Jordan
Our 'guide' was the second son of a Bedouin, home from business school. He was young, early twenties, and it might have been that, but it could have also been the silence of the landscape, but he rarely ventured beyond a few words when he spoke. Wadi Rum is a sandy desert scattered with large basalt and granite outcrops with sheer vertical faces up to 100m high; the type so favoured by climbers. The was the land of T. H. Lawrence who waged a guerrilla war against the Ottoman empire. In an attempt to elicit some conversation I broached the subject of Lawrence of Arabia but the response was seemed cold, suggesting that Lawrence was an agent for the British goal of setting up the state of Israel. Being in Jordan I thought my best diplomatic option was to drop the subject.
We camped in the desert, warmed by a fire, drinking strong sweet tea and listened to our guide play the oud and sing melancholic songs about love and the desert. Like any country lad, he seemed more at home driving his old land cruiser across the open plains than discussing how to build a web page to promote his father's business. We had one day to ourselves to walk into the landscape, but it felt hard to feel isolated, even though we saw only saw two distant people, as tyre tracks cris-crossed the sand and at the foot of many of the mountains was another Bedouin tent.
The bus never arrived for our trip to Petra, something that is not unusual. But a racing driver managed to be on hand to give us a lift for twice the fare. Eventually Roselin worked her magic and managed to squeeze 6 passengers into his dual cab for the same price as the bus. Our assured us that he paid a lot of money for his license and seemed to think that meant he was ready for the track despite protests that we wanted to live to see more of Jordan from our Korean co-passengers/co-sardines.
The ancient city of Petra is approached through a narrow canyon and the first glimpse lives up to the hype. The slither that peeks at you through the slit in the rock tantalises; promising more the further you approach. And finally you burst out upon The Treasury, glowing in the morning sun. The hills are carved thought with these facades that served as tomb to the Nabateans who, from here, controlled the trade routes from Egypt. But it is not the tombs that were most surprising but the rock itself that they were carved into. It is a glorious rainbow of reds, pinks, yellow, and blue gray that is the colour of the the mountains. Today Bedouins live in Petra, some of the cave-like tombs acting as home or stables.
We stopped on the trail back from the hill top Monastery to drink tea with a Bedouin woman as we watched other tourists drifted on by passing us side ways glances. We sat on a dusty carpet while the woman heated a blackened teapot over a juniper fire, and were joined by a young man of 23. With the kohl darkening is eyes and his head wear he had the appearance of Jack Sparrow. He called to the tourists passing but none would stop, and he commented that they were so typical, too much in a rush to appreciate anything. He was full of bravado, explaining that this was one of his mothers and his father had five wives. Roselin was quick to ask why there were so few men about, and he retorted that they didn't need to work as they made the women happy at home! He tried to invite us sleep in a cave in Petra like a 'real' Bedouin but thoughts flashed to me of the New Zealand woman who was "Married to a Bedoiun" and has now written a book of the same title. We declined as graciously as we could and made our retreat.
We completed our race through Jordan with a taxi ride to the crusader castle of Kerak, a dip in the Dead Sea and a peek at the mosaics of Madaba. Or taxi driver was a talkative senior gentleman who used the trip to get a tax invoice for his last stop at a garage, some vegetable and some eggs. All a little eccentric but nice none the less, when he dropped us off in Amman he thought that some of the locals would take "1000 years to be human".
We had not planned to go through Israel at the start of our travels but to overland through Syria. But the world changes and we thought discretion the better part of valour. One plus is that we had friends we met 10 years ago in South America that we could catch up with. We crossed the King Hussein bridge from Jordan and ran into problem with our telephoto lens. They security check seemed not to have seen one before and even asked me to take it apart. Next was immigration and that was another kettle of fish. Roselin was getting grilled about not wanting a stamp in her passport and then admitted to travelling with me, to which the woman official exclaimed "You are married to HIM!". On producing our marriage certificate and some sort of evidence of a flight out (of Turkey) it was my turn. I was going OK until I was asked if I had been staying in the same hotels as my wife. Then I lost it (briefly). What are we meant to do on our honeymoon? But fortunately I must have answered the other questions correctly as we were let in. The German next to me who was coming to see some aid project that his company was working didn't join us on our bus from the airport. He seemed to be getting a tougher grilling than me. Our next shock was the bus check before entering Jerusalem. A girl, possibly all of 18, with braces, an iPhone in one hand and a machine gun over her shoulder boarded and started checking passports. The prevalence of guns was one thing but to see them in the hands of children was another.
Jerusalem was clean and well maintained, not the deterioration of other ancient walled cities that we had seen. But it still maintains that street market atmosphere of a Marrakesh or Varanasi, just a lot cleaner. It is a city divided into four: Jewish, Arabic, Christian, and Armenian quarters. This is just fitting with the theme that Jerusalem is a multi-layered cake; Romans, Crusaders, Mamaluks, Arabs and Jews have all had a part of building on the remains of what went before. This was no better seen than when we toured the underground tunnels of the Wester Wall. So many sights to see that we extended our stay a day. We even made it to the Holocaust museum and the visited the museum of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In Rehovot we met up again with our friends Nadav and Keren and there shy son Shalal. They were so generous that they took a day of work to show us around the old port city of Jaffa outside Tel Aviv. Really such a fleeting visit but we had just one more country to see.
