"What remained were people": Tamar's story in the Wadi Rum Desert
Tamar, 39, jack-of-all-trades, incl. full-time adventurer
Tamar (39) describes herself as a bit of everything, including a full-time adventurer. She knows from experience how much space nature can create to reconnect with yourself, but also how quickly it can bring people closer together. “‘In nature, you’re working together on something bigger than yourself,’” she explains. “‘You walk, carry things, navigate, set up camp, solve problems, and sometimes you literally have to help each other.”’ Those shared experiences often lead to conversations and connections that might never happen in an everyday setting.
For Tamar, that combination of experience, challenge, reflection and connection is particularly powerful for young people. Nature gives them the chance to encounter themselves, try things they haven’t done before and discover that they are often capable of much more than they expected. It is why she sees nature as more than a setting for activities. The environment itself becomes part of the learning process.
There is one experience in particular she keeps thinking about. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Tamar guided a group in Jordan that, on paper, seemed unlikely to become a close-knit group. There were people who were strongly in favour of vaccination and others who were fiercely opposed to it. People had very different views on Israel and Palestine. There were vegans travelling with a group for whom the Bedouins had slaughtered a goat as a special gesture. Atheists, Christians and Muslims were all together.
“‘You might think a group like that could never really become one, but as soon as we left the inhabited world behind and stepped into the sand of the Wadi Rum desert, all those labels quickly faded into the background.””
They walked together, shared food and water, helped one another and sometimes had no choice but to rely on each other. There was no phone signal, no news, no social media and, perhaps most importantly, no audience to perform for or convince. “‘What remained were people,’” Tamar says. “‘Nature taught us to respect each other. It didn’t force anyone to change their opinion. It simply allowed us to experience that you can respect, trust and help each other without having to agree on everything.”’
By the end of the trip, the differences were still there. What had changed was their importance. They had been replaced by something more fundamental: a shared experience and the realisation that, despite all those differences, they could take remarkably good care of one another.
That is one of the things Tamar sees happening outdoors. You are pulled out of your comfort zone more quickly and placed in situations where you cannot control everything. You have to improvise, make decisions, deal with discomfort and sometimes literally put your trust in yourself or someone else. In a group, this can reveal qualities that might remain hidden indoors: leadership, patience, humour, care, responsibility and the ability to ask for help or offer it.
She believes this is increasingly important for young people. They are constantly surrounded by stimuli, opinions, images and expectations. Through their phones, they are connected to the rest of the world around the clock, but that does not necessarily mean they feel connected to themselves, to other people or to their surroundings. “‘Nature offers something that’s becoming increasingly scarce: space without noise,’”
That doesn’t mean she believes young people should simply be taken away from their phones because technology is somehow bad. Instead, she wants to offer them something that is compelling enough to make the phone irrelevant for a while. Something that captures their attention so completely that they forget to check what is happening elsewhere.
Her favourite format is therefore to take people to places without phone reception for longer periods, often into unfamiliar environments where they encounter other cultures and sometimes travel with animals. The circumstances naturally create situations in which people step outside their comfort zones, learn to trust themselves and each other, and become much more aware of what is happening in the present moment. What starts as an adventure can become a journey inward as well.
There is one thing Tamar is particularly keen to avoid: taking young people into nature simply to teach them another lesson or make them work on themselves. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can give them is a space where they don’t have to perform, produce or constantly improve. “‘As far as I’m concerned, the power lies in less fuss, and simply enjoying playing outside.”’
Check Tamars work here: