Jordan on My Mind: Part VI: Jerash

After the unparalleled beauty of Wadi Rum and Petra, both experiences that I have not found equals for anywhere in the world, Amman did not look appealing. As my bus out from Petra approached the city from the south the only color I could see was gray. Squat concrete buildings filled the entire horizon from end to end. Areas that used to be cities in their own right have simply been subsumed and become urban sprawl. Amman might be a fine city, full of stuff to do and see, but I just couldn’t stomach it after so much time in the open countryside. So I rented a car and left.

I went North to Jerash. This is a little easier said than done, as Amman is not the most easily navigated city I’ve seen, but after some helpful folks at the gas station led me down the road (a few hours after I’d set out on a two hour drive) I was on my way. Jerash is one of the best preserved Roman ruins I’ve ever seen, excepting Rome itself and Baalbak in Lebanon. I have no idea what the significance of the town was, the historical importance of the place, or the purpose of many of the structures. There were well preserved remnants of a race track, and an immaculate forum that seemed to escape all the ravages of time. I stayed on until the sun dropped below the columns and then I headed back south. I’ll just leave you with some of the pictures:

God is for Pinheads

Driving in Dubai is like tap-dancing across the 38th parallel. It is impressive if you can pull it off, but in the unlikely event that you succeed the only reward is survival. Yet that is exactly what I did my last weekend in Oman. In a quest to buy gifts in one of the world’s greatest attempts at erasing culture, the shopping mall, I found some unexpected moments of clarity.

Dubai is a desert city. Any sheikh, princeling, or multi-national company can find a square of sand and begin construction. Half a mile away another begins, and then another, and another. When the projects are completed they must be connected to one another and the rest of the city. In such ways overpasses, underpasses, roundabouts, traffic circles, utility roads, construction cones, and concrete barriers dance haphazardly between the errant shopping malls. Everything is disjointed and caddy cornered, and most importantly, still under construction. Road signs become outdated weeks or even days after they are erected and tourists drive hopelessly in circles while locals drive them off the road.

In 2011 consumption remains conspicuous, but the city that once lived exclusively in the future has been shocked into standing still. Dubai still has a high concentration of construction cranes, but they remain idle. The mercurial machines stand as quiet as the dangling arms of arcade games, waiting for a quarter to bring them to life. Unfortunately the foreign firms burned their cash, and then their credit. The city-state of shopping needs only a few balls of tumbleweed for an official end to the gold rush.

I drove into the city in the late morning, heading to a place that I had gotten lost for hours trying to find on my last visit, so the route was firmly burned into memory. Wafi is a sprawling mall complex, complete with designer stores, restaurants, a hotel, an atrium, frescoes, underground complexes, and particularly interesting was the sub-building designed to look like a modern Arab suq. The courtyard, underground but open air, is modeled after a Moroccan coffee shop, whatever that’s supposed to be. The shops here are a welcome relief from the mass produced, mass marketed, and expensive designer labels that fill the rest of the mall. In the underground Wafi, craftsmen, whether they are local, or copycats milling around India and China are making things that at least look genuinely Arabic.

In a small shop called the Golden Pen I came to a man named Amir Golshani. Amir sat behind a large desk with an assortment of pens, grinding machines, and bamboo reeds. The focus of the office was not his desk, but the coffee table and couch, the latter draped with a large brown leather shawl. Around the white walls hung an assortment of oddly shaped pieces of leather, decorated with pictures like colored constellations inside of a border of Arabic script. I was interested in one large, Celtic looking piece of leather, which I later discovered was the entire first verse of the Koran, written in such a way that it looked far more like a design than a piece of writing. Amir’s first love was Calligraphy, as I unexpectedly discovered, conversation came in a close second.

I entered Amir’s office expecting to buy two pieces of art quickly and leave. Six hours later I left with an indelible imprint of a man and a city that defied my expectations. I had already picked out one piece a few months earlier when I briefly stepped inside. I quickly claimed my first gift I began pouring over smaller scroll work on leather. After a half hour my search turned up nothing that really fit.

When I finished looking at the smaller pieces, somewhat dismayed, I went back to the walls, pacing and thinking. My eyes and my thoughts settled on a painting. A striking combination of a blooming flower coming from a stalk and leaves composed of sinuous Arabic script.

I asked Amir if he was a painter among his other talents. This question prompted a long story about a European woman living in Dubai to whom he had taught calligraphy. When the woman returned home she put her newly acquired skills to work creating this beautiful painting and sent it back. A lengthy conversation about art in the Muslim world piggy backed onto the story, on one side an Iranian mechanical engineer cum calligrapher, on the other a wannabe writer trundling haphazardly around the Arabian Gulf. Calligraphy, painting, and poetry represented a totality of acceptable forms of expression for a long time in the Muslim world. Sculpture came around to the oil kingdoms more recently, as the forms of men and women had been properly devolved into inhuman shapes.

During a lull in the conversation, Amir decided that I was either a worthy aficionado or an easy mark. “Let me show you something,” he said. He bent over to open the door of a large cabinet and began pulling out a few boxes. The first box he lifted was about big enough to hold a severed head, and when he opened it, lying on cushioned, red felt was a huge shell covered in black script. Before my eyes could really adjust to the letters flowing through the pastel shimmer of the shell he opened a second box with an even bigger shell. “This took me six months,” he said. Next he took out a box containing two huge ivory tusks with a helix of Arabic script running from the bases to the tips. Lastly he went to the very bottom of the cabinet and pulled out the most beautiful nautilus shell I’d ever seen. It appeared as if the oceans, working in concert, had spent a hundred millennia perfecting geometry.

I could see the latticework of his engravings not yet darkened by ink. He said he was devoting two years to completing this shell, and planned on donating it to the United Nations afterward. He was going to cover the shell with three languages; the Arabic verses of the Koran, seen by the naked eye, the English verses of the Bible, seen with a magnifying glass, and the Hebrew verses of the Torah, seen with a microscope. I wasn’t sure if what he was describing was even possible but I realized at the time that I had stumbled into this man’s deepest passion, and whenever I am lucky enough to encounter such a thing I try to immerse myself and let it roll over me.

He wasn’t done showing off though. He bent down under his desk and dialed the combination to a lockbox that might look more at home in a CEO’s office than a small art shop. He pulled out a few small boxes and placed them in front of me. He opened the first box, about the size of my palm and infused with Arabic script.

Inside the casing was a slender cylinder of about three inches. The end of it tapered into a smaller silver cylinder that looked like a headphone jack that could plug into an IPod. He took out a piece of paper and pressed the end into it, making a slight circular depression. He passed the paper to me and rotated the giant magnifying glass mounted to the desk. When I looked into the small circle I saw a confluence of symbols that seemed to run like Japanese script, from top to bottom.

“It is the name of the Sheikh of Dubai,” Amir said as I puzzled over the characters. He pulled of another piece of paper with a few paragraphs of English printed on it. He pressed the tip into the paper and said, “You can press this into the first ‘O’ of any document in 12 point font or greater and it is absolute proof that it comes from the Sheikh,” he said. “Nobody else could make this.”

I felt like I was being pulled backwards through history to a time when Medieval kings or Mandarin Emperors pressed their signets into a band of wax while sealing some declaration of truce, or war. I didn’t mention then the fact that most leaders who required such proof often killed the makers of their signets, or chained them to a post within their compound. I continued looking down into the paper, trying to make out the Arabic characters, and failing.

He had finally slowed down his whirlwind of activity, appreciating my appreciation, my awe at discovering the Lilliputian world of his imagination. He walked to the opposite corner of the office and pulled out a magazine from a pile of identical magazines. It was some in-house propaganda rag for the Wafi Mall, but like most things in Dubai, it was extravagant. Every page was covered in color photos on high quality, glossy paper, the kind that feels like plastic. In it was an article written about Amir and his shop. He pressed his tiny stamp into the page and circled it, then he took out a few gold and silver markers and wrote a note out to me in the most artistic and beautiful way I’ve ever seen the English language presented.

Living in China and Japan for the last few years I never considered that there could be an English calligraphy. I thought it was something that must have been reserved for the Asian languages with their pictographs or Arabic with its endless strings of curves. It was then I discovered that these were just Amir’s opening acts. Out of a small case, without any ornate flourishes or decorative touches, he took out a pin. He handed it to me and adjusted the magnifying lens on his desk. “You can’t see it directly, you have to twist it in order to make it clear,” he said. After twisting the needle, and my head, the thing finally came into focus, like three waves cresting a gunmetal ocean.

