Granted I was a big fat tourist in Egypt, sticking only to the major traveler sites for the most part. And touristy places are often somewhat disspiriting, especially in places where the tattered economy depends almost solely on the fat wallets with a lack of local knowledge that pass through. But Jordan has been saner, cleaner, friendlier, more enlightening, more hospitable, and with infinitely better food so far. Egypt was amazing, don't get me wrong, but I didn't bother to write about the constant scams, lies, harassment, and occasional food poisoning that became part of my daily routine there, and I skipped the parts where I was lonely or confused or frustrated. Adam the charming Bedouin, for example, at the end of our stay brought out a tabulated list of every kind thing he had done for us and charged us an outrageous amount for it. It's well worth it for sure, but it is not always a pleasure cruise. Jordan has lifted my spirits considerably.
The travel agent I had made friends with in Dahab arranged for both Olivier and I to leave too late to catch the cheap ferry to Jordan, and when I got to the ticket office in Nuweiba they told me I had no chance of catching the slow ferry so I had to catch the fast (read: expensive) one. But they didn't actually sell ferry tickets at the ferry ticket office even though the prices were clearly posted in English. So I had to go across town to another office, and when I got there and asked directions, a boy showed me to a man walking by with a suitcase. I wasn't about to give $50 cash to a man walking by with a suitcase if he didn't at least produce an official-looking badge or something, and he said suit yourself and jumped in a cab. I asked the boy again, where is the ticket office? He shrugged and pointed at the retreated cab.
I asked another man where I could buy tickets to the fast ferry, and he pointed me back to the first place I hadn't been able to buy tickets. I told him it was no good, and he said it was OK, and I tried in vain to argue. A small crowd gathered and I found myself wishing I had listened to the man with the suitcase. Finally a taxi driver said he would take me where I needed to go for no money, and my heart sank as we pulled up next to the first ferry ticketless office.
The driver insisted I give it a try, so I walked up to the window... and there was the man with the suitcase. He laughed and pointed at his blank shirt and said, "See? Badge." I gave him the $50 and walked toward the dock, but I was waylaid by some security guards who said I had to wait one hour, and why didn't I sit in the shade with them while I waited? I told them the boat was supposed to leave in an hour, but they didn't understand and so brought an "interpreter" who said, "I like you from the moment I saw you, understand? I like you from first moment." He'd obviously been to the same School of Awkwardly Hitting on Foreigners every other man in Egypt had been to, and I grabbed my pack and walked back to a hangar-like place where some Dutch tourists with the expensive tickets were waiting and just followed them. When I got on the fast boat, the slow boat was still there loading passengers. I spent my last five pounds on some bad mango juice and thanked god I was leaving all that behind.
I got to Aqaba around sunset and took a cab to town and asked him to drop me off at a travel agency so I could figure out how to get to Wadi Rum. He didn't understand and so pulled up next to a teenage boy who said his uncle was a travel agent of sorts and was going to Wadi Rum the next day, and why didn't I talk to him? I said thanks but I'd like to go to a travel agent office first, which turned out to be closed, so I went to talk to the uncle in front of his shop. He gave me some tea and told me he had two Dutch women and a German guy and Irish woman who were heading to Wadi Rum the next day, and he could give me lodging tonight with dinner and breakfast, transport to Wadi Rum tomorrow, a tour, and lodging and dinner in Wadi Rum all for 20 JD (after some bargaining). It sounded like a deal, and I was eager to meet some other tourists to talk to and get advice about Jordan from.
We went to his Bedouin camp about 7 km south of town and had a small BBQ of ground beef, tomatoes and cucumbers and bread and cheese. The best part was that across the water we could see Eilat, Israel; Taba, Egypt; Aqaba, Jordan; and in the distance to the south the lights of a small Saudi Arabian town. The Irish woman and German man were on their honeymoon and the two Dutch ladies were on holiday together. Mohammed the Bedouin guy entertained us with jokes and impressions while another Bedouin guy BBQed. The BBQing guy was like an unrealistic TV character. He looked like a garden gnome and never said a word, just puttered around with a faint smile on his face and picked flowers that he put all around the camp and artistically in our food that he cooked. He wore a Gilligan hat with the brim turned sharply up to add to the surreal effect. The next day we went snorkeling together, and to my horror he kept diving down and picking up immobile pieces of marine life and giving them to me as gifts. He was a surprisingly good swimmer though, like a walrus, and a nice guy.
