Until I got to Wadi Mousa (the town nearest Petra), everything on the trip had been very, very easy. In Wadi Mousa, things started to go a bit wrong.
The hotel was very bad. It was the kind of hotel you'd wake up in if someone had stolen your kidneys. Its one merit was that it would calm any anxiety you might have felt over being caught in a terrorist attack on tourists. A silly fear anyway, but terrorists would target 5-star hotels; the only people who might blow this one up are local civic beautification activists.
There's a kind of shabby joylessness about Wadi Mousa, which, as the nearest town to Jordan's biggest tourist attraction, is in the early stages of becoming Jordan's Niagara Falls. There are two towns mixed up together -- one an average Jordanian village, one a mercenary, low-rent tourist circus. There are odd 'Italian' restaurants, and there are shops where you can buy live chickens out of a crowded cage (Madaba also has a few of these; it may be a chain).
I woke up sick the first morning at 3:30. I suspected the falafel from Madaba, on grounds that anything that cheap and that good had to have some hideous catch. (The sad thing is that I'm now back in Madaba and, though I can't be sure they were responsible, have to avoid the falafel joint anyway.)
In the afternoon, I decided I had to do what I could about seeing Petra. I took all the pills I had that seemed like they might be relevant and caught a ride down with the hotel's 'shuttle'. I saw about half of the site, walking a hundred metres at a time and then having a long rest. But it is, as the English version of the official guide has it, "huge in size yet beautifully awesome".
A walk through the first half of Petra takes you through a series of canyons eroded out of pink sandstone. First a long, narrow gorge that leads to the 'Treasury' (of Indiana Jones fame), then a wider canyon where tombs have been carved out of the cliff faces, most simple rooms, a few more elaborate ones. Transportation is by horse, donkey, or camel, and Petra thus smells of three different kinds of animal dung. Unruly Bedouin children tear about on donkeys, shouting 'beep beep' when tourists are in their way. Groups of bored-looking 'tourist police' lounge about at rest stops.
I rested for in one of the more basic tombs, while across the canyon a group of 3 Bedouin men and 2 donkeys listened to American hip hop on a boombox. After a while, one of them rode off, and the music moved with him. I realized my mistake; it wasn't a boombox, it was a donkey stereo.
The Bedouin would frequently sidle up and say, "hey... want to ride a camel?". I actually did kind of want to ride a camel, but didn't feel up to it. I didn't know how a camel would react to being thrown up on, but couldn't imagine one being gracious about it. Camels' faces have a hard, skeptical look.
After Petra, I slept again, woke up sick again, and took a cab back to Madaba by the desert highway. The desert highway takes the direct route from Wadi Mousa up to Amman (and Madaba), which is through a scorched desert of sand and gravel. Ramshackle restaurants and supermarkets have been improvised all along it, and you pass through strange little settlements that seem to be building up into a town or village but then lose heart and dwindle out. Periodically, a bilingual sign would thank you for visiting X municipality, and another would welcome you to Y, the next stretch of featureless desert.
Occasionally, in villages, there would be a portrait of a benevolently smiling man with a caterpillar moustache -- sometimes the king, sometimes someone else, presumably a member of the royal family or a local leader. The portraits would be 3' to 6' high -- big enough to be prominent, but well under the cult-of-personality threshold. My hotel in Madaba has a carpet portrait of the king hanging hanging in the stairwell, so it may be true what the travel guides say about the monarchy's genuine popularity.
I was still rather sick, and it was hard to keep the Petran taxi driver focused