There is only one thing a man as devout as Amir could have carved into history. “Allah,” he said, “it is the smallest engraving in the world.” As he spoke I kept twisting the pin, trying to see the strokes that created it. “I couldn’t see what I was engraving, I had to feel it.” He made god through faith in the memory of his name. When I handed the pin back to him he quickly replaced it in the case and put the cherished items back in their safe.

Before I had a chance to take in what it was I saw Amir set to work rifling through a pile of papers. He handed me a printout of an e-mail he received from the Guinness Book of Records. The illustrious book of records which tracks such statistics as longest fingernails and heaviest hamburgers sent Amir an e-mail stating that his accomplishment was “too good” for the Guinness book of records. The book strived to include records that were breakable, attainable, that would draw publicity for their dramatic “shatterability.” Amir’s Allah, they reasoned, was such a pinnacle of the art form that nobody could hope to break it and thus made for a bad record.

“That’s crazy,” I said, but he seemed to have come to terms with this lack of recognition. He felt recognized in much more significant ways than a line item in a record book. The next thing Amir showed me was a slide show of his customers and visitors to his shop. Whether he remembered these people or made up their nationalities and titles as he went a long along I’ll never know, but the parade of diplomats, politicians, scientists, and professors was almost endless. Many have invited him to show off the creations he showed me in European exhibition spaces. After ten minutes or an hour or a day the pictures finally stopped scrolling and he took a picture of me to add to his illustrious patrons. It may be the only time I will be included in such company.

I had run the gauntlet of the man’s professional history, but I had also discovered the true power of Dubai. Here was an Iranian practicing his art a few miles across the Strait of Hormuz from the artistically oppressive regime of his native land, and across that chasm he is caught, gladly, in a maelstrom of countries and cultures. Dubai, like maybe no other city in the world could take him so far, so fast into the collective thoughts of planet Earth.

Finally it was time to figure out what shape the last memento I brought back from Amir’s shop would take. I started looking in earnest at the small cache of necklaces he had above one of his cabinets. Icons and Arabic script looped and curled around the subtle kaleidoscope of polished shell and pearl. As I looked over the visible items he beginning opening drawers full of more and more objects. After a while I thought I’d found what I was looking for and he asked me who I was shopping for. “My sister,” I said.

“What does she look like?” He asked. After I described her, her physical features, her personality, what she was doing he asked, “and what is her name?” I wondered why he wanted so much information about someone for whom I was just buying a gift. “I like to get a picture of the person in my head before I design anything for them,” he said, “I don’t really engrave on the shells, I engrave on the mind.”

He poured a few dozen shells on the top of his desk, they were mostly a little bigger than a quarter, and they each had that slight phosphorescent glow of things that once grew in choral beds. He traced the shell I picked out on a piece of paper and then proceeded to design my sister’s name in Arabic on the page. When he was finished with his drawing he showed it to me. It took me more than a minute to realize that the design was Arabic letters spelling out her name.

After his tracing with a wooden reed dipped in an inkwell was finished he allowed me an unobstructed glimpse of the design. From another drawer behind the desk, he pulled out a box of Omani dates. “I like to have a little bit of sugar before I work,” he said. While he chewed his date he picked up a remote control and turned on the stereo in the corner of the office. An aria emerged softly from the speakers, and he walked over and locked his door. After seeing all of his creations I realized that I was anxious to see the creative process unfold in front of me.

Before he sat down again I asked him to give me the paper from the Guinness Book of Records. If the only true art I could practice was bullshit, at least I had a chance to practice it here. As Amir used the reed pen to draw the design on the shell I re-read the horrific response of the record book and began composing a response in my head. He was scratching the surface of the shell gently, wiping excess ink on a napkin as I pulled a blank piece of paper from near the magnifying glass. The singer was growing more emotional, more powerful as I began writing a letter on Amir’s behalf. After some time I heard a noise like a dentist drill. He had begun piercing the shell with his etching machine, which looked like a water pick.

The two of us remained in the same position for the better part of an hour. He slowly carving and then re-tracing the lines with ink before polishing the finished product to a shine, me trying to appeal to the artistic sensibilities to the Guinness Book of Records and argue than the absolute limits of the human hand could never touch those of the human mind.

I walked out of his office at least partially satisfied that the simple ability to play with words, if not adequate to change a man’s mind, or a company’s policy may have at least provided Amir with a small comfort, a slightly more permanent testament to his art than the gasps of the usual passerby.

After being locked in seclusion in the small room for so long, the blinding, afternoon sun coming off the spires of glass was overwhelming. The towers and hotels loomed slightly more gigantic and monolithic than they had on the way in. The city itself was taking on a few new added dimensions. It occurred to me then that Dubai is actually one of the most spiritual cities in the world. In a way it is a testament to all the gods we’ve created, all the idols of modernity. The old faiths have been cast aside so that the temples of scale and the monks of marketing could baptize the sands with a system of faith greater than any one consumer.

But I find some solace in the idea that the old gods will never die. Even after all the great works in their names have been destroyed, their temples and testaments, obelisks and observances vanish from our consciousness, they will be there waiting, humbly staring back at us from the head of a pin.

Cut and Run

I pay two dollars and fifty cents for a haircut in Sohar. This is probably a little more than I should, but because he doesn’t try to rip me off too badly I usually give him five.

I return to the same shop every month, not because it is the best, or because it is the cheapest, but simply because we are all creatures of habit in some way or another, even those of us who can’t stay in the same country for more than a year. This particular shop had only one barber’s chair, and fittingly, only one barber. In the middle of a street dominated by Indian restaurants, and Bangladeshi used electronic stores the barber shop was nestled between a three story building permanently under construction and a small cell phone shop manned by a young Omani. The cell phone shop was remarkable only for the thick cloud of Oud, some kind of Saudi incense that produces thick, acrid smoke.

Apart from the barber chair, the only furniture is three white, plastic deck chairs and a corner table covered in five year old magazines about the hotel industry in Abu Dhabi. Above the plastic chairs is a large picture of Sultan Qaboose standing in front of the vast globe that dominates the famous Sohar roundabout. The picture was at least ten years old, because the Sultans short beard and mustache were in their salt and pepper stage. He often strikes me as a dead-ringer for Sean Connery, should the actor ever play an Arab with a Scottish accent.

One of the things I’ve always liked about this dictatorship was that people had a wide variety of official pictures of the Sultan to choose from. Flipping through a book one might wonder whether Admiral Qaboose or General Qaboose might be more appropriate for their restaurant or hotel lobby. Commander in Chief Qaboose? Holy Warrior Qaboose? Elder Statesmen Qaboose? His line of action figures would be legendary, however there’d only be one Barbie to accompany him, draped from head to toe in black.

But a monarch reigning for 40 years is not an anomaly in this part of the world, nor, is my Pakistani barber, but he interests me far more. Faarooq has been cutting hair in Oman for 17 years. More specifically he’s been cutting hair in this shop for over a dozen. Farooq was a large man, but not a fat one. He had the body of a man whose mirth could not be contained in 150 pounds. He wore the national garb of Pakistani muslims, a Salwaar Kameez. Which is a linen or cotton pair of pants, with a shirt that was as much of a cape as it was a shirt. He has the brown and black staples of this part of the world, black hair, black beard, brown eyes, and brown skin. Though his beard has begun its slow erosion toward gray he has the energy of a much younger man.

When I walk into his shop he greets me with a bear hug, and walks toward his radio to turn the volume down. Every day he listens to the voice of America, in Urdu. Radio stations across the country have been beaming out the news in over forty languages since World War II. When I have to wait for him to finish with another customer I browse through a magazine about new building projects in the Abu Dhabi hospitality industry, and wonder about the parts of the world so shut off from the things we find common place that their main source of news is a battery powered radio.

I had a professor once, a short stick of a Chinese man, for whom eccentric might be an understatement. During the cultural revolution he was taken from his parents and sent to a farm in rural China. He said while he was there he learned the vast majority of his English by secretly listening to the Voice of America when everybody else had gone to sleep. But in the absence of abject poverty or societal upheaval I wonder why anyone would still use such an archaic mode of news transmission.

