Jordan On My Mind: El Fin

After the sun set over Jerash I went back out to my car and took out my map of Jordan. I had an outline of a plan, a sort of constellation of possible places to go, but nothing remotely resembling an itinerary. I did have a car, and I could return that car to Aqaba, where I’d seen the same rental agency by chance when I arrived in Jordan. I also had two more days. I wanted to see the dead sea, and do the obligatory float, and I wanted to see the crusader castle at Karak (not to be confused with Kraks de Chevaliers, which is in Syria) and I’m sure there were some other things worth seeing in the interior of the country but I wasn’t entirely sure what they were.

My trusty car rental map glowed on top of the hood from the light of my headlamp (never leave home without one) and it seemed the road that went to Jerash, which took me so long to find actually went straight through Amman (where I didn’t want to go) and out the southern end, towards a central city called Madaba, which according to the Lonely Planet was also filled with old stuff. Never being one to underestimate the value of a straight road, I got in the car and went off the exact same way I came. I basically ignored every sign on the street, pumped some music through my IPod, and started paying attention again when I saw signs that said Madaba.

When I got there it was around dinner time and I stopped at the big roundabout that I very wrongly assumed was the center of town. After making a fool of myself trying to ask for some shawarma sandwiches I realized that you don’t actually order sandwiches from the people that make sandwiches, you order them from another building from the people who take the money. I grabbed my sandwiches a few minutes later and walked out, almost immediately a couple of twenty somethings offered me “Jordanian coffee.” Any real travelers know that food or drink items with a nationality for an adjective are much better than ones without. So these two Madaba hipsters gave me some coffee, which I spilled trying to get the money to pay for, and was subsequently given another cup free of charge. We talked for a few minutes while I burned my mouth, and they discussed how little affection they held for this little town. Not having seen much of it, I immediately agreed that it was a shit-hole and wished them the best of luck getting to America, where people are fatter, just as provincial, and half the time more religious than Jordanian Bedu.

I got back to my tiny little French car and killed off a sandwich. I took out the lonely planet, which had a slightly better map of the town than the rental car map did. It looked like there were hotels, you know, in that part of town where the hotels were. So I went in the direction that looked like it went to that place. It was not that place. I turned around came back to the roundabout and went the other way…also not that place. I went back to the roundabout, took out the map again, dictated an angry letter to lonely planet in my head, and went back one of the two ways I’d already gone that was the wrong way, I just went farther, and civilization appeared. There were some well manicured houses, some hotel signs, little Italian restaurants, and gelato shops…and wait hotel signs. I went into one, determined to get a good deal and check some of the other hotels, and then after I saw a mediocre but passable room I just decided to stay there. I was drawn more to the liquor store across the street than anything else.

In the end I just went up to my room, watched a movie and fell asleep. I got up for hotel breakfast and then got directions from the hotel staff (neatly printed out no less) on how to get to Mukawir (Herod’s Palace), Mount Nebo (where Moses saw “the promised land”) and the dead sea. I decided to pay for another night on the hotel, since my backpack would probably weigh down my miniature, 14-horsepower, high performance vehicle.

My first stop was Mount Nebo, only 10 or 15 miles from the hotel. Since this was a big stop on the Christian tourist circuit, (All the Holy land you can eat!) the hotel had a little printout with directions. Which I followed without too much trouble, and before long I was in a parking lot filled with buses. I do not like parking lots filled with buses. It makes me feel like a tourist, which I am, but nonetheless don’t like to admit. I went to a small kiosk and spent a few dinars to get a ticket for entry. The walkway was filled with old people. Old people like the Holy land. The reason that there were so many old people was primarily due to the fact that one only had to walk about half a mile to get to the attraction…on paved road. There’s a big Church dedicated to Moses (who is also a prophet in Islam) but it’s entirely under construction. There’s a tent with some large, fairly beautiful mosaics exposed (Jordan is apparently famous for Mosaics) and after words the main attraction. Said attraction is a brown patch of Earth on the side of a mountain where Moses was ordered to go where he could look out over the promised land.

There’s a little sign pointing out in five or six directions to tell the casual observer what they can kind of see. There’s a patch of smog floating over something that could be Jerusalem, a patch of smog floating over what might have been Galilee, and a few others. Directly below there is a valley that may or may not have been green a couple thousand years ago. For those of you who aren’t experts in geography, topography, mountaineering, path finding, leading a bunch of angry Jews to the promised land, or common sense I can reveal that valleys, the places between mountains where all the water goes when it rains, are generally green, and mountains, the tall things pitched at steep angles that aren’t quite as good at collecting water, are generally more on the brown side.

Seeing Mount Nebo made me think that there may be a glaring translation error between Aramaic and English. Maybe it wasn’t actually God’s chosen people who were told to go up somewhere high to find a nice place somewhere low, maybe they were actually God’s “special people.”

