Jordan

I probably should've done more research before taking a bus from the Central Bus Station in Jerusalem to the Allenby Bridge border crossing to Jordan. It turns out that they won't let you through the Israeli security checkpoint there unless you have a Jordanian passport or a Jordanian visa already in your passport. I had neither. They laughed at me and told me I should've done more research. So much for relying on the advice of the information booth at the bus station. I waited for an hour at the bus station in the middle of the desert with large lizards for the next bus to arrive and carry me north to a different border crossing where they issue the visas on the Jordanian side. From there, it was 39 Jordanian Dinar to get me to Amman, a ride which took about an hour and a half. Incidentally, 1 JD is about $1.40 USD. Jordan is not a cheap place to be.

We rode through the Jordan Valley, villages and farms en route to the big city where many people live who can't afford to live in Amman. The cab driver spoke English well and was amused by my Arabic as I tried to discern what differences exist between the Jordanian and Egyptian versions. Most of the things I learned in Egypt still applied with a few changes in pronunciation and a few changes in vocabulary. I was impressed at how friendly the driver was, especially when he stopped and treated me to tea even though I warned him I had no money left after the border crossing and cab ride, which was true. I had converted all of my remaining Israeli shekels into JD leaving me only a few Israeli coins. Throughout my stay in Jordan, I maintained a mental state of lack of trust and disbelief that anyone would actually do anything just to be nice, something which I acquired in Egypt. Overall people in Jordan were nice and didn't try to rip me off the way they did in Egypt, though when the cab driver dropped me off and I went upstairs to check into the hotel I'd pre-booked, the receptionist told me she was on the phone with the cab driver who was trying to arrange a commission for himself for taking me to the hotel. I guess he didn't quite understand that I'd booked the hotel in advance and that he couldn't claim credit for depositing me there. This is a common modus operandi in both Egypt and Jordan. If you don't have a hotel and a cab driver takes you to a hotel, he tries to get a commission from the hotel for bringing you. Conversely, if you arrange a tour with a cab driver outside the hotel, often the hotel will somehow try to get a commission on the tour. They basically work hard to take money out of each other's pockets.

I enjoyed my hotel in Amman immensely. Upon arriving I met a slew of travelers, the way it is supposed to be and yet was not in Egypt. Five of us went out to dinner together within an hour of my arrival. A woman from France and a man from Portugal who were in town for a conference on human rights, an American who'd lived in Syria for two years studying Arabic and had been turned away at the border on this return trip to visit friends, thus dumping him in Jordan (with all of his luggage lost to boot), his Palestinian friend who told stories of climbing the wall between the West Bank and Jerusalem to visit his brother who lived there, and Anne from Germany who had been spending 2 months working on a farm in Israel and then traveling through both Israel and Jordan. Anne and I would make friends and spend the next few days together. Later on in my stay in Amman, I also met an Iraqi fellow who lived in Fallujah who had quite a few stories of his own, involving missiles flying past where he sleeps. He was upset because he was paying double the price for the same hotel room as other guests, because as it turns out, Jordanians do not like Iraqi people and also believe them to be very wealthy, so because of his accent and passport he was having a rough time of his stay in Amman where he was hoping to arrange papers so that he could travel to Canada and work there as an engineer, his trade in Iraq.

I traveled the first day from Amman to Jerash with Anne, joining with an American guy we'd met at the bus station who was also heading that way. He'd been studying Arabic in Cairo for about a year which was helpful to us as we attempted to find the right bus. Jerash is a Roman city north of Amman, which is quite well-preserved. On the bus, things were very quiet though the three non-locals talked amongst ourselves freely until the very Muslim gentleman next to me wrote on his notebook that he'd just come from the night duty and would like to sleep. The American thought the guy was being difficult, since in Egypt people are very loud on buses, but I thought the guy next to me was probably correct since nobody else on the bus was talking really. Ultimately it worked out, and I chatted for a few minutes with the Muslim guy who told me I should read the Quran because it has all the answers. I was polite. My companions and I subsequently wandered the ancient ruins of Jerash and found our way to a Lebanese restaurant in the actual city of Jerash where we had a nice meal, refraining from ordering the delicacy of the house which was bull testicles. They claimed it best to wash them down with a glass of white wine. Though I have never heard of this particular pairing before, I am hardly a connoisseur of testicles on the order of my friend Ben for instance.