When I step into the surprisingly comfortable leather barber chair I am greeted to a menagerie of foreign sights and smells. Talcum powder in a pink tube with a smiling Buddha for a logo, aftershave lotion stamped with a Himalayan peak, and razorblade packaging with a multi-armed goddess perpetually akimbo. Before the cut begins we banter in broken languages, mine Arabic and his English.

As the months go by and the hair clippings pile up I learn that he has had a wife and two daughters living on his wages, in Lahore. Like most of the Indians and Pakistanis brought into this semi-gulag wage slavery he cannot bring his family with him here. That privilege is reserved for doctors and teachers and engineers, or anyone with cream colored skin. One of his daughters, the beautiful one who beams from her plastic covering in his wallet, is about to go to college. “In Pakistan or India?” I ask. “India,” he says and taps me on the head, “or America.”

The sacrifice required of so many here is something that slips beyond the realm of empathy, because I cannot imagine working so hard or for so long for a family I’m unable to be with. When I read through some of the travel guides and websites about the Gulf, there is a curious string that runs through them. While sunbathing in the Emirates, or Oman where Western thought has gained an intractable foothold, beware of the sub-continental day laborers, they will ogle on the verge of perversion. These men that build the hotels and restaurants that tourists lounge around in, unable to see their wives, sometimes for years at a time, unable in most cases even to purchase affection for a night, are castigated even for giving attention to attention starved women.

Before he starts today’s cut he turns off his radio, and tunes his small TV to CNN. He asks me if I want anything special, but I gave up long ago trying to describe a haircut to a barber or stylist that doesn’t speak my language. I just give them the benefit of the doubt. As he begins cutting and combing and shaping the mound of wet hair breaking news bursts from pretty woman behind the desk in some labyrinth of an office building. A series of bombings has left dozens dead and hundreds wounded around markets and police stations in Lahore.

At first Farooq slows down, listening to the broadcast but focusing intensely on cutting my hair. Neither of us is smiling anymore. I know that Lahore is where his family lives, but I don’t know which markets his wife goes to buy food, or toys, or clothes. We don’t speak for some time and eventually he walks over to the TV and presses the power button. His distraction is evident by the fact that he passes the remote to get to the TV. The smartly dressed woman had given way to series of talking heads discussing American foreign policy and the war on terror. I can see his face in the mirror in front of me, but it had only been tuned to one setting in all the times I’d come here, happy. I was not sure what part of sadness or anger was currently winning for control of his eyes.

He picked up the razor, flicking the old blade out mechanically, wiping the new blade in alcohol proclaiming Tibetan freshness, and keeping the blade hovering over the flame of a Bic for a few seconds. After he shaved the back of my neck he spent a minute rubbing the loose hair and dead skin off of my head while staring at the ceiling. We hadn’t said a word to each other and the chasms between us had grown far wider and deeper than a lack of language in that awkward space.

When he took off the apron I jumped out of the chair and picked up my bag. I had four one Riyal bills in my wallet so I took them all out and gave them to him. Ten bucks instead of five, it was the height of futility, and possibly an arrogant American way to deal with such a situation, but sometimes, meaningless gestures are all we have.

Jordan on My Mind: Part V - Petra Day 2

I woke up for the hotel breakfast around seven. I’m not sure if this is a sign of maturation in my travels or if there just isn’t as much partying to do in the area but it says something that I woke up on time for every hotel breakfast during my stay in Jordan. After a pretty mediocre spread of bread and jams I was cruising toward Petra around eight. Already large groups were mulling around outside, and I followed a line of people through the gate and into the first stretch.

This time though, instead of going into the Siq, where the tourist population bottlenecked, I veered away from the gift shop and went under a tunnel, which lonely planet and a sign warning against going without a guide told me was a side trail into the ancient city. After passing under a fairly large tunnel I was spit out into a gorge much like the Siq, but wider, and much quieter. I couldn’t hear any of the rabble behind me and I saw no one in front of me. I walked.

Twenty minutes later I was still walking, slowly, enjoying the solitude of the stark mountains. It was hard to believe that somewhere around me tens of thousands of people were gathering and roaming around, because there was an eerie silence that had descended on the trail. I hear any birds, no lizards darted from between boulders and there was no detritus of tourism or old campouts. Eventually I began to wonder if this trail actually went anywhere at all. So as the sky darkened and rain drops started falling I pulled out my Lonely Planet to check. It described the entrance to the trail and then said, “Whatever you do don’t take this trail if it’s raining. There is a tendency for the wadi to suffer flash flooding.”

That sounded exciting enough, it also said that after 45 minutes I’d come to a T-Junction and there’d be a white arrow pointing left. Without that stupid guide book I might have given up and turned around, so this was one of the few days I was thankful to have it along. After a few more minutes of walking I found the junction and arrow exactly as it had described. Lonely Planet did its duty, I hucked it back in my Indiana Jones bag and plodded along the trail. It narrowed, it widened, I had to climb down a couple of “stairways” composed to wire mesh and old tires, and after another hour or so I hadn’t seen or heard a single human being, and I was spit out into a massive valley. In a 180 degree arc I was surrounded by the beautiful Nabatean tombs of Wadi Musa, carved into the mountain, and completely devoid of either Bedu or tourists.

I wandered happily around the empty tombs, climbing up and down the hillsides for the better part of another hour, before I made for a trail that I assumed would take me back to the heart of the city. On the way back in I saw a covered woman taking her goats into a cave. She waved at me and I happily sauntered up a small hill to the cave where she was feeding her goats. She was middle aged, missing a few teeth, but that only made her smile a little more genuine. I once again brought out my now very well tuned three phrases of Arabic and we approached something that could be described as pleasantries. Then she took out a little change purse and removed a silver coin a little bigger than a nickel and put it in my hand. I looked at it and back to her and she was beaming. The coin itself was very faded but the remnants of a man’s face. Around the head there was script that was still fairly distinguishable, and it was Greek. I know the coin was real because when I gave it back to this little goat herder she immediately snapped it back into her change purse and put the purse back in her pocket. This was a cherished possession. She didn’t try to sell it to me. This woman, possibly an illiterate woman, very likely someone who hadn’t ranged very far from her home here in the mountains, was carrying around a piece of history thousands of years old. Her good luck charm could have easily found its way into a museum somewhere, certainly the Beirut museum had coins just like this lined up in a glass case. It’s not often that any of us get to touch anything that old, to hold something in our hands which changed hands so many centuries ago.

Petra was growing powerful, but the spell of solitude was about to end. As I walked down the trail I saw a few dozen people milling around one of the larger edifices. The first populated tomb I came to was the burial chamber of the Roman governor in charge of Petra. The inscription (long faded) had apparently related to how this governor after ruling over the breathtaking spectacle of his territory wished to be buried in Petra rather than Rome. This tomb dated back to the reign of Hadrian, famous in history class for the wall he built to keep the Scottish out of Roman controlled England, a backwater hamlet that marked the northern reach of the Roman Empire.

It seems even more remarkable now, with all the advances in technology, and all the failures of modern governments that without cars, planes, and telephones the Romans not only ruled, but maintained such an unbelievably vast swath of planet Earth. Empires aside though, there was a large stairway nearby that nobody was climbing. As most people read the inscription took a photo and headed back toward the main path I went up the stairs. A half hour later I was still climbing the stairs and reaching the top of a mountain with an amazing view of the city below.

Not long after turning from the peak I spotted an unladen donkey near a small, abandoned cave. After a moment a boy came out and offered tea. I was glad to have somewhere to sit down away from the wind that was whipping around. There were a few people at the entrance to Petra handing out flyers about the plight of the children who were skipping school to make some money off tourists, it’s sad that I would be contributing to what might amount to be the theft of this Jordanian child’s future, but I really wanted some tea.

The kid, who was not much older than nine or ten, had a whole array of items to keep himself warm and occupied. Some school books were collecting dust under his radio, but his English was passable. He said his friends came up to the cave at night and they slept there often. I asked him about his family, which was sizable. He had a horde of brothers and sisters, some in school, and some scattered around Petra working in various odd jobs. After I’d had a few cups I paid the kid and left. I didn’t really know where I was going, if I’d reached the end of what I could see, or if something spectacular loomed along a different horizon. I just walked.

I got lost for a little while, climbing over an old cistern, up and down stairs carved into the rock millennia ago, and to a point where there were hardly any remnants of human activity. I turned myself around a few times before I found my back to the tea-cave and then discovered that there was a rather obvious trail leading in the opposite direction from where I had just come.

