I got an airport transfer to the airport in Istanbul, and from the airport in Amman to my hotel in Madaba. I love airport transfers. It probably means losing the respect of the backpacker community; but, then, that's a community based on carrying luggage in a pointlessly exhausting way. In Istanbul, the alternative was an 800m walk up a steep, busy, cobblestoned street and then a ride on a very, very busy transit system. Or you could drive yourself, but to attempt it you'd need to be either a very confident driver or out of your mind; and to do it successfully, you'd need to be both. In Jordan, meanwhile, transport works like this: If there's a bus to where you want to go, there will be only one, it will leave at 6AM if the driver shows up and there are enough passengers, and the trip will take 5 hours.
Jordan turned out to be very bright sun, very dry earth, and, in between, a bunch of unplanned towns of blocky white buildings. Concrete and right angles are the two ingredients of Jordanian architecture. Around Madaba, there were large, sloping Bedouin tents here and there in the fields, and men tramped around after herds of goats. Litter lined the sides of the roads, growing denser as you approached a town.
There is one traffic light in Madaba, and two traffic circles. There are almost never traffic jams, but there is a constant stream of cars on every road at all times. You cross streets by stepping out into traffic and hoping for the best. Candy bars are sold out of fridges because of the heat, and goats are sold absolutely whole, hanging upside down, skinned except for a tuft of hair on the tail. Falafel sandwiches are unbelievably good, and cost 35 cents. I ate 3 of them on my one night in Madaba.
Burqas with face veils are common, and most women wear at least a headscarf. With the headscarves, many wear a specific sort of figure-concealing overcoat, despite temperatures in the mid-thirties. In Wadi Mousa, I walked behind one woman dressed this way who was also wearing a pair of stiletto heels. She actually gave me the eye a bit. But it would never have worked. We're from two different worlds: I believe in practical shoes. Also, it wasn't a flirtatious sort of eye, more of a 'now, why is this creepy tourist looking at my feet' sort of eye.
After a night in Madaba, I arranged a car to Petra (via the King's Highway) with the hotel. The staff suggested starting early, because of the heat. I decided on 9:30, because I felt like I needed the rest. I woke up at 4:15. I still haven't completely convinced my body about the time change, and it's started experimenting at random.
My driver, whose name I'm going to spell 'Jehad', had a car without air conditioning, but with a 'Moab Car Wash' air freshener dangling from his rear-view mirror. I liked Jehad. He spoke about as much English as I speak French, but still managed to be interesting (so his English may be better than my French, really, or indeed my English). We talked about the world cup and about comparative falafel prices. His driving technique had some rough patches. He had a habit of drifting across oncoming lanes to cut through corners, and came close to steering us into an olive tree when his hand slipped as he screwed the cap back onto a bottle of water (to his credit, it was a brave thing to attempt while also talking on a cell phone and driving 100kph along a highway with no lane markings).
We went up a series of steep switchbacks, and stopped at a lookout over Wadi Mujib. Here, the desert mountain falls away below you like a rumpled brown skirt, and you can look out at miles of featureless desert slopes. There's a dizzying sense of space. There was an abandoned attempt at a very basic cafe, and a bored-looking bedouin man and a little boy halfheartedly trying to sell blankets and twisted goats' horns.
At the Mujib dam, Jehad, whose phone had a waterfall ringtone, talked about how bad Jordan's water problems are. The reservoir was the largest body of water I've seen in Jordan. The second largest was when someone in Madaba spat on the pavement. From it (the reservoir), thin black hoses snaked up the hills in all directions, carrying water to surrounding settlements. We detoured around a bridge that was being built over a dried-out riverbed.
I stopped at Kerak, a crusader castle that later became a Mameluke castle and, finally, a colossal, crumbling ruin (Jehad dropped me off for an hour and went off to get a shave). When I bought the ticket, a teenager standing beside the ticket booth offered me coffee, waving an empty cup in his hand. He said it was 'tourism day'. He had no visible means of cleaning the cup between visitors, and, looking closer, the cup was actually visibly dirty, so the squeamish westerner in me -- which is pretty much all of me, actually -- shuddered, and I explained that I'd already had too much coffee that day. Still, you have to hand it to the government of Jordan: when they celebrate a holiday like Tourism Day, they go all out.
In tourist areas, Jordan is full of what seem like odd mispricings. I thought Kerak was spectacular; admission was 1 dinar ($1.50). Petra is 33 dinars (and prices are going to rise sharply quite soon). Amazing falafel sandwiches were 0.25 dinars. The drive to Petra was 54 dinars. (When I reflected that I could have had 216 falafel sandwiches for the cost of one ride to Petra, I felt I might have made the wrong decision.)
Kerak was very quiet; a tour group was leaving as I arrived, and the next one didn't arrive until I left. It's been left quite open. You're free to walk down uneven stone stairs and duck through narrow, lightless passages, and, if you choose, fall down one of the various wells or walk out the doorway that opens onto a fifty foot drop down the side of the hill. I wouldn't advise anyone to go to Kerak with an energetic child (that they wanted to stay alive).
Beyond Kerak, the ground was baked earth, dotted with tufts of yellow grass. Further on, it got sandier and dryer. In the distance, there were houses here and there on the desert, for reasons I couldn't guess at and never learned, because Jehad was doing some tricky driving at the time and he always turned away from the road to answer my questions.