The aww shucks crowd cooed irritatingly behind and in front of me, taking pictures into the glare of the sun, and without too much ado I walked down the hill and asked some of the bored looking security packing automatic weapons how to get to Herod’s stomping ground. (The location where John the Baptist’s head was offered as a gift to a beautiful woman – Now there’s a god-damned Bible story I can get behind). He gave me some moderately specific directions and I was off.

I actually had to go back to Madaba again and leave the city from another direction to get to Mukawir, and within about a half hour I had seen a sign, and was convinced that I was on the way. The signs and lack of signs once again managed to overcome my complete and utter ignorance of the country to propel me into another somewhat embarrassing situation. I’d followed a sign for Mukawir, which led into a kind of village, somewhere in the country of Jordan. The village was built around the sides of a hill and the pinnacle, the place most suited for a school, or mayor’s house, or Warlord’s pleasure palace was actually a rocky, crumbling façade of what looked like a small castle. Surely this majestic view overlooking the serfs and peasants of old befitted the Roman Guardian of the Realm. I drove up, whether it was the wrong way down a one way street or that I didn’t move enough to the side of the road, something was amiss. I was getting strange looks from everyone outside, though I was driving a tiny, shitty French car.

After about a half hour I reached the peak. I parked my car nearby, took out my camera, and opened the door with satisfaction. I’d been lost for a much shorter time than usual, found the place I wanted to find, even with confusing signs, and it was pretty darn nice up here. Not epic, not gorgeous, but on the pleasant side. I took some pictures, meandered around the wreckage for a while, took some more pictures, and then a man from one of the nearby houses came out.

Hatha Mukawir? I asked, though to be honest, I didn’t really say it like a question.

He looked at me the same way one looks at a child in a department store who asks you if you know where their mommy is. He looked at me with a combination of abject pity and smug superiority. This is generally not good.

Hatha bait fi Herod? (This Herod’s house?) I asked. By this time I was already pleading.

He asked me if I’d like to come to his house for tea. At this point he was offering me the equivalent of giving a stray puppy some leftovers from dinner because you don’t really know what you can do to help it. This, for my purposes, is bad. I politely declined, got in my motherfucking French POS and burned back down the hill at an unsafe speed.

I decided, this time, to pretend the arrow on the “Mukawir” sign said straight, because that intuitively made more sense than detouring through the hilly outback of the tea-people. After driving down this road a little while longer, I stopped at a gas station and kind-of confirmed that I was sort-of on the way. This was better than nothing, so I went with it. After a while though it stopped mattering whether I was on the way or not because the countryside took on a visceral beauty that I hadn’t really felt in the Middle East before.

The landscape in middle Jordan isn’t craggy and imposing like the area around Petra, and it doesn’t have the kaleidoscope of colors that Wadi Rum had, it works mostly in shades of brown, but there’s something hypnotic about it. The hills roll on in what seems like every direction like the undulations of a vast snake. I stopped the car at one of the many scenic parking areas between Madaba and the Dead Sea (and hopefully between Madaba and Mukawir) and I had the top of one of these hills completely to myself. The wind blew and I looked out toward a shimmer in the distance which would eventually become the Dead Sea. Between me and the Sea, not so far away, was an unnaturally tall and narrow band of rock that rose higher than the rest of the surrounding hills. There was some kind of structure at the top of it, and narrow walls spiraling out from the core, like the teeth of a saw blade biting into the rock. I kept going.

Before long there were real signs for Mukawir. Of course there would be after I’d already spotted it. The signs became more specific, noting that the Palace of Herod the Great was up ahead. There were no other cars on the road. I passed families of Bedu herding their sheep, or piling whatever they were growing onto the backs of pick-ups. Every single person waved...and smiled. Some of the children even ran a little ways after the car. This was a very good sign. Not many people visited Mukawir.

I pulled into the parking lot that was almost entirely empty. A Winnebago sat in one corner and two or three compact cars in the other. As I parked a young Jordanian in some kind of security uniform pounced on me, demanding that I comply with some rule or other. I moved the car where he pointed and paid the man a whopping 2 or 3 bucks American for entry into the site. There was a path the wound up the mountain from the parking lot, and as it climbed it passed by the ancient chambers carved underneath the foundations of the palace that housed prison cells. There weren’t many, but they looked fairly abysmal if the size was any indication of comfort.

As I got about halfway up the path the group that comprised the three cars went down the hill and left. I had already passed the old Winnebago couple sitting under a gazebo near the parking lot. That left only a rotund, middle-aged Arab and his two little Filipino girls, who stood on the plateau overlooking the Dead Sea jumping up and down and trying to get photos of themselves in mid-air. It was a sweet and disturbing little moment.