The morning after the BBQ one of the Dutch women got sick, and without consulting me everyone decided to put off Wadi Rum and stay in Aqaba one day more until she got better. When I heard about it, I was a little put out, and Mohammed said he could take me there alone and give me a "special tour" where I'd see things most tourists never saw, and then the others could meet us the next day, but... no way.
So I was stuck another day in Aqaba, a new town that rose to prominence when Winston Churchill was carving up the Middle East with a pencil and ruler and made Aqaba Jordan's only outlet to the sea. It's most famous for being a ferry and cargo port and a place for people of Saudi Arabia, the most schizophrenic country I've heard of, to blow off steam buying duty-free alcohol and women on the weekends. Anything fun is strictly forbidden in Saudi, one of the most absurdly rich countries in the world, and women walk around like Darth Vader all in black with just their eyes peeping out, often behind screens.
I went snorkeling in the morning and then we went shopping and grabbed lunch, and then Gilligan grilled us up some fish while another Bedouin guy, this one who had studied in Amman, played the lute and the others sang along and little Mohammed, Mohammed's nephew, pulled us up to dance sometimes. We finished the meal with mint tea and sweet, snappy apples and I decided life wasn't so bad.
We got a late start to Wadi Rum, and the Dutch women decided not to go at all, so the honeymooners and I got in a cab with a guy who pointed to every semi truck on the Desert Highway and told us which country they were from. Most were from Saudi, Jordan, and Iraq. Funny how business can go on as usual in some ways even in an occupied country.
A wadi is a dry valley or canyon carved out by water that is not there anymore. Wadi Rum is a spectacular piece of desert northwest of Aqaba where Lawrence of Arabia hung out, and it is a nature reserve now. Sandy valleys surround giant mountains of rocks in grotesquely beautiful shapes. The mountains of Sinai are Precambrian, on the order of a billion years old, and I imagine those in Rum are of similar age. They were there when the seas covered the desert, and the patterns of erosion make some of them look like slightly melted Gothic cathedrals with flying buttresses and everything.
We took a jeep tour to some natural bridges, old rock carvings, places where treasure hunters had dug huge holes, and wells where Bedouin served tea and sold 5-minute camel rides to shirtless Hungarians. At one of the natural bridges, our guide and his son threw colored sandstone, red and blue and white, at rock walls and watched them explode in colorful dust. I couldn't help but join even though it seemed wrong to disturb the desert. It was fun anyhow.
The lute player from the night before had joined us, but there was no sign of Mohammed. It was October 9, Thursday, full moon, and we watched the sun set from some dunes protected in the east by an enormous rock wall. Our guide rustled up some burnt, undercooked chicken and delicious roasted tomatoes and onions, and we had tea and fruit again next to the wall while the lute player played. About that time, Mohammed appeared around a corner in full desert dress and said he'd been looking for us for hours, and he joined our circle.
The moon lit up rock mountains to the west and south while we were still in the moonshade of the wall, and it was otherworldly beautiful. The border of the moonshadow advanced on us until around midnight, when the full moon cleared the cliff above us, and it had a bright ring around it about 20 moon-diameters across. I sat alone on a dune and took it all in. The ring with the moon in the center looked like the dome of a great cathedral, and the rocks around looked like silent, jagged pillars over softly glowing sand. It was a moment where I understood the meaning of the phrase, "My cup runneth over."
I spent a long few moments of peace and gratitude until my solitude was shattered by Mohammed ambling over and trying to hit on me by waxing poetic about the night and again offering "special" tours alone and for free. I told him in no uncertain terms that I was not interested, but he only went away when I told him I wanted to go to sleep. I slept near the honeymooners by the fire and watched the moon until I fell asleep and dreamed that we did the jeep tour again, only this time Jon Bon Jovi was with us. I blame the desert air.
The next day Mohammed dropped me off by the side of the highway and said the bus to Petra would be coming along shortly. I waited about 20 minutes until a cab with three men already in it pulled up and asked where I was going. He said he would charge 10 JD to Petra, and it was my only option since there were no more buses coming that way. I didn't know whether to believe him or not, but I certainly didn't want to be stranded there. I was trying to argue him down to 5 JD when the bus pulled up. He shrugged and drove off.
