Jordan On My Mind: Part I

My itinerary was pretty simple. Drive to Jordan, do stuff, and drive back. This plan was made slightly more difficult by the 1200 kilometers (720 miles) between my home in Jeddah and the Jordanian border. I knew for certain that I could park my car somewhere near the border without issue for the duration of my vacation, but I wasn’t sure where. I couldn’t take my company car across into Jordan however, because I didn’t have the paperwork, nor would my company grant it if I asked them. I had a road map of Saudi which confirmed that one main highway would take me all the way to where I needed to go, but the highway bisected six or seven major towns and cities, which I’d never even heard of let alone navigated before.

I packed a fake backpack that I bought for 20 bucks at the Filipino Souq (market) before my trip to Lebanon. I borrowed a small cooler from a friend and filled it with ice, a case of Mountain Dew (sweet nectar of the gods) and some imported root beer and Dr. Pepper (I splurged for the imports). I threw a case of water and a folding beach chair in the trunk, in case I got stuck or broke down in the middle of some god awful desert. I burned a bunch of CD’s to keep me from passing out on the ride down, took a nap for about two hours and headed out.

Once I cleared the sprawl of the airport and the last chance gas stations the vestiges of the city quickly faded behind me. The six lane highway bored straight through the flatlands between Jeddah and the next city, Yanbu, some 350 Klicks to the north. As the music started to get going and the car settled into that long distance engine drone I got used to the cars zooming past between 110 and 150 miles an hour (yes miles). This seemed needlessly impatient and reckless at the time, the highways are not very well lit, or lit at all, and if you hit a rock the wrong way at 150 your corpse isn’t going to be pretty.

Driving through Saudi Arabia it becomes very easy to lose all context of speed. This is a lesson I quickly learned. It’s not just because the Saudis driving around you, infamous for their highway shenanigans, typically choose a cruising speed above a buck ten, but the country itself seems to propel the car forward. Once you stop thinking about the next curve, you realize there is no next curve, the highways are basically laminated in a straight line across the desert. You also don’t have much in the way of landmarks like trees, houses, or terrorist training camps to gauge your speed by, and this is even more pronounced at night. So I slammed the petal down just to keep up with the cars around me and reach whatever the next city was.

In the 350 klicks between Jeddah and Yanbu the black stretches forever in both directions. The few times I pulled over to evacuate some Mountain Dew offered exceptional views of the stars, in fact they were the kinds of skies one usually has to climb a mountain to see in most of the world. After all that darkness and light I hit Yanbu.

It is one thing to know, intellectually, how much oil Saudi Arabia spits out of the ground, but it is quite another to actually see one of the facilities in full force. The highway ended abruptly and was replaced by an entrance to Yanbu, an even wider road, dotted with expertly manicured gardens and parks. There was only one purpose to this city, and it’s façade of greenery, and it punched a million holes through the darkness of the sea. The refinery at Yanbu is the single largest complex I’ve ever seen, and the spectral buildings shining through the night for fifteen miles made the entire coast appear like a single iridescent honeycomb. It was, paradoxically, a beautiful sight. Without the haze of vapors erupting from dozens of vents this pulsating mechanical monstrosity merged into a landscape, a city composed entirely of ethereal, yellow light.

After I had cleared the industrial heart, the arteries of the actual city of Yanbu were more disappointing. It was simply another unkempt, dilapidated middle-eastern city. It reminded me of Sharjah, the Emirate condemned to staring into the sky at its neighbor, Dubai.

This cycle of complete darkness at 110 miles an hour interrupted by lackluster cities would play itself out over the course of the next six hours. Then the sun started coming up. I was tired, cramped, hungry and probably a little sandy when I found a flat spot to pull my car over. I opened the trunk and pulled out my beach chair, grabbed a soda and a granola bar, and had breakfast while I watched the sun come up. The highway was empty, the desert sprawled out until the flat horizon met the curve of the Earth and I felt more alert than I had been in the past eight hours of driving.

The desert gave way to the mountains as northern Saudi approached southern Jordan and the three lane highways turned into near hairpin mountain roads, almost always under construction.

*Saudi Fun Fact*

The country with the most oil in the world has, paradoxically, the shittiest gas stations. They still use the types of gas pumps America discarded in the 70’s. Well, except for that one gas station right across the New York border in New Jersey. The OC residents know which one I’m talking about.

