By Adar
Twenty-Four Exposures In Jordan
I’ve always been jealous of people who have the ability to just “pop down for a weekend” in a different country. And Israel is fairly limited in countries you can pop over to. Lebanon? Absolutely not. Syria? Forget it. Egypt? It’s extremely uncomfortable to go there and you’d have to go through the Sinai, which is incredibly dangerous. Saudi Arabia? Iraq? The only country we can really visit is Jordan, and last weekend we did. I took my film camera and had to choose my shots very carefully. Haven’t gotten them developed yet.
When you cross the border from Israel to Jordan, you can immediately see the difference. Coming from the developed beach resort city of Eilat, with its skyscraper hotels and tourist-friendly promenade, the Aqaba side seems barren, deserty, and empty. We took a cab to a town called Wadi Musa, one of the neighbors of Petra, about two hours from the border. Our cab driver was incredibly nice, and chatted with my friends in their limited Arabic. We were excited that he was a Bedouin named Mohammad because you can’t get much more quintessentially Jordanian majority demographic than that. He brought us to a couple of viewpoints along the way to get a few pictures of the Mountains. I tell you, these mountains are absolutely striking. I’ve passed through the Alps and I think Jordan’s are more beautiful. Our hostel was a cute, cozy place run by a couple named Valentina and Sahid. The bed was the most comfortable one I’ve slept on since leaving San Francisco, and the blankets were all Mickey Mouse themed.
Petra is basically an ancient city ruins, used and built by the Nabateans as part of the incense route about two to three thousand years ago. It’s carved into a set of mountains, with a few giant facades – the treasury, the monastery, the military tombs, and the palace. Walking around Petra is awe striking. You walk for about half an hour, discover a giant façade, walk for another half hour, find another façade, and so on. It’s huge, it’s magnificent. And it would be perfect if we weren’t constantly approached by souvenir salesmen, women and children with forlorn faces trying to sell Petra trinkets. The poverty is rampant. So many school-aged children were just wandering around with nothing to do besides try to sell postcards to foreigners. And the other really clear misfortune was that of animals. All over Petra, animal handlers tried to sell us rides on donkeys, camels, and horses. The animal abuse was appalling. We saw donkeys being whipped by metal chains, horses suffering in the sun with no water, dogs lying on the ground surrounded by fleas,. I saw one horse try to run away from its owner, who then got on a different horse, picked up a rock, and throw it at the runaway’s head. It’s sickening.
Our third and last day in Jordan started off at 6:15 am, with our shuttle from the hostel to Wadi Rum, about two hours away. On the way, our shuttle picked up seven different groups of hitchikers, without saying a word or asking where they were going. They’d just get in, and tap the window when they wanted to get off. One groups of people he picked up was a group of school children, who were in uniforms and matching hijabs. They seemed to have been walking for miles, and we dropped them off a solid two miles from where we picked them up. One of the little girls, could not have been older than six, couldn’t help but stare at my friend Leah, who is incredibly blonde and pale. It was so cute; I don’t think she’d ever seen anyone so light. The shuttle dropped us off at the Wadi Rum Visitors Center and promptly leaves. The Visitor Center is literally just a sign with some prices of trips and a restroom. We decided that we wanted to ride camels to Lawrence Spring and then drive in a jeep to see some of the other sights in the area (a bridge, a canyon, ancient Nabatean inscriptions things like that). Somewhat hesitantly, the four of us got in this guy’s run down jeep, who drives us to his house in the nearby village. It’s not much more than a stable structure, and he asks us to sit in his living room while he goes to make tea. There is a baby crying in the next room, and I won’t lie I was a little intimidated by the situation. I get up to go use the restroom, and to no surprise it is a squat toilet in a different structure. Squat toilets are the bane of my existence. They’re all over Turkey, even in really nice places. The palaces in Istanbul had squat toilets made out of marble. But this was no marble, this was for sure granite or worse, and dark and scary.
When breakfast and tea were over, we went outside at Moussa’s urging to meet the camels. It was only the four of us and two Bedouin kids, probably around ten years old, and the camels. Nobody really knew what to do for a while. Do we get on? Where should we put our stuff? Can we put our stuff on the camels? Where did Moussa go? Eventually a young man we hadn’t met yet drove up in a jeep and told us to put our stuff in the back, and then told the kids to help us get on the camels.
One lesson I’ve learned from Jordan is that people really trust each other. And as a visitor, you have to try and be part of the system too. We trusted that the hitchikers would be ok people. We trusted that we would get into Moussa’s car and eventually get out. That we could put our stuff in this guy’s jeep and eventually get it back. That we would not die riding on a camel in the middle of Wadi Rum into the desert, straight up Prince of Persia style. And in the end, it all worked out.
I got to see Lawrence’s Spring, hike up the beautiful Jordanian mountains, meet some young Bedouins and listen to quintessential Arabic music in a bumpy jeep in the desert. I was 10 kilometers from the border with Saudi Arabia at one point. It was just such a different world that I couldn’t ever imagine from sitting in my dorm room in DC.
Jordan and Israel could not be much more different. Jordanians are so much more non-chalant, while the Israeli temperament verges on frenzied. The landscape is different. Israel is extremely technologically advanced and developed while Jordan just isn't, not even in Amman. Spending even a day in Israel shows you that things are constantly changing in this country, while in Jordan it almost seems as if nothing has changed in the past 2000 years. Going to Jordan made me really evaluate how much Israel has developed over the past century and a half, because until the late 1800s, the two looked very similar. But somehow Israelis managed to build things like public transportation, industry, forests, healthcare, an education system, a social services system, and nation-wide civil society while Jordan remains much more small-community based. I don't necessarily want to put a judgement on the Jordanian way of life. I think there's much to be admired, and I had a great experience in their country. But I definitely think travelling between the two has been a fascinating experience.