full day (8 hours)
Group size
Up to 12
Language
English, Arabic
Sixteen kilometres, all of it down. You start at 1,200 metres in Dana village among Phoenician juniper and half-collapsed Ottoman stone houses, and finish nearly a thousand metres lower on the floor of Wadi Araba, where every plant has thorns and the ground is black with copper slag from mines the Romans ran and the Bronze Age started. The change happens slowly enough to watch: juniper, then acacia, then not much at all. A donkey carries the group kit and the water, so you walk with a day pack. We stop for lunch in the shade at Shag al-Reesh around 11.30 and reach Feynan by mid-afternoon, where a 4x4 takes you out over a rough track to Rashaydeh. The honest part: downhill sounds like the soft option and it is not. Eight hours of braking on loose gravel will find your knees, and there is almost no shade after eleven. From June to September the wadi floor sits above 40C, so we start at 5am or we do not go at all. If four hours of walking at home is not comfortable, take our birding morning instead and enjoy your holiday.
We are eleven guides from Qadisiyah, the village above Dana, and most of us learned these trails herding goats long before the reserve had a name. Dana Trail Collective walks. No jeep tours, no camel photo stops. We take you down Wadi Dana to Feynan, through the water in Wadi Ghuweir, and out along the Rummana escarpment at first light when the Syrian serin is actually singing. Fees are split evenly across the collective and the Feynan drivers are paid properly. We will also tell you honestly when a route is beyond your fitness, because Dana sits at 1,200 metres and Feynan is close to sea level, and the mountain does not negotiate.
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