I was staying at a hotel right across the street from Aqaba’s public beach. The other eight to ten klicks of coastline was divided into the private beaches of various resort hotels. Since I’d not had the foresight to bring either soap or shampoo I decided to go swimming. I figured this would be a better way to wake up than standing under the dubious showerhead of the hostel. Unfortunately, the public beach was where locals came to party. It was one of the dirtiest beaches I’ve ever seen. It looked like a Gay Pride Parade, Puerto Rican Day Parade, and St. Patty’s bar crawl had coalesced, screwed, and vomited on the same patch of sand. The first twenty feet or so of the water was also filled with sharp jagged rocks. Since I didn’t feel like shredding my souls before a week of hiking and backpacking I just went back to the hotel, ate breakfast, checked out, and went to find a hotel closer to the city center.
Aqaba itself is a fairly unremarkable little tourist trap. It sells itself as a coastal resort but it’s currently in the boom stage. Tourism is new to the area, construction is clawing at every available space, and the party culture hasn’t really surfaced except for a half dozen bars. I spent the day trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do on this vacation, and with the help of a Ro Pro (That’s Japanese for Lonely Planet) and an internet café I managed to book myself a couple of days in Wadi Rum. I spent most of my afternoon talking to the kid running his dad’s hotel.
My young hotelier and I talked more often than not about women. He was recently engaged to a woman he’d only met once, in the company of her family, and they talked on the phone frequently afterwards. This is pretty typical of courtship among conservative to relatively conservative Muslims in the Gulf, and I suppose Jordan. The families find the match suitable, they come to some kind of arrangement on buying the bride, some allotment of time for non-sexual courtship is allowed, and then you have a big wedding and get to baby makin’.
After wandering around for souvenirs for most of the afternoon I headed out for a night on the town. The hoppinest spot in Aqaba was a club called “Friends.” The letters were of course written in the same awful font as the accursedly bland sitcom. I immediately ran into my new baby killer friend, who we’ll call Bob. I also quickly discovered that the British Navy was in town. Apparently some frigate was docked in Aqaba for R&R and 500 British sailors had stormed the redoubts. Of the few things in this world more entertaining and congenial than the Brits, there are the drunken Brits.
Any illusion of having some tryst or other was shattered by a male to female ratio of about 147 to 1, but a good time was had by all. In the course of the night a Scotsman would return to fire a barrage of questions at Bob and I because he was convinced we were spooks. Bob had recently come for Korea before the tensions escalated and myself coming from China, where they’re bat fucking insane as a matter of principle. One of the lady sailors ended up working the bar most of the night, and royally screwed up everyone’s drinks.
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| The first time I've seen this...how polluted is your air? |
One thing I must say for British sailors that I found incredibly mature and endearing is that the few women who were at the club, through escalating toxicity of the gang, stayed on the dance floor the whole night without being bothered. None of the sailors tried to grind up on them or make them feel uncomfortable, they just got drunk and danced like white people…badly.
It wasn’t long before the R&R escalated into the good natured, wanton, and wholesale destruction of entire city blocks. Glasses shattered, tables shattered, toilets clogged, and then it was time to depart. On leaving the club, which had amassed what I imagine to be NASA’s yearly budget for the night’s tab, I had to get between a few irritated sailors and one of Jordan’s Bedouin. The teenager was strutting his absolutely gorgeous camel around town offering rides to tourists, and had done something to upset a bunch of drunken British sailors. As I approached one was threatening to beat up not the Bedu, but the camel. In the end everyone got on their camels and/or in their taxis and went home.
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