I followed the trail, which had some recent footprints etched into the loose sand, and eventually passed a couple from New Zealand I’d seen on the way up. Not long after that I was struck dumb by what I think is the coolest view in Petra. After all that meandering I’d managed to get myself directly back to the entrance where the pink stone treasury lay. The difference was this time I was at least a hundred feet above it. The magnificently preserved façade seemed even larger from the heights above, where the throngs of tourists were reduced to pin pricks against the sandy floor of the city. Once again I found myself completely isolated while simultaneously in the same place as tens of thousands of tourists. It felt like I was doing Petra right.

By the time I climbed back down, past the tea-cave and the Roman Governor’s tomb, and reached the main thoroughfare of the city, it was mid-afternoon. I’d seen all of the major sites, but there was one more trail I wanted to go up before I left Petra behind me. This one was a little more crowded than the previous trails that day because the staircase began adjacent to the main road near the Amphitheatre. It climbed to the remnants of a sacrificial alter. When I got to the top I read one of the handy placards that described how the grooves around the sides of the square were drainage for the bloodletting of animals during the rites and rituals of the Nabatean kingdom that preceded the Romans here. The view was again, spectacular, but not nearly as stark as the views over the Monastery from the day before or the Treasury only an hour or two ago.

No this last hike was remarkable more for the two people I met on the way down. Two shaggy, long haired Jordanian Bedu in their mid-20’s introduced themselves as “VIB’s” when I met them.

“We are very important Bedu.”

They called me up to the small plateau fifteen or twenty feet away from the trail where they were sitting. One of them, named Sami, was high as a kite and looked it. I pulled out my notebook and wrote the word “Visine” on it. They had liberally applied “kohl” the black Jordanian eyeliner underneath their eyes, and they cat-called everything with tits that walked up and down the mountain for the twenty minutes I was sitting with them.

“Hello, beautiful you will come camping with us. Get the real experience of Jordan.”

“Yes, yes come here, have tea with us, we will take you in the mountains and drink with the fire.”

At one point they tried to decorate me with kohl but one of my travelling rules is that I don’t let stoners go to town with anything that looks like a needle near my eyes. They wore pretty shabby looking clothing, and seemed to creep out every woman they yelled at, but they were masters at playing up the Arabian “mystique” and there were apparently no lack of woman looking to go native for a night or two. At least according to the stories they told. We swapped phone numbers and they told me that they had planned a rendezvous up in the mountains with four girls they’d met who were shockingly inclined toward their awkward pickup lines.

A sight I’ll never forget are these two stoned Bedouin slowly packing up their camp (losing and finding their lighters a half dozen times) and then climbing onto their donkeys before going at a gallop down the narrow trail. The donkeys apparently saved up a whole days worth of shit, and God (Allah) know what they were feeding the things, because green splatters of poo flew from them like candy from a broken piñata all over the trail.

The sun was slowly setting and I was exhausted so I shimmied back to my hotel, stopping for pizza again on the way back. I walked up the hill to the hotel grabbed my swimsuit and then walked straight back down toward Petra again. It was time to hit up a Turkish bath. The Hemams (which actually just mean bathroom in Arabic). On the way out of the hotel I ran into Sami again. He had a small brown paper bag and he smiled at me as he opened it up and pulled out what was inside…Visine. He told me he was still waiting for the girls to call him back, but he still planned on hanging out in the mountains somewhere nearby tonight.

The Hemam was an interesting experience, somewhere between the Onsens of Japan and the bathhouses of Shanghai. It starts with a blisteringly hot sauna for about 15 minutes. This is followed immediately by a cold shower. It should be noted people wear bathing suits in these as opposed to the au natural of the former two. After the shower I laid down on this tile slab and a Jordanian dude came over and rubbed me down with soap and then scrubbed off the dead skin with something that felt like a cat-o-nine-tails. After that I got a pretty decent massage. I would hardily recommend this to anyone tired from marching around Petra for a whole day.

After I got out of the Hemam I called Sami, who informed me that the girls would, sadly, not be joining us. Shoganai, I was still excited to go chill out up in the mountains with my VIB’s. After getting lost for a little while I managed to find Sami along the road that ran along the edge of Petra. A Bedu fire was burning, and an old man and an adolescent kid sat around it, one drinking gin the other Pepsi. When the Bedu make a fire they don’t start with little stick and brush (for obvious reasons), they usually just light a big branch or log that will continue burning for a long time.

Soon after sitting down Sami offered to go buy me some booze, so I gave him a few bucks and he came back ten minutes later with a little bottle of vodka, which I mixed with a bottle of orange soda they brought with them. I sat somewhere away from the road, and Ali, the old man pointed into the darkness ahead of us, “right down there is Petra, we can walk in from here and nobody would ever know.”

I sat with my back to the wind and my face to the fire, perched atop the cliffs a short walk from Petra, indistinguishable from the other dark rocks and spires of the night. It’s no wonder that this place had been completely abandoned and forgotten for so many hundreds of years. But once it was found again, there was a group of Jordanians that immediately took notice. “We lived there, in the caves” Ali Said. “And I was born in a cave. Until 1989 the tourists would sleep with us in our tents. We would guide them around to all the good places, and then the government made this city,” he pointed to the lights in the distance, a town I’d noticed when I’d first met the woman with the Greek coin, “they moved us there and forgot about us, now they make so much money from this place, and we don’t get any of it.”

I imagined how amazing the experience must have been such a short time ago, the double barrels of the incredible edifice of Petra, and staying and eating with the Bedu who lived there. I also thought of the young guy who approached me before I got my ticket to Petra, it seems like he was right, I could have just walked down from the hills into the city, and he was probably right to be as angry as he was.

They didn’t stay angry for long though, as the vodka and fire began to warm me up a little Sami and Ali went on for quite a while about past sexual conquests, all involving tourist girls. They’d say a name, an age, a country, where the deed happened. For instance Else, the blonde Swedish student, 10 years ago, camping out right over there etc…This carousel of carnal memory was interrupted when Ali realized that he’d lost his little black book, and spent the rest of the night wandering around the rocks trying to figure out where he’d dropped it.

When I’d polished off my vodka, and Ali wandered back to the dying fire, frustrated with not having found his book, it was time to call it a night. I made the long walk back up to my awful hotel for the last time and decided to leave Petra. I had a three day ticket but I thought I’d seen all that I was really going to see in two. The next morning the hotel owner took me to the bus stop and I paid some small amount for a trip up north, next stop Amman.

Jordan on My Mind: Part IV - Petra Day 1

The bus from Wadi Rum village dropped me off in the city of Petra sometime in the early morning. I walked for about a half hour before I stopped at one of the obligatory backpacker hotels and shelled out 30 bucks for a room. The hotel was dingy but I was happy just to drop my pack somewhere.

Since Wadi Rum had somehow managed to turn all of my socks into some kind of cotton/sand blend I would need some new ones for another few days of walking, a little shop across from the hotel had some children’s socks with kangaroos on them and the old bitty charged me ten bucks for four pairs. The village of Petra, a meaningless fleck on the map twenty years ago, had acclimated to becoming a tourist hub.

I walked down the hill toward Petra proper; the road was thankfully only built up on one side with the bric-a-brac of Jordan tee-shirts and bottles of colorful sand. It was cheerfully touristy and devoid of neon. As I closed in on the entrance the hotels became more monolithic and extravagant, the Petra Hotel, and Nabatean Inn gave way to Movenpick and Crown Plaza. I would soon discover that Jordan attracted a rather geriatric crowd, many of whom were probably thankful that after a day of walking that their 5-Star resort was only a few minutes away.

The first indication that all was not well in the ancient Nabatean capital was the scraggly looking Jordanian twenty-something that accosted me at the gate. “I’ll take you in for free,” he said. “They charge so much money for tourists to come here, and the bedu don’t get anything,” he continued, “this was our home, and the tourists stayed with us, now the government doesn’t care about us, they moved us and give us nothing, I’ll take you anywhere you want to go and you won’t have to pay.”

I think most people would have the same reaction in this situation, which is to say something polite and move gracefully away, I would discover later that this wasn’t actually a scam, and he could have very easily taken me around the side and down into Petra without any trouble, and he was motivated more by spite at the government than to gouge some gringo bumpkin. At the time I just said, that from what I heard about Petra it was worth every penny and I don’t mind paying. He scowled and went prowling for another young backpacker to convince.