My old friend Aimee arrived in Amman later that day to spend the next 10 days with me traveling. Our first day was spent wandering the city of Amman, described by most travelers as unremarkable. I understand why people would say that, but to wander for a day was enjoyable. The most obvious landmark is a giant Roman Amphitheater which was quite well preserved, though the grayish and overcast weather (the first not sunny day on my trip) made the city seem excessively drab for most of our day. We wandered through the rest of the city, the downtown of which shares some character with Cairo but is overall cleaner and less chaotic. We also found our way to more modern parts of the city where expatriates and the wealthier folks dwell where we spotted a Gap, a Starbucks, and even a Carvel. There was no harassment from random folks, people were not overtly surprised to see us, the prices on the menus were fixed and I never had to bargain for a bottle of water or anything besides a cab ride. The city also has a feel of being under construction and of new clashing with old. We walked through one modern outdoor mall but walk down one side street and there was a crumbling apartment building with an unpaved parking lot. Oh yes, I also saw a Carvel of all things in that shopping center.

As the sunset approached, we took a cab to the Citadel, a high point overlooking the downtown area. Things got interesting as one side of the sky turned an unearthly orange as we stood looking out at the valleys and hills making up the city. In Amman the homes are built up the sides of steep hills and are tightly packed together, which creates a dramatic appearance even when there isn't a giant orange cloud of indeterminate composition hovering over the city. As it turns out, we got to experience either a dust or sand storm, depending on who is explaining it. The cloud settled onto the city as we walked down the mountain from the Citadel and people walked through the streets covering their mouths with their hands, with masks (way to be prepared) or with the cloth that many men use to cover their heads. It was an eerie way to see the city as dust was illuminated by every headlight and street lamp. Had it lasted longer I probably would've minded, but for a few hours it was a pretty interesting cap to my 3 nights in Amman. A few hours later it had dissipated and a group of us found our way to Hashim, the same restaurant I ate in all 3 nights of my stay in Amman, an outdoor cafe where you can essentially get all the falafel and hummus one could possibly eat for a few JD. The waiters come around with large bowls filled with falafel and deposit them on pieces of paper on your table and you eat with your hands. It's in an alcove off a main street and every time I was there, it was full, and apparently runs 24 hours as well.

The last night in the hostel, I ran into a Taiwanese guy also looking to head down to Petra and we decided to share the cost of a slow drive with a few stops on the Kings Highway, the older and more scenic of Jordan's two major roads running between Amman and Aqaba. Though the trip amounted to a lot of drive-by scenery with photo opportunities, I was glad we got to see a cross-section of the country if only briefly, and it gave me some clues as to what other things I might do differently when I one day return to Jordan. We visited Madaba, a city of beautiful mosaics, two large nature reserves, Dana and Wadi Mujib, and one large desert castle called Kerak, finally arriving in Wadi Musa in the early afternoon, where we'd be handed off to a second driver who would aggressively try to convince us to enlist his services for our stay at Petra, as would just about every other person we'd meet for the next 2 days. It's a touristy place, so one can't be too surprised really. That second driver would reappear at our hotel periodically to see if we'd decided to take him up on his offer. He assured us it was the high season, which it is, and therefore it was necessary to confirm immediately, which it was not. Many people were clearly available to take us wherever the hell we wanted to go, and the prices only went down the more often they asked if we were interested and the more often we declined.

Aimee and I arrived at the gate of Petra that evening at around 8pm and waited for Petra By Night to begin. The crowd swelled to at least several hundred, and once they started allowing people through the gate, I followed the advice I'd read and we let the anxious masses move forward without us, walking at a snail's place until it was just us and a few individuals and couples walking pretty much alone along the Bab Al Siq, a dirt road that leads to the Siq itself, a steep canyon cut out of red stone leading into the ancient city of Petra itself. For this night tour, they light the entire path with candles and people who work there periodically walk up and down the path shushing people as we cover the 3 or 4 kilometer stone path into the site. Despite the large volume of people ahead of us, we walked for the most part alone and undisturbed admiring the dramatic, moonlit canyon until we finally rounded a corner and I caught my first glimpse of the famous Treasury which many people would recognize from the 3rd Indiana Jones movie, and in the square in front of it we found maybe 200 candles in paper bags surrounded by a ring of tourists all sitting remarkably quietly except for the occasional digital click and whir of a camera or odd cellphone ringing. A few people insisted on sharing their undoubtedly insightful observations with their friends despite the repeated shushes of the crowd wranglers. As we arrived, a brief show began with a few Bedouin musicians taking turns playing pieces first on a Bedouin instrument called the Rababa, a bowed instrument made of wood, covered with goatskin, and with a bow and a string made of horse hair, and then a flute. The crowd listened in reasonably respectful silence. The camera flashes didn't do much to preserve the ambience, though the lead Bedouin had a good sense of humor about it and on the count of 3, suggested everyone point their cameras at the Treasury and take a picture at the same time, which created an amusing and seizure-inducing strobe effect.

The plan was to sleep in a bit the next day before heading to Petra for the day, but that plan was disrupted by a clanging fire alarm at some ungodly hour which didn't show signs of shutting off anytime soon. We slept anyway. Later I found out that the night-watchman had decided he didn't really believe the smoke detectors did anything. The whole thing in his view was an elaborate scam. To be on the safe side, he decided to test it out with his cigarette lighter. I am not making this up. He held his lighter under the smoke alarm and set off the fire alarm system for several hours, at around 7:30am in the morning, in a hotel.