Mukawir itself, the remnants of what must have been a formidable structure, was left with three Roman columns and the box of its foundation. Everything else was gone, and likely carted off by farmers over the centuries to wall off their livestock. History has its own hidden ecosystems. What remained was a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside and the dead sea, across to Israel, Sinai, and all the same crap Moses saw. Unlike Nebo though, Mukawir, without the palace, offered a perfect 360 view. If I knew how to use a camera or had one of those nifty little tripod things I could have gotten a seriously nice panorama of Jordan from there.

Once again, as soon as Jordan threw something touristy and disappointing at me, it almost immediately redeemed itself.

I wandered back down the hill to the empty parking lot, and started talking to one of the guards, a kid in his early 20’s. A few minutes later the other guards came over and they invited me to eat with them. It was a simple meal, reminiscent of our “Bedu lunch” in Wadi Rum. They brought over Arabic bread with some tuna, tomatoes, and cucumbers for sandwiches; a little tin of hummus, and juice boxes. I cannot think of too many places in the world where employees at a tourist attraction invite the affluent tourists to dine with them, sharing the food they bought with their meager salaries. If it is the history and majesty of the sights that bring people to Jordan, it is probably the Jordanians themselves that make them return. We ate the lunch, and then over tea tried to communicate in the broken shards of language we’d all accumulated, and then I got directions to the Dead Sea. I pulled the cord to start my little, French lawnmower, and headed down to the water.

The Dead Sea, as all the guidebooks will tell you, is the lowest point on planet Earth. This meant that although I could see it from Mukawir, I’d still have to drive around the mountains to get to it. I went back the way I came, waved to the Bedu, went back into Madaba, then past Mt. Nebo, then down the mountains, then up the mountains again, and then down the last time to get to the road the wound along the Dead Sea.

The Dead Sea gets its namesake from the fact the salinity of the water is too high to sustain any kind of aquatic life. It is literally a huge body of water without any fish in it. Surprisingly, this has nothing to do with pollution, agricultural runoff, or any other human factors. It simply arises from the fact that more of the water is evaporated out of the sea than is dropped in. So every year as water evaporates from the surface it leaves a little more salt than the year before. This also means that if you get Dead Sea water in your eyes, it hurts like a bitch. The flipside of the high salinity is the reason it’s become one of those things you have to do when you’re in Jordan. It’s almost impossible to drown in the Dead Sea. The salt content of the water makes the human body much more buoyant than normal. So if you go into the water, you’ll just float above the surface.

I pulled into a hotel named “O”. Or at least that’s all that was written on the sign. I paid 25 bucks for the privilege of using their facilities to swim in the Dead Sea. It was one of the most modern and extravagant hotels I’ve ever seen. It had a giant pool, lined with lights, right across the horizon line. Immediately beyond it was the sea, and the borders of Israel and Egypt in the distance. People are warned strongly against any activity that might take them out too close to the Israeli side.

Not seeing much point in lingering around I went to it. The “beach” was actually a small mountain of sharp, impassable rocks. Most of them covered in the slimy salt-fed mucous that made the passage even more painful. My feet slipped a dozen times before I finally banged and slid my way into the water. And then that was pretty much it. You can affect a backstroke for a little while but more often than not all 4 limbs ended up sticking out of the water. I could see why so many people opted for the pictures of them in the sea reading a newspaper. It was a natural pose here. When I finally gained control of my flopping arms and legs, started to look at the descending sun, and wonder about all the wars, messiahs, and trials this sinking puddle had witnessed, all semblance of peace was shattered. About 50 old, Spanish women were entering the Sea at once. They screamed, giggled, and drooped flesh in every direction at unreasonably high decibels. It was after about a minute of this that I decided I was done with my awkward floating.

I sat down for a meal and watched the sun go down over Israel. The table next to mine quickly filled up with girls speaking in American accents. These would be the first Americans I’d seen since the bus ride to Petra. As it turns out though, they were all Palestinian, born in the United Arab Emirates, educated abroad, and culturally melded somewhere in the middle. You get a lot of this in the Arabian Gulf. Since the wages are so high, and native-born skilled labor so lacking, thousands of educated Pakistanis, Indians, Egyptians, Jordanians, and Palestinians settle into these countries where they have no chance of ever becoming a citizen, raise their children within cultures that don’t accept them, but with almost no real connection to their parents native lands, and then go to Europe or America to get an education, and choose where they’d like to settle afterwards. These women gathered at this little sea side resort, who I thought were American by their accents, had resettled in Abu Dhabi. We chatted a bit and then they headed back to Amman while I drove back up and down and up the mountains again to Madaba.