When I got to the ticket counter my jaw dropped. A one day pass was 55 Jordanian Dinars, a two day pass 60 and a three day 65. That came out to about 80 dollars just for entry. That’s the same price Disney or Six Flags might charge, and they actually BUILT the cities of entertainment behind the gates, and required thousands of employees to maintain them. This was an insane amount of money to look at some ruins, it dwarfed Machu Pichu, the Pyramids, and Ankor Wat, probably all three put together. Luckily I was making Arab money, so I just paid. Making a fuss would get me nowhere anyway.

It was around noon when I got there, and I was advised by some American lads on the bus ride over to get one of the free tours, but I was burning daylight. I walked past a few shops and through the gate, to the left some dashing Bedu were offering tourists rides on horseback, the horses had their own track that went about a mile or two, this ostensibly cut down on the walking time for the open area before the real entrance to Petra that didn’t offer much in the way of sights. I skipped by and walked into a wall of badly dressed humanity. Petra was packed.

I dodged between the awkwardly coalescing bubbles of tour groups summoned haphazardly by their English, or French, or German, or Russian speaking guides. Small megaphones blared, flags waived and hordes of aging, fattening tourists bumbled across the path. I bobbed, I weaved, I scoffed, and I was unhappy. After the solemn, silent power of Wadi Rum, Petra represented everything tainted and wrong about the Amerification of the exceptional.

After a mile the herd didn’t thin out, but it focused into the Siq. This was the real entrance of Petra. The path narrowed to about ten feet across and the smooth rock walls rose fifty feet into the air on both sides. The air rushing through the crack tempered the Jordanian sun. It was imposing. It was also an echo chamber of ignorance. The tour groups didn’t stop, they seemed to multiply, slow down, and chatter more. It felt like a church service that piped Norwegian Death Metal through the speakers.

Horse drawn carts clambered by, forcing people to hug the rock walls during their passing. Many of the tourists gladly shelled out ten bucks if it meant a ride back to the hotel, I had trouble believing that after charging so much money that they would inconvenience and risk injuring so many of their patrons. I was annoyed, bordering on angry.

And then after thirty minutes of rising tension I turned a corner of the ravine, and glowing through the cracks was the treasury. I couldn’t believe how instantly every emotional trigger in my body could be switched off. The massive, pink building hewn into the rock of the mountain was almost perfectly preserved. The lines that cut across the rock were stark and crisp. The scale of the art was jaw dropping. As I neared the Siq’s exit, I still don’t know why, but I was fighting back tears. Something about the misery of that walk and the beauty of that building rippled through the skin and into the nerves.

You don’t see the treasury coming, it isn’t some beacon like a pyramid in the desert which you anticipate in the distance. The treasury explodes into your field of view, though it’s carved into a mountain it manages to materialize, a rose colored masterpiece against a brown wall.

As incredible as this moment is, it is only a moment. The childlike awe that overtook me, despite my growing annoyance at my surroundings, passed as quick as it came. After the wave crashed the sounds of the sea returned. The endless clicks of cameras, the inane commentary of the touritariet, and the booming voices of the tour guides started up again. I lined up a few shots and moved on. The enclosed cavern of the Siq expanded into a wide open space, the mountains yielded to the sand. The walls of rock were lined with tables of tourist knick knacks sold by bedu woman. It didn’t take long to see that everyone was selling identical items. In Petra all roads don’t lead to the gift shop, the road is the gift shop, and it was overflowing with people. The population of Petra had to be numbered in the tens of thousands during the hours it was opened. There is nothing so majestic in this world that it can’t be ruined by other people.

I moved with the herd. On both sides of me huge walls of the mountains had been carved into funerary chambers for the dead. Archeologists who came upon Petra were incredibly confused about how much effort was spent preserving the dead, and how little effort seemed to be spent on the living. They found little evidence of how the Nabateans actually lived despite the abundance of tombs. Early excavators began to label this city, the heart of a thriving empire, as a necropolis, a city of the dead. The answer was much simpler though, and they wouldn’t have had to go far to ask. The occupiers of Petra were Bedu. They lived in tents, they moved often, and the followed the grazing. They didn’t leave much of their lives behind that wasn’t also used by their children.

I walked through the sandy street which gave way to distinctly Roman columns and flagstones. Here there was an amphitheatre built for a capacity of 5,000, carved completely from the rock. Surprisingly, the amphitheatre was original, the columns and flagstones were Roman. The Greeks tried and failed to march an army through the Siq and take the city, the Romans didn’t have as much trouble. Though the temples and buildings the Romans built here didn’t stand the test of time. Where the Nabatean structures have held up amazingly well, the Roman structures are simply basements and foundations. Petra has been rocked by dozens of strong earthquakes over the centuries, nothing freestanding stood a chance.

It was around two o’clock when I got to the end of the flat road that ran through the heart of the old city. I hadn’t bothered to explore any of the ruins as they were crawling with people. Now the road went straight up, 800 steps, to the monastery. This was supposedly the only building in the city that vied with the pink treasury in scale and beauty. A dozen young Jordanians offered me a donkey to ride to the top, but I pressed on, passing people as fast as I could, seldom looking back, just to get away from the throng.

The winding path up the mountain was also lined with stalls of identical goods, manned exclusively by local women, covered up. Their beautiful children roamed around often chanting the English alphabet, months of the year, days of the week, etc… One woman named Fatima brayed at me and I promised her that if she remembered my name and recognized me on the way down, I would buy something from her shop.

Eventually I reached the end of the stairs, and almost immediately turned a corner and was confronted by the awesome spectacle of the monastery.

It was roughly twice the width of the treasury building and probably a little taller. It was definitely worth the trip up. Fortunately it wasn’t nearly as crowded as the areas below, but still there were plenty of people around so I decided to roam. I walked around behind one of the tea houses and found piles of Pepsis and water bottles next to the remnants of campfires where the locals probably hang out at night.

As I meandered farther I also noticed foundations, and stairs. They were literally everywhere. There were no tourists within earshot yet there were still remnants of this ancient civilization in every nook and cranny of the mountains. I started climbing some stairs, and then I started bouldering, and then finally just climbing to get to the top of a little mountain. After a half hour or so I was standing a hundred feet above the monastery, on a mountain top all to myself, with an amazing vantage point of pretty much all of Petra. I was beginning to gleam the true value of this place. Directly across from me was another hilltop, swarming with people, with a huge placard that said “The Best View in Petra” on it. They were seeing exactly what I was seeing, but I wasn’t fighting a handful of Austrian octogenarians to take a picture of it.

After I scrambled back down, recovering the sunglasses I dropped, I went toward the very back end of the city, or the sights, or whatever obligatory boundary marked the end, choosing the dour “view of the end of the world” over “the best view in Petra.” There were far less people going that way. This time I had to give it to them, it was aptly named. From the very edge of the cliff I looked down on an almost endless array of jagged rocks and sharp mountains pitched at extreme angles. It would have been impossible for any army to come through Petra the back way. It was devoid of any vegetation, and the clouds rolling in shrouded everything in ominous shadows. Anyone riding through the desert, and entering through the imposing and easily defended Siq must have looked upon Petra as an oasis, an almost magical city that existed in spite of its surroundings.

I had reached the end of Petra, and in one of those moments when egotistical people begin to think that the universe is aligned specifically for their travelogues, it began to rain. I high tailed it back down the stairs with an old British foursome. We’d gone down quite a ways discussing the fate of one couple’s grandson (the same age as me) when I hear my name being called.

“Steve! You say you buy something!” “And you, Ed-a-Na you say you buy something!” Fatima was one sly fox. It was one of the humbling moments when I was forced to admit that I wasn’t nearly as clever as I thought I was. So we stopped briefly and I bought myself a bedu necklace, which may or may not have been made in China.

The rest of the walk back passed without incident, but with the rain starting and the sun setting the whole city began to take on a more genuine glow. The boys yelling about donkey and camel rides, and the river of Tommy Bahama shirts began their slow erosion from foreground annoyance to background static. By the time I got out of Petra the rain was coming down in sheets, and I arrived at my hotel soaked and cold. I had a ticket for something called Petra at Night, but my hotelier told me the show would go on.