We got up and headed to the site. For the next 12 hours or so, we wandered around the ancient city of Petra. We approached the Treasury through the Siq by day, a completely different experience since the dark red and orange stone and the contours of the canyon and ancient Nabatean irrigation systems were now all clearly visible. The Treasury is even bigger than it looks in pictures. I envied Aimee who in her haste to come on the trip did not research and saw the Treasury for the first time without ever really having seen a picture of it. It must have been a lot like the experience of the Swiss explorer who "discovered" Petra by tricking a bunch of Bedouins into leading him there, having no idea what he was about to see. Within Petra, there is one main road along which you wander, and up on the hills to the left or right you pass a large amphitheater and various tombs carved into the sides of what they always refer to as "the living rock" though I do not know why. It's pretty impressive. At your leisure, you can choose which things you'd like to inspect more closely, often necessitating a hike of varying length, or if you are a wildly overfed tourist, a donkey ride of varying price. Aimee and I wandered the main road but headed for a more distant site first on the advice of some other folks we'd met earlier who suggested a few ways to avoid crowds. We hiked up what I'd guess were between 750-1000 miles of steps, though possibly less, to reach the Monastery, a building similar to the Treasury though a bit less grandiose and dramatic and certainly harder to reach. Way up on that mountain, there were several vantage points though really the scenery from just about anywhere was quite overwhelming. At the "End of the World" viewpoint, we sat overlooking the Arabian desert and drinking Bedouin tea with 3 folks waiting for the tour groups to resume after lunch and come inspect their Bedouin silver stand. There are plenty of stands throughout the site, some with drinks and Pringles, others with jewelry and Bedouin daggers, and still more with whatever tourist knick-knacks you can imagine. Children also wander the site trying to sell postcards, though at no time was any of this more overwhelming that in is in any Egyptian tourist site I visited during the first 3 weeks of my trip.

Later, after our return from the Monastery, we had paused at a drink stand ("Happy hour all day!") and we were drinking the best bottle of water I have ever tasted, when the man running the stand suggested we could check out the "High Point of Sacrifice" only 30 minutes up the hill behind us. In Jordan estimates of time and distance were not very reliable in general. Up we went passing absolutely incredible scenery including the "renaissance tomb" and the "tomb of the roman soldier" and other sites that were not even marked on the primary map they hand out to most tourists. Petra is so filled with amazing stuff that much of it is beyond the reach of those who don't stay for more than a day, or in the case of some tour groups who arrived from Israel, a few hours. The rocks took on an even more surreal appearance as we wound our way through canyons and stone steps eventually arriving at a high vantage point over the entire site. Besides the amazing scenery, we were pretty much alone besides the very occasional traveler or Bedouin local we'd encounter en route to or from the caves in the site in which many of them still live. Anne told me when she visited Petra, she'd made friends with a Bedouin fellow and actually stayed a few nights inside of Petra, sleeping in her sleeping bag just outside the cave where her friend lives.

Petra was really the reason I came to Jordan in the first place and in no way did it not meet my expectations. I read about the history of the Nabateans, the people who built it and about whom much is still unknown. They had constructed sophisticated systems to save water from the very rare rainstorms which enabled them to build this giant functioning city in the middle of the desert. Having accomplished this goal, and having spent many weeks traveling, I decided it was time to change the pace for the final night in Jordan and we landed at the Radisson hotel in Aqaba. Less than an hour later I was having a drink at a bar in a swimming pool. A well-deserved drink I thought.

I recalled having met a young English couple in Amman at our hotel who were walking like they were 150 years old, but it turns out they had just spent the day in Petra doing exactly what we'd done the day before. We were not quite as worn down as they, but the hectic schedule of the weeks previous did make me appreciate the luxury all the more, as well as the shower door, cause in most of the hotels on this trips and in many budget hotels besides, they're not too big on shower doors or curtains. The owner of our hotel in Wadi Musa was genuinely puzzled that someone had left a negative review of his hotel because there was no curtain separating the shower from the rest of the bathroom. I've come to accept this as normal in most budget hotels, and in fact in many places, the bathroom and shower are the same room. In Wadi Musa there actually was a division of space, but I suppose they figured that so little water is going to come out of the shower head, that not much could possibly end up all over the bathroom. Incidentally, the shower head is also a bonus, since the hotel in Amman didn't have one of those either. It was pretty much like taking a shower in a 6 foot tall kitchen sink. Actually it was more like 5 feet, so I had to duck in order to actually get under the faucet. Point being, when I found myself later back under the gun of a real shower being blown back and pinned against the glass as if being blasted by a fire hose, I was thankful.