These gas stations are universally manned by Indians, Bangladeshis, or Pakistanis. Not only do they work there, for very little pay, but more often than not they live at the gas station, their homes branching out from the inevitably dingy bodega at the station.

Anyway, after driving through the night at a hundred miles an hour, the mountainous switchbacks of Northern Saudi, a single lane in both directions, felt like a crawl. But through the last sets of traffic lights and onto the corniche (boardwalk) of Al-Deera I burned on toward the nearly abandoned border. There should have been a certain level of relief at finally reaching the border, but there was instead confusion. Cars were strewn everywhere, signs that said parking in English also had pictures of cars being towed with warnings in Arabic, offices were closed, or open with nobody inside, there was nobody milling around and very few cars passed in either direction. As my good friend would opine, I was LIT. (Lost in Translation)

I drove around and parked and then began systematically checking all of the buildings to find advice on where I could ditch my Honda. This being Saudi Arabia, there are a number of reasons why I couldn’t find anyone to help me. It could have been prayer time, it could have been some kind of holiday, they could have gone into their secret sleeping chambers where they avoid customers, or I had inadvertently driven into some kind Al-Queda village and they were secretly studying my habits.

Finally after coming up with bunk, I managed to find a few Pakistani truck drivers lounging around their vehicles. In about three and a half to eight seconds I had used all the Arabic at my command. But one of these saintly gentlemen returned with me to my car and then got in and directed me to a long term free parking/abandon your vehicle before fleeing the country because an angry mob wants stone you to death lot. I parked between a Chevy Blazer held together with a combination of dust and neglect that was somehow missing only its steering wheel and a Yellow Ford Mustang with 4 flat tires and a Darwin fish on the bumper.

I thanked the man, whose name was unpronounceable, with a can of Dr. Pepper, which he looked at with such child-like awe that I wish it could have been filled with something slightly more magical than high fructose corn syrup and radiated ginger backwash. I don’t think they get the off color brands of soda much where he was from.

It should be noted that after driving about 800 miles in a Honda Accord, I had spent a little less than 10 dollars (yes dollars) in gas.

When the shifter hit park the drive had finally ended, but I still had to get into Jordan. As it turns out this is not a border you can walk across. I had to wait for a Saudi kid to offer me a lift, for which I paid fifty bucks. This border crossing was much less stressful due to the Serendipitous arrival of a fellow baby-killer, working for the same company that I work for, but in a city nine hours closer to the border. He had made the crossing before and cut the cab fair in half.

Flashing ahead a few days most Jordanians would respond with a lot of sympathy when I told them I live in Saudi. At the Jordanian border I understood where their opinions of the magic kingdom came from. To put it bluntly, the Saudis that popped into Aqaba for a weekend jaunt are essentially the Arab equivalent of rednecks. They pile over the border with stained thobes (white robes) and pickup trucks filled with hay. There are no lines at the border, just a giant melee in front of the passport windows. Many of the Saudis coming from Tabouk and the northern climes have seldom if ever been around members of the opposite sex that weren’t family, and naturally don’t have access to alcohol. This leads to a rather cavalier attitude toward the local girls whom conservative mullahs have branded as sluts for merely being around members of the opposite sex, and they cannot handle their liquor.

To be fair though, I live in Jeddah, which is the equivalent of New York, San Francisco, Miami and Austin all rolled into one…you know by Sharia standards. The generation of Saudis which have gone abroad to study and returned home tend to settle here. They are far more progressive, educated, and open minded in general. They just hosted a TED conference in Jeddah a few days ago in fact…but moving on.
It took us (myself and the other white guy I met at the border) three hours to clear customs. This included tracking down all the Saudi officers who were supposed to be stamping things in offices but were in fact having tea somewhere or watching TV. You know there’s something wrong with your bureaucracy when I find myself yearning for the good ole’ days of waiting at the DMV. Afterwards we made it quickly to the center of Aqaba and I changed some Saudi Riyals into Jordanian Dinars at my compatriots five star hotel before grabbing a taxi to my zero star hostel.

After I checked in I immediately ordered a meal at my hotel, the first since 5 PM on Wednesday. It was now 4 PM on Thursday. I woke up for work and hadn’t stopped moving for the last 35 hours. After I ate I managed to take most of my clothes off before I fell into a coma, and woke up at six the next day.