I bathed, napped, put on a jacket and a hat and headed back down toward Petra. The Petra at Night event was held a few times a week, and I was lucky to catch it on the first day, since I don’t think there was much partying going on in town anyway. They limited the tickets to a manageable number of people but I wasn’t sure how many exactly.

It was dark when I walked through the gate into Petra again, but where before there were hordes of tourists, and loud locals offering horseback rides the path was filled only with two rows of candles. The candles were placed within thin brown bags that protected them from the wind, and they lined the entire pathway from the gates, through the Siq and down to the Treasury building, whose pink walls radiated through the night.

There was something very genuine about crawling through the Siq by the light of actual candles. It had a timeless quality which is impossible to achieve in a theme park, and to everyone’s credit they seemed like a passive and humbled crowd from the simple spectacle. The candles multiplied and expanded into a vast circle in front of the treasury building. People began sitting down as they came in, and men, but not men in uniforms were constantly trying to squeeze all of these strangers closer together.

From somewhere little cups of tea appeared on trays, moving through the crowd. The cups were like paper shot glasses, but the warmth of the drink burrowed all the way to the blood after the walk through that humid night. After everyone had made it through the Siq and sat down, the show began. The old man who’d been trying to gather up the crowd sat down on a stool with a one stringed bedu guitar and began to play. There were no announcements or explanations, he simply waited for the crowd to quiet down and began playing and later singing. It wasn’t a performance I’d call beautiful, but adept. There’s only so much you can do with one string and a 60 year old larynx. When the music stopped the old bedu explained the significance of the instrument and the song he sang, which was a complex invitation to drink coffee. The sheiks of the desert would ask someone to play and sing in order to call some kind of meeting, or gathering in which the news of the sands was shared and decisions made.

After he finished another Bedu who was previously shrouded in the shadow of the treasury appeared, playing a flute. He also came without any kind of introduction, and the melody coming from the simple instrument was entrancing. He walked around the crowd, dipping into the light and then retreating into the darkness while the song continued. When he finished to some applause the original performer returned and this time spoke in a booming voice. It was a kind of story teller / history lesson about the Jordanian bedu. He spoke about the significance of the music they played, and how like almost everything in the desert, had a practical as well as artistic purpose. After he finished speaking the crowd dispersed as noiselessly as it had gathered. It was a surreal experience within the same site that had previously seemed drained of its charm by the masses.

Petra was beginning to redeem itself.

As I walked out past the candles, many of which were blowing out after burning through their paper prisons, I realized that I hadn’t had a decent meal all day. Past the Movenpick was a little pizza joint owned by an Egyptian and staffed by various Arabs and Africans. I listened to the Muezzin’s call come down from the hill above and die within the cracks and crevices of the ancient city. When the call to prayer finished in Petra the TV began playing the prayer in Mecca. The Hajj has begun in earnest. The TV showed the sprawling square of the Masjid al-Haram, the Mosque that surrounds the black cube of the Kabba. The densely packed crowd circled the small building and prayed in unison, but the interesting part of this televised pilgrimage was the interspersing of moments of prayer with nature scenery. Here a bearded man closes his eyes in the vast Mosque, there a waterfall, a boy crying in religious glee, then a bee pollinating a flower, faces to the sky in rapture, then a duck landing in a pond, a million white clad figures circling, then a sunset. This bizarre mash up continued accompanied by the voice of a female Arabic singer. Which is odd considering that music is considered blasphemous in the conservative halls of Saudi Mosques.

I was reminded a bit of what I’d managed to escape from for a little while to be enjoying a pizza, which was actually the tastiest I’d had in the Middle East, among a culture that actually took pride in its pre-Islamic history. The Saudis on the other hand, tried as hard as they could to downplay that the world had actually existed before Mohammed stamped Islam upon its psyche. I left and took the fifteen minute walk uphill in another downpour, vowing to return to Petra as early as possible to beat the mob, and do the next day right.

Lost in the Saudi Desert or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Honda

When in doubt…well just stop doubting, it’ll all be fine.

We piled into the car in the compound adjoining my own. We loaded up the car quickly, stopped to ice down the cooler and the wine, and then drove off…ten minutes down the road. We stopped again at the Panda, our local supermarket, and grabbed some barbecue implements (including a long lighter which would be a lifesaver) and extra water. At about ten in the morning we were off in earnest. Our destination was the Wabha Crater, a three mile wide, seven hundred feet deep hole in the Earth carved out by a massive volcanic explosion three million years ago.

As the driver I had absolutely no idea where we were actually going, and I only found out later that my navigator was going purely on hearsay from some other friends. This would, not surprisingly, come into play later. For now I wasn’t worried though, because I’m perpetually lost anyway. When we left the streets of Jeddah had finally dried off after the multiple deluges that engulfed the city in previous weeks.

During one storm in particular Jeddah had twice as much rain as the yearly average, and this was the third or fourth major storm of the winter. Why bother talking about rain when the streets were dry? As we drove out of the city we were treated to a rare sight. The entire desert of southwestern Saudi was awash with…grass. It was unbelievable that a few weeks earlier the entire landscape outside of Jeddah had been barren and brown, because a carpet of green had rolled over miles and miles of hills as we drove on.

One of the passengers in the car had only arrived in Saudi two weeks before, so we also felt it necessary to point out the other exciting things we found along the road.

Camel!

Sheep!

Goat!

Black Camel!

and you get the idea. The Bedouin still roam freely around most of the Saudi countryside, although larger animal farms and abattoirs are slowly beginning to take over many of the areas along the road.

The first obstacle along the highway, besides Saudi drivers, was the Mecca turnoff. Not far outside of the city of Jeddah motorists come to a police checkpoint where they are given two options. “Non-Muslims Are Obligated to turn right” reads one sign, and simply “Muslims” reads the other. The Holiest city of Islam and the resting place of the final Kabba (there were rumored to be as many as a half dozen in earlier times) is off limits to us.

So we turned right, as Allah intended, and headed toward the mountainous city of Taif. We were amazed that hundreds of kilometers outside of the city the desert greenery followed us. As we approached Taif the road started the slow and inevitable uphill tilt. Taif is located a staggering 6,000 feet above sea level, and the road leading up the mountains was in amazing shape.

As we rose, my erstwhile navigator, D. saw something atop one of the mountains. “Look at that observatory,” he said, but as an observatory would merit some kind of belief in science I immediately dismissed the idea. There was a more likely explanation for the curiously scientific looking structure. “The moon wizard!” I shouted, interrupting the conversation between the girls in the back.

The Holy Month of Ramadan, which most people know as the month when Muslims fast from sun-up until sun down cannot officially begin until a specially appointed Moon Wizard goes outside and tells the king that he’s spotted the full moon. This means that if the moon were obscured by cloud cover on the given night it could actually delay the beginning of the holiday. Even though we can predict exactly when the full moon of Ramadan will occur for the next thousand years using common sense and deductive reasoning, this strange tradition still persists in Saudi. The structure was a perfect place for the moon wizard to roam the mountaintops. (I should note that most Muslim countries no longer rely on moon wizards.) The reason many foreigners are slightly irked by this odd tradition is that it can have profound implications when trying to plan vacations for the holiday.

We didn’t have much time to muse on the Moon Wizard however because after rounding a turn up the mountain, with the shouts of camel and goat fading a new phrase echoed through the car, “Monkey!”

As we passed a large rock outcrop to our right, small and medium sized baboons began jumping up and perching on the guard rails. After a few minutes we approached a small parking lot off the side of the highway and “Holy shit look at all those baboons!”

We had inadvertently entered the fabled “monkey mountain” of Taif. As we pulled into the parking lot dozens of baboons were climbing all over the other parked cars. People were throwing food out and the baboons then clambered for more. There were no signs, no warnings, or banners, or any indication that this was a special or abnormal occurrence. I had assumed that “monkey mountain” was a destination that people had to drive to; I never imagined that the highway simply went through baboon territory.

We all picked up our cameras and got out of the car to take some pictures. The baboons didn’t really respond to our presence since we weren’t giving them any food. Then D. decided to see how aggressive they were. He slowly approached a lumbering gray baboon with a long mane of hair and it charged. It wasn’t much bigger than a medium sized dog and likely couldn’t have done too much damage but we scampered pretty fucking fast back toward the car.