I was the only woman on the bus and was directed to sit in the back, where the ticket-taking boy with a Petra T-shirt immediately started telling me about his uncle in Petra who has a good hotel that he could take me to. I said no thanks, and then another man came back and sat near me and asked where I was coming from. I said Wadi Rum. He said, "Oh, I am very sorry. That was not Wadi Rum that you were at. Wadi Rum is not for several miles. Did you go to Wadi Rum village?" No, I hadn't, and I also hadn't seen some of the other famous landmarks that were in my guidebook. I had seen some amazing things, but this guy was telling me it was just some random piece of desert where Mohammed, whom he claimed to know and also claimed wasn't really Bedouin, could get in for free. This made me feel confused and nervous, even moreso when the guy said he felt bad for me and was going to Wadi Rum in two days with two Hungarian women (it's something of a Hungarian invasion for the tourist industry of Jordan these days) and I could go with them for free. It sounded like a deal, and the guy produced an official-looking business card with "Recommended by Lonely Planet" written on it. But the whole thing sounded pretty fishy, and he'd said we would go by car with the two women and then later changed it to going by bus alone together, and after that I ignored him until he went away. But I hadn't really trusted Mohammed either, and his story that we weren't really in Wadi Rum sounded plausible enough. It made me feel cheated and downhearted again.
I put my things in a cheap hotel and headed straight for Petra, the single site in the Middle East I had been most excited to see. It was built by the Nabateans, a nomadic tribe from western Arabia, in the centuries before the time of Christ. "They became rich, first by plundering and then by levying safe-passage tolls on passing trade caravans traveling north with spices and slaves from southern Arabia. Petra later became the sophisticated capital of a flourishing empire which reached as far north as present-day Syria." --Lonely Planet. The Romans took it over in about 100 AD, and then changing trade routes caused Petra's importance to decline into obscurity by the 7th century. Only Bedouin people knew about the existence of its ruins until it was "rediscovered" (love that western mentality) by a Swiss explorer in 1812. It was still fairly obscure, and still inhabited by Bedouin, until the 1980s when the serious worldwide plunder started, the Bedouin were "relocated" further north, and the tourists moved in in force. Now the Bedouin make their money with drink and souvenir stands (some of the Bedouin handicrafts I recognized from souvenir stands in China), and several children entreated me to select and purchase a specimen from a box of rocks they were carrying around. I wished so much I could have come there in the 1920s like Richard Halliburton with a chartered plane and a Bedouin guide and been the only visitor there, not have to buy outrageously expensive tickets and dodge Hungarians and donkey taxi touts, and not have to leave before sundown. Petra under the almost-full moon would have been spectacular.
But Petra is one of the few places I've been whose charm still far overpowers the cheapening, disheartening specter of the tourist economy. The only entry is through the Siq, a narrow crack in solid rock that twists and winds its way almost a mile beneath towering cliffs. The way was paved by the Romans and you can see pipes and channels and dams all along it that were used to bring water to the city. When you come to the end of the Siq, you catch your first glimpse of Al-Khazneh, The Treasury, a wrongly-named Nabatean royal tomb that was believed to hold a fantastic treasure. Carved into a solid iron-laden sandstone cliff in exquisite detail and symmetry, the Treasury itself is one of the greatest treasures of the Middle East. No matter how many times you hear about it, the first glimpse from between the crack of the Siq is unforgettable and indescribable. It has a dusty roseish hue, and something about the carving and the massive size make it seem to shimmer. It is probably most famous nowadays for being in the last scenes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as the resting place of the Holy Grail. I had seen the movie of course, but had no idea at the time that the place really existed or where it was. All my bad feelings were washed away in the grandeur of the Siq, and coming upon the Treasury was something else again. I sat on the front steps of the ancient marvel to eat a Jordanian chocolate bar and reflect.
And once again my thoughts and solitude and transcendent mood were broken into by a guy who came by. He said, "Do you mind if I sit here?" Out of sorts, tired and distrustful of men, and exhausted from the past few days, I said rudely, "It's a free country." It occurred to me that I didn't know much about the degree of freedom of this particular kingdom, but that was beside the point. The guy sat down. "I'm Murat from Germany," he said politely. I shrugged. "How are you?" he asked. "Tired of being harassed." "What is 'harassed'?" "It's when someone talks to you when you don't want them to."