The next morning I took in the local color. I drove around the part of town that I had missed previously, and was pleasantly surprised that although touristy, it still seemed a very genuine, old-fashioned Arab town. Madaba was apparently some kind of Mecca for mosaic craftsmen, and people today are still digging up the foundations of old houses under their own, tiled floor to ceiling in the beautiful, intricate pieces. I visited a museum with a cheap entrance fee that housed some of the larger, if more faded works, and a cathedral famous for its radical (at the time) mosaic map of the world.

The shops were abundant, typical bric-a-brac selling tourist traps, but the staffs were friendly. There were a number of workshops where artists put together some fairly stunning mosaic pieces, but the prices were exorbitant, and having no idea of what the real value was I shied away from them for fear of getting fleeced.

By late morning the French POS was leaving Madaba for the last time. I headed south. My last stop before Aqaba was the Crusader castle of Karak. Along the main road heading south out of the city, and after another breathtaking ride atop the spines of a dozen mountains of the Jordanian interior I had to stop for a moment at the Wadi Mujib Gorge. Affectionately, if not accurately, referred to as Jordan’s Grand Canyon, the gorge filters down into a large damn, and the area is incredibly beautiful. Atop the one side of the Canyon are a number of little tea-shop rest areas. When I stopped I was greeted by a middle aged Jordanian who spoke perfect English. After he revealed that he was a former air force officer, I knew he studied at the Defense Language Institute in San Antonio, which he did. Chosen military officers from most countries in the world take the little pilgrimage to Texas to study English from a bunch of fat old southerners there. His te

a-shop, open air, with folksy furniture and a bevy of beautiful children wandering around, was a welcome respite from all the day’s driving. It also sported an outdoor canyon toilet, which is my new favorite bathroom on planet Earth. A tour bus full of middle aged Europeans parked alongside my car, and I had a chat with a Danish lady for a little while. I would end up pulling into the parking lot of Karak castle only moments before the bus rumbled in behind me.

The castle was built into the side of a steep hill, and a mid-sized town had grown up next to it. I imagine the town had been there almost as long as the castle. The roads were narrow and carved at steep angles. I imagined before the days of giant tour buses this was a rather imposing route to attack the castle from. It was also the only way in.

Despite the prime, fortification real estate, the castle looked like a much sloppier construction that many of the remaining castles in Lebanon. This made sense to me, because the farther the invaders came from the sea the quicker they must have wanted to get their impregnable fortress up and running. The castle was wonderfully open to wandering, and I often reached into my bag to get a flashlight to follow some tunnel or offshoot off the main paths until reaching a dead end.

The castle, like most in the middle east, has a long history, and has changed hands more than a few times. It has the distinction of being attacked by Saladin twice, and taken by him the second time. It was then taken by Egyptians, the Turks, and then the Egyptians again, before finally becoming a museum. Most of it had been destroyed, some of it rebuilt, then destroyed again, and then…it became a museum. This is a familiar pattern in this part of the world.

I took my time lolling around on the hillside, enjoying the view, and the old stuff. I wandered through the museum, half paying attention to many of the relics found at the site, attributed to the various hordes and armies mentioned above. I had to stop on the way out of the castle to get directions back to Aqaba, and also to take pictures of the creepy, Scooby-dooesque haunted amusement park under the castle.

The drive back from Karak, once I got directions, to Aqaba was straight forward, and interrupted only by a speeding ticket an hour from the city. Since my car wouldn’t hit a decent cruising speed unless it was launched out of a catapult the ticket wasn’t so bad. I was driving a whopping seven miles an hour over the speed limit. I was also busy staring at another beautiful sunset when it happened. Otherwise I’d reached Aqaba without a hitch, dropped the car off at the rental place, checked into the same hotel I’d been in a week earlier and went around to all the shops I’d seen the first day to buy gifts that I didn’t want to carry around the country with me. I went out to the bars again, but they were basically empty, so it was hardly a wild last night in Jordan.

The next day I took a taxi to the border, which was the same painstakingly slow process as entering the country. They checked all my bags and my backpack for anything titillating, which would naturally be banned in Saudi Arabia. I had a piece of crap tell-all biography by a Bin-Laden wife about how screwed up that family was, and the customs official looked at it for a minute, but I could tell the neurons weren’t really firing. I could have had a book that said “How to Convert Muslims to Christianity” and he wouldn’t have known what it was. I got back into my car, in the abandoned car parking lot, and got ready for the long haul back home.

It was an unremarkable burn through the desert, save for the incredible sunset bursting over the charred rock strewn hills of northern Saudi. It was nice to be back in a real car, pushing the needles toward the dashboard, sliding across the dark and quiet streets toward Jeddah, where I’d wait for the next chance to explore a piece of this batshit crazy region we call the Middle East.