We rustled up some extra burger buns we had in the back seat and then moved the car slowly toward the biggest group of baboons sitting on top of the concrete barrier. As soon as the window opened and the first bun flew through the air it was bedlam. Baboons swarmed the car, jumping on the hood, around the doors, and climbing onto the roof. A few more buns were ejected and they scrambled, sometimes fighting, tossing babies, and wrestling for the scraps of bread. At one point we saw one of the larger baboons knock over a baby and take the bread from it, and in another instance one of the older, larger baboons was breaking apart a bun and divvying it up among the smaller baboons. There was some kind of order to the chaos, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

When we tired of the spectacle I put the car into drive and moved it a few inches. The response was immediate. The baboons, knowing the feeding was over, leapt off the car and moved out of the way. We continued up the mountain. We stopped at a few more scenic overlooks, each with its own smaller baboon populations clambering among the rocks.

Not too long after our brush with baboons we reached the city of Taif. It was once renowned as the summer resort for all of Saudi Arabia, but its glory had faded recently. We passed a number of old looking amusement parks and water parks that looked like good settings for a Stephen King novel on the way to the city center. All of a sudden a crisis loomed.

“The Duvet!” My navigator’s kiwi girlfriend remembered. Being an uncouth bachelor I was immediately confused. It took me some minutes to realize that they were talking about a blanket. Since we were in the midst of a fairly large city surely we could stop to pick up another Duv…”Listen,” I said, “As long as we’re being carried along in this Japanese car very generously donated by American baby killers I’ll have no more talk of this ‘doo-vey,’ you will refer to it as a blanket, or at least a ‘doo-vet.’” I tolerate no French in my car. Even a “freedom-vey” would suffice.

And so we stopped at yet another Panda, this time in Taif, to get a blanket. Unfortunately it was prayer time, this meant that we’d have to wait a half hour before anything in the country opened up. I find this to be the only really inconvenient facet of life in Saudi Arabia. Five times a day (and the times change every month) every restaurant, shop, and store in the country close down for a half hour for the population to go and pray.

When we left the store, blanket in tow, we encountered our first navigational issue. Namely, we had no fucking idea which way to go. We drove around the city a bit, exited the city, decided to turn around and go back through the city and out another direction and finally were on our way. “Er, I think we’re going in the complete opposite direction that we want to go,” said Dave as he checked the GPS on his cell phone. We turned around so that we were again approaching the city of Taif and D. called his friend to find out which road to take.

Finally, with fresh directions we went back through Taif for the third time and off to the Riyad road. After all the congestion in Taif it was nice to get back to another hundred mile an hour burn through the desert. The girls had fallen asleep in the back and D. was checking his GPS as we drove through what appeared to be a swarm of locusts. They swept in from both sides of the highway and left large purple swaths of bug blood as they smashed against the windshield. After a half hour I was surprised I still had any wiper fluid left. When one of them got caught between the wiper and the hood of the car we figured out that they were dragonflies.

Sooner or later, after my karma had taken a hit from the deaths of a few hundred dragonflies, we came to what we thought may have been the turnoff we’d been looking for. According to the hearsay (in place of actual directions or GPS coordinates the average person would use) we’d been going on, we should be able to make a left off the highway and the road would quickly deteriorate into desert, and after an hour of off-roading we’d simply arrive at the crater.

We made the left turn. The road stopped. The desert began. Providence!

We realized sometime later that every single off ramp on the Riyad road may have followed the same pattern. For now though, we were exactly where we wanted to be. When the road ended the desert was sculpted into a very easily traveled path about two cars wide, the grooves were smooth, and it went straight in the direction we thought we might have wanted to go. We were driving through the desert for a few minutes when the girls woke up in the back. “Are you sure this is the right way?” M. asked.

At that moment the sands were covered in an endless field of large, porous black rock. This is exactly the strange environment I’d seen outside of another old volcanic site in southern Oman. I confidently told the girls that if we were looking for the volcano this was as good an indication as we could get. The stones were completely unnatural to this terrain, we different from the native rock of the mountains, and spread so widely and haphazardly that a volcano was the only likely culprit. This satisfied all parties involved, so we pressed on.

Unfortunately after ten minutes our smooth, wide “road” began narrowing a bit. Eventually we were following a single set of tracks and the small stones on the sand were beginning to ping the undercarriage like shrapnel. As one set of tracks began turning to deep sand I’d switch over to another set of tracks. After another ten minutes we’d switched tracks a dozen times. The horizon beckoned though, in the distance the land rose evenly in what looked like the outline of a giant crater. Driving through that desert, without any landmarks, the apparent lip of a crater staring us in the face, I immediately understood why Oases shimmer to dehydrated travelers in the desert, wishful thinking overwhelms logic.

We soon passed what turned out to be anything but a giant crater and did the only thing we could do, keep going. Unfortunately, without a large path, the large black volcanic rocks became part of the path. As I gunned the Honda’s engine through places of deep sand I’d inevitably swerve into a large rock making a teeth clenching clung against the undercarriage. We continued going in basically the same direction, toward where we thought the crater might have been if we were actually heading in the right direction when we left the highway…maybe. The sound of rocks pinging, banging, grating and scraping the belly of the car continued and the path we were on, and most of the subsequent single sets of tracks then turned sharp left around a small hill. It seems like we’d been in the desert for hours, but it was probably only 35 minutes or so. I decided to stop the car and reconnoiter the hill to see if we could see anything in the distance. We all got out and stretched out as we walked to the top of the hill.

When we got to the top of the hill, the oasis stared us in the face. A set of mountains loomed in the distance. D. and M. could swear those are exactly the mountains they saw in pictures of the crater. Surely the hearsay we’d been going on said we’d be off-road for an hour and it had only been thirty or forty minutes of punishing off road driving. All we’d have to do is follow the tracks around this hill and continue on toward the crags in the distance. We’d practically made it.

Reality, unfortunately, sunk in quickly. When we got back to the car we took a good look at it for the first time since we’d been in the desert. A piece of plastic was dangling from one of the wheel wells, another piece was hanging, but still functional beneath the engine, and something was leaking. I would put all of these squarely into the bad things category. I reached down and yanked one piece of plastic off the car, it didn’t seem too important, but the leak was another story. I backed the car up a few feet and the four of us leaned over to inspect the puddle on the ground. We touched it and smelled it but I don’t think anyone went so far as to taste it. It wasn’t oil, and it wasn’t gas. It was clear so it wasn’t anti-freeze. D. and I knew about as much about cars as we did about planning a road trip. M. stepped up to the plate though, and she had a theory. “It’s probably just water coming from the exhaust, which doesn’t affect the car’s functioning at all.” She had apparently ripped a whole exhaust out of an old truck one road trip in New Zealand. D. and I took the jack out of the car and jacked up the car, and then the men sent one of the women scurrying under the car to take a look. After a rather anxious few minutes (the jack didn’t look all that stable) she kind of confirmed what might have been the case.

At this point we had a choice, we had another hour to hour and a half of daylight, should we continue on toward the random mountains in the middle of the desert that might have been the random mountains in Wikipedia shots of the crater, or should we turn around and camp car closer to the road, where D. would get signal again and find the actual GPS coordinates of our destination. Back toward the highway we went.

I hardly noticed the sky darkening, but as we drove back on a fairly good path the skies opened up. The rain came suddenly and for a half hour a trip that was turning bleak was beginning to look like a defeat. The path was smooth, but every rock banging against the undercarriage had me wincing on the ride back. Then as suddenly as it began, the rain stopped. We found a place with soft sand between a few desert shrubs and decided to make camp. The road wasn’t too far away and D. was getting signal on his phone again. As soon as we got out of the car though, another problem confronted us, the wind was whipping around like crazy, and it was cold. We had another hour or so until sunset and we’d have to put everything together and get the cooking started before it got too dark to see.

M. put the grill down behind one of the shrubs and almost magically (thanks in no small part to the small lighter D. didn’t want to buy at the first Panda) she got the fire going. D. managed to get his tent up, but we had trouble figuring out where to put that the wind wouldn’t blow it around, because under a few inches of soft sand, the ground was hard as rock. The measly tent stakes provided with our tents didn’t have a prayer of staying in with the wind. The second shrub provided enough cover for the first tent, but the tent B. and I would share wasn’t going anywhere. We put it next to the other tent but the stakes just wouldn’t stay in. Then a burst of inspiration took D. We took four plastic shopping bags out of the trunk, filled them with sand, and placed them on the corners of the tent. Huzzahs all around.