In the deeper desert there wasn't even litter, the plastic bags having blown on to somewhere with trees or grass to snag themselves on. The soil turned to gravel and sand. Sometimes it would suddenly look like there were crops, but they were just fields of small black rocks. It got hotter. It was 35 in Amman that day; in the desert it may have been a little hotter. Inside the car, it was hotter than outside. When we got to Petra, I was feeling a little unsteady.
Jordan turned out to be very bright sun, very dry earth, and, in between, a bunch of unplanned towns of blocky white buildings. Concrete and right angles are the two ingredients of Jordanian architecture. Around Madaba, there were large, sloping Bedouin tents here and there in the fields, and men tramped around after herds of goats. Litter lined the sides of the roads, growing denser as you approached a town.
There is one traffic light in Madaba, and two traffic circles. There are almost never traffic jams, but there is a constant stream of cars on every road at all times. You cross streets by stepping out into traffic and hoping for the best. Candy bars are sold out of fridges because of the heat, and goats are sold absolutely whole, hanging upside down, skinned except for a tuft of hair on the tail. Falafel sandwiches are unbelievably good, and cost 35 cents. I ate 3 of them on my one night in Madaba.
Burqas with face veils are common, and most women wear at least a headscarf. With the headscarves, many wear a specific sort of figure-concealing overcoat, despite temperatures in the mid-thirties. In Wadi Mousa, I walked behind one woman dressed this way who was also wearing a pair of stiletto heels. She actually gave me the eye a bit. But it would never have worked. We're from two different worlds: I believe in practical shoes. Also, it wasn't a flirtatious sort of eye, more of a 'now, why is this creepy tourist looking at my feet' sort of eye.
After a night in Madaba, I arranged a car to Petra (via the King's Highway) with the hotel. The staff suggested starting early, because of the heat. I decided on 9:30, because I felt like I needed the rest. I woke up at 4:15. I still haven't completely convinced my body about the time change, and it's started experimenting at random.
My driver, whose name I'm going to spell 'Jehad', had a car without air conditioning, but with a 'Moab Car Wash' air freshener dangling from his rear-view mirror. I liked Jehad. He spoke about as much English as I speak French, but still managed to be interesting (so his English may be better than my French, really, or indeed my English). We talked about the world cup and about comparative falafel prices. His driving technique had some rough patches. He had a habit of drifting across oncoming lanes to cut through corners, and came close to steering us into an olive tree when his hand slipped as he screwed the cap back onto a bottle of water (to his credit, it was a brave thing to attempt while also talking on a cell phone and driving 100kph along a highway with no lane markings).
We went up a series of steep switchbacks, and stopped at a lookout over Wadi Mujib. Here, the desert mountain falls away below you like a rumpled brown skirt, and you can look out at miles of featureless desert slopes. There's a dizzying sense of space. There was an abandoned attempt at a very basic cafe, and a bored-looking bedouin man and a little boy halfheartedly trying to sell blankets and twisted goats' horns.
At the Mujib dam, Jehad, whose phone had a waterfall ringtone, talked about how bad Jordan's water problems are. The reservoir was the largest body of water I've seen in Jordan. The second largest was when someone in Madaba spat on the pavement. From it (the reservoir), thin black hoses snaked up the hills in all directions, carrying water to surrounding settlements. We detoured around a bridge that was being built over a dried-out riverbed.
I stopped at Kerak, a crusader castle that later became a Mameluke castle and, finally, a colossal, crumbling ruin (Jehad dropped me off for an hour and went off to get a shave). When I bought the ticket, a teenager standing beside the ticket booth offered me coffee, waving an empty cup in his hand. He said it was 'tourism day'. He had no visible means of cleaning the cup between visitors, and, looking closer, the cup was actually visibly dirty, so the squeamish westerner in me -- which is pretty much all of me, actually -- shuddered, and I explained that I'd already had too much coffee that day. Still, you have to hand it to the government of Jordan: when they celebrate a holiday like Tourism Day, they go all out.
In tourist areas, Jordan is full of what seem like odd mispricings. I thought Kerak was spectacular; admission was 1 dinar ($1.50). Petra is 33 dinars (and prices are going to rise sharply quite soon). Amazing falafel sandwiches were 0.25 dinars. The drive to Petra was 54 dinars. (When I reflected that I could have had 216 falafel sandwiches for the cost of one ride to Petra, I felt I might have made the wrong decision.)
Kerak was very quiet; a tour group was leaving as I arrived, and the next one didn't arrive until I left. It's been left quite open. You're free to walk down uneven stone stairs and duck through narrow, lightless passages, and, if you choose, fall down one of the various wells or walk out the doorway that opens onto a fifty foot drop down the side of the hill. I wouldn't advise anyone to go to Kerak with an energetic child (that they wanted to stay alive).
Beyond Kerak, the ground was baked earth, dotted with tufts of yellow grass. Further on, it got sandier and dryer. In the distance, there were houses here and there on the desert, for reasons I couldn't guess at and never learned, because Jehad was doing some tricky driving at the time and he always turned away from the road to answer my questions.
In the deeper desert there wasn't even litter, the plastic bags having blown on to somewhere with trees or grass to snag themselves on. The soil turned to gravel and sand. Sometimes it would suddenly look like there were crops, but they were just fields of small black rocks. It got hotter. It was 35 in Amman that day; in the desert it may have been a little hotter. Inside the car, it was hotter than outside. When we got to Petra, I was feeling a little unsteady.