Either he didn't quite understand or he was the most tolerant and laid-back person I've met, because despite that beginning, we ended up having a civil conversation until I decided to climb to the Monastery in the mountains and curtly took my leave. At the top of the mountain we met again, taking in the spectacular sight of an even bigger facade than the treasury carved into another cliff and the desert scenery to the north, and I still felt no love or trust for strange men, but I began to feel bad about being so rude to someone who had done nothing at all to me. So I said hello again, and he suggested we sit on a rock to look out over the desert mountains. We did, and we talked, and it was nice. He said he was going to Wadi Rum the next day with a driver that the uncle of his friend Marwan had arranged for them. I told him about the big scam that had been pulled by Mohammed who had taken us to god-knows-where and then at the end tried to charge me more than we had agreed, and he said to cheer up because we were in a beautiful place now and that was all that mattered. It was good advice and I took it.
I asked if it might be possible to hitch a ride with them to Rum since I apparently hadn't actually been there last time, and he said it was no problem. We left Petra together and met his friend Marwan, another German who was half-Palestinian and had a lot of family in Jordan. Murat's family had emigrated to Germany from Turkey before he was born, so they both looked Middle-Eastern, and Marwan spoke Arabic with a German accent and Murat spoke Turkish with a German accent. It was cute. Both also spoke English well. Their driver gave me a lift to my hotel, and later they met me at my hotel and we went out for drinks. They were both very charming and funny and smart, and I felt better than I had in a while.
By the way, if you're wondering why in the end I trusted them even though I had only just met them, all I can say is, no one who speaks German could be evil.
I watched the end of Indiana Jones at my hotel and saw Petra and the Siq with Harrison Ford riding through and penitently dodging beheader-blades, and it was very cool.
The next day we met at Petra again and Murat and I just sat on a bench gazing at the Treasury and talking with an old Armenian-American woman from California and later on old Turkish-American woman who spoke in Turkish with Murat for a while, and they were as American as apple pie but with an old culture and tragic history to tell about as well. The Armenian-American had met her husband at Stanford and both were incredibly well-traveled and intelligent. It was fun talking to them, and then we went to have tea and gaze on the 8,000 capacity Roman theater carved in another cliff. A Bedouin was sitting on the stage talking loudly on his cell phone, and it echoed around the place. Petra is enormous and has something like 800 registered sites, including 500 tombs, a lot more than one can take in in a day, but we preferred to take in a few things a lot rather than a lot of things a little. At 1:00 we met Marwan and the driver and headed for Rum again. The driver charged me a nominal fee to hitch with them, of course, but it was definitely worth it.
The jeep tour we took turned out to be pretty much the same one I had taken last time at Wadi Rum. Yes, it had been Wadi Rum and the guy in the bus had been a creep. But so had Mohammed. In any case I was very glad to see the place again and with people I actually liked. We watched a fantastic sunset and then drove to a camp that a man from the Caucasus and his British wife had built for tourists in a spectacular desert location. Both had lived in Jordan for years and spoke excellent Arabic.
I have to go now to meet up with one of Marwan's uncles in Amman to see a caravan sarai. Murat and Marwan have left, sadly, but I seem to have inherited Marwan's family. Hospitality is a way of life here, and I have a problem that I feel almost bad to talk to shopkeepers and waiters, because once somebody knows me a little, they often refuse to charge me for food and services. I feel a great spirit and am very glad to be here. Amman is a relatively new city and is full of refugees from the occupation of Palestine, but most people are well-educated and friendly, things are clean and well-kept, and although the hundreds of thousands of apartments and houses on the 19 hills of ancient Philadelphia all kind of look alike, there's a charm to it, a sense that people are trying to make the town look as nice as they can under the circumstances, and seen from the Citadel at sunset, with the sky glowing pink and purple and the houses glowing sand-colored and the minarets glowing with green neon and flocks of birds wheeling around and evening prayers echoing in stereo... I like it. At my hotel I have met a lot of great people who are doing what they can to help the situations in occupied Iraq and Palestine, and I will write more about that when I can. And also explain the subject line.
Big love,
Pam