The groundwork laid, I moved the car in front of the cooking bush to cut off the wind a bit and we setup camp and got ready to eat. M., who is one tough cookie, sat down in the wind cooking all of the food as I scampered back to my tent to wrap a light blanket around me. Living in the Gulf had completely sapped me of my tolerance for the cold. We had some burgers and chicken skewers and a little couscous, D. opened up the two bottles of apple wine someone had fermented at home and given him as a gift, and we feasted.

The day, despite some setbacks, had turned out pretty great. We hunted down some sticks that had fallen off the bushes and thrown them on the hibachi after we finished eating. Myself and D. being men immediately responded to our primal urges to make the fire bigger and scurried around the desert with flashlights looking for more firewood. The girls didn’t take long to follow. After an hour we’d burned everything close by, but the desert provides…if you decide to start pulling whole small shrubs out of the sand. After we’d burned all that we discovered an entire ecosystem of roots dotting the ground. We went around kicking these out of the sand and burning them as well. Amazingly, what looked like a completely barren patch of ground had yielded enough sticks to keep the fire going for almost three hours. When we were out of wine and fire it was time to go to bed.

The night passed without incident for me, since I’m the one who snores. I woke up in the early morning to a strange sound coming from outside the tent. When I opened the tent flap I was staring at a white Toyota pickup with two Bedouin inside the cab. After being surprised, then exchanging pleasantries, and then being a little creeped out, I got out of the tent, zipped it back up and put on my shoes.

When I got out of the tent things took a turn for the strange. The driver got out of the car, wearing not only the typical thobe (white robe) and sandals, but he had a giant fur lined coat over this thobe that went down to his sandals. He walked to the bag of the truck and pulled out two huge branches and laid them on the sand. Then he pulled out some hay and a small water bottle filled with diesel fuel and tried to start a fire with matches. Let me try to translate my Arabic into English and his Arabic of which I understood about 10 percent into English jibberish:

Me: Please, thank you, no thank you, no problem.

Bedu: No problem, turtle Pikachu, dirka dirka, Praise be to Allah

Me: Yes, no, thank you, no thank you, sleeping, fire bad, no problem, no please thank you.

Bedu: (Running through matches like crazy) donkey meth lab, problem dirka boogy sideshow, fire good, Odin tampon, dirka, by the will of Allah.

Me: thank you, no thank you, no problem, please thank you, no please

At this point the Bedu simply mumbled as his friend in the truck laughed, and then he got in the truck and drove off, leaving the empty box of matches, diesel fuel, hay and branches on the ground. I was perplexed to say the least. In the back of my mind the whole time was the fact that we had girls with us, and I wasn’t exactly sure what the reaction would be. I hadn’t really interacted with any Saudis outside of the city of Jeddah, the most liberal part of the country.

After they’d gone everyone else got out of the tent, amused at the streams of babble and the gifts they’d left behind. The first thing we did was kick over the coals that were still burning from last night and break apart the branches and start up another fire. It was cold and wet in the morning. We were coming out of our malaise and beginning to pack things up when our visitors returned…with breakfast!

They were amazed that we’d managed to turn their sticks into a fire where they had failed to do so, there were many dirkas of congratulations to go around. We sat down around the fire putting eggs, or beans, or some kind of paste into Arabic bread and gorging ourselves on the free food. I’ll save you another round of translations, but unfortunately for us the level of Arabic between my three co-campers made mine look like fluency.

What we got from our fireside chat was that D. and M’s tent was a little sissy tent and there’d be a big problem if it rained while they were sleeping in it. We figured out that the two men were brothers, (since I’d forgotten the word for brother I simply pointed to them and asked if they had one mother and one father) and that they lived somewhere close by. We discovered that they liked the girls, a lot. They asked me if they were my sisters, and I immediately replied that they were our wives. Sisters are fair game in Saudi Arabia. They offered to take us to their home, and offered us rides on their camels, but we tried to explain that we simply wanted to go to Wabha. They looked at the car and also said that this was a big problem. The brother of the pyromaniac took me off to the side and began drawing a cryptic map with a bunch of circles and lines in between, attempting to explain why going to Wabha would be a problem. Naturally I had no idea what he was saying or drawing.

Eventually the agreed to guide us to the crater and we were elated. We hastily packed everything up, crammed the tents down, and stuffed everything into the trunk and back seat. One of the brothers wanted to drive my car for me, but after some time they dropped it, got in their truck, and led us through the desert. They took off at a pretty good clip and I was struggling to both keep up and not destroy what was left of my car. After a few minutes they stopped in front of fence.

We got out of the car and the Bedu were smiling wide, they’d taken these hopeless foreigners to where they needed to go. It was certainly A crater, but it was only about 20 feet across and a few feet deep. One hole’s as good as another to them I suppose, they live here. I immediately got down on the ground and told the Bedu to watch me. I drew a small circle in the sand and pointed to their crater. I drew a bunch of similar sized circles and then one very big circle that obviously dwarfed the others and pointed to that. The reaction was immediate, but first they wanted to take pictures with the girls.

That finished we got back into our cars and sped off through the desert. After ten minutes or so we got onto a paved road. After hours of driving in the rocky desert the road felt like glass. Not a minute after we’d gotten on the road we heard a pretty loud noise coming from the bottom of the car. At first we’d thought that we punctured a tire. We stopped on the side of the road and our guides stopped and reversed back to where we were.

The massive piece of plastic that had come half off from under the engine was now almost all the way off, but it was still too far from the edge of the car for me to yank it off completely. Our Bedu friends came over and had a look, muttering “no problem” before going back to their truck. Before I had time to react the driver was coming back toward our car with a massive curved knife that looked lick a sickle, you know the one on the Soviet flag, and in one motion he sliced the fucking thing right off the bottom of the car. The girls on watching him approach were laughing hysterically. Another small crisis averted, another piece of my car moved from attached to the car to into the trunk, and we were off again.

Our guides stopped on the side of the road another couple of times in the next half hour and each time we were more confused that the last. The first time we stopped M. and I got out of the car and it quickly became apparent that the Bedu were not following the look but don’t touch rule with our Kiwi companion. After accepting the gross groping of our guides the first time M. no longer got out of the car when we stopped and I think it disheartened our new friends a bit. We drove past a few towns and stopped to get gas, where the gas station attendant informed us that we were very close to the crater (which had a paved fucking road leading all the way up to it). Eventually the Bedu came to a stop in front of some steel pylons. We stopped next to them and when we got out the crater wasn’t more than twenty feet away from the car, and it was immense.

We jubilantly got out of the car, grabbed some small supplies and cameras and trotted down to the edge of the crater. We took pictures, and I tried to teach one of the Bedu how to properly throw a rock, but he kept staggering mid throw and almost tripping over himself, and when we told them that we wanted to walk down to the bottom of the crater they left us. We thanked them heartily and hiked over to the trail carved into the steep cliff face of the crater. When we started hiking down there were a few Saudis with hammers and instruments and a couple of Indian porters carrying a drill and some gear. I asked one of the men if he was a geologist. Not only was he a geologist working for Taif university, but he’d gotten his PHD in the U.S. For those of you not prone to visiting big holes in the ground, a geologist is about the most perfect person you could possibly meet in the situation and I grilled him for a few minutes. According to his research the caldera erupted nearly three million years ago, and he was going to spend the day drilling core samples out of the upper rock.

We left our geology friends soon after and meandered down to the beautiful salty remnants of the lake that once filled the crater. After all the hoopla and drama to get there, we probably only spent a couple of hours at the crater itself, there wasn’t much more to do than take some pictures and drive back home. We ate the last of the food in the parking lot. I pointed out to my navigator that we’d passed three rather imposing mountain ranges on the way here, one of which was likely the one we were going to drive to the way before, and it would have been physically impossible to get here through the desert. The Bedu had totally saved our asses.

We drove back, stopping briefly to feed the baboons again on the way back through Taif and toward Jeddah. Coming back we went the back way around Mecca and the massive clock tower (the biggest in the world) was visible beyond a range of mountains. Otherwise we returned home without incident in our unstoppable if not slightly battered Honda Accord. We were treated to one of the most beautiful sunsets I’d ever seen in Saudi, radiating a deep red over the thousands of cranes at the Jeddah Port.