Jumping Jordanian

I’ve just come back from Jordan – what a beautiful country! It is something like the 10th poorest country in terms of its water resources, but that sure makes for some beautiful desert.

One of my fellow “villa”-mates, Emil from Denmark, and I started off on an early Tuesday morning last week, taking a “ser-VICE” (pronounced like in French, with the accent on the last syllable and the “I” like “ee”) to the bus station. We haggled for a good price and then waited an hour for more passengers to come. Such is life. We got to Amman and then got on a bus to Aqaba, which is the farthest point south in Jordan. We didn’t want to go there though, so we got off at a random checkpoint before Aqaba in order to hitchhike to Wadi Rum where Lawrence of Arabia based his rebellion. It was amazingly beautiful, peaceful, tranquil, isolated, and serene. It was a desert, just like how one would imagine a desert, but rather than large dunes, it had huge mountainous outcroppings that abruptly jutted out from the surrounding sands. We camped out under the stars for two nights – I haven’t seen so many stars in my entire life. There wasn’t a city around us for at least 50 miles – not a real city anyways, only small Bedouin villages without many lights to ruin the sky. It was also a new moon and so the sky was darker than usual. There was almost total silence except for the wind rustling through the nearby tent flaps. During the day, we toured around the desert in a modified Toyota Land Cruiser from the 1970s. It was rickety and felt like it would fall apart at any minute, but it held together long enough to get us into the deep desert and back. We saw wild camels, went rock climbing, and I did some front flips down the sand dunes. Fun stuff, but I got sand in my camera – currently at the repair shoppe.

After Wadi Rum, the history of which is told in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which I didn’t finish due to its excessively flowery, early 20th century British style, we continued on to Petra and Wadi Moussa, the closest city to the ruins. Petra was a big disappointment after the magnificence of Wadi Rum, yet it was still an amazing mountainous and desertified region. I also really enjoyed seeing the façade from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (one of my favorite movies). We hiked all day long throughout the ravines, which had cubes carved out of its sides in order to house the ancient Nabataean civilization. We attended (sort of) a Bedouin wedding with one of Emil’s mom’s associates that night, but it was really only sitting and eating with a bunch of men – no ceremony or music unfortunately. I guess that was one of the other nights.

The next morning (Friday by now), we took a bus back to Amman and then another to the Dead Sea and a place called Wadi Mujib. Wadi, by the way, means Valley in Arabic. So all these are “valleys”, but valley is certainly a non-standard term here. It could be anything from a shallow and desolate crack between two plateaus or a green oasis with a bustling brook or stream running through it. So Wadi Mujib was the latter and we hiked up the difficult trail along the stream that led to a big waterfall. There were some serious rock obstacles along the way and not all voyagers could complete the entire trek.

So we floated back down the river after the trek and then hopped over the freeway to bathe in the Dead Sea. All of our little cuts from the river trek stung so badly when we got into the 30% salinity water. Crazy salty! More than I remembered from my previous experience in Israel. We frolicked a bit, then covered ourselves with dead sea mud, dried in the sun, and then washed off in the nearby hot springs. Lovely time, but it was sooo hot. We didn’t have a place to stay that night, so we camped in a valley along the highway somewhere. Aka we put a couple towels on some sand in an inclining ravine between two mountains. We ate various canned foods: tuna, sardines, sweet corn (delish!), and olives. We finished the evening with a ½ of a pound cake each. We made a fire out of the little bit of kindling we could find and relaxed. Falling asleep was more difficult because the heat at 400m below sea level is quite suffocating. Somehow we did though, and woke up the next morning, re-hydrated with our lukewarm water, and hitched a ride back to Amman with a passing truck driver. We took 7 different vehicles on Saturday to get back to Damascus. In order: Truck to Amman, van to the bus station, car to a city near the border, taxi to the border station, another taxi to the Syrian bus station after we waited for my visa to come through (only 3 hours this time!), bus to Damascus bus terminal, and van to the Old City, where we walked the 5 blocks to our villa. Whew! We could’ve pushed it to 8 for the 5 blocks, but decided against it.

Heading to Lebanon on Thursday for 6 days, so expect another update in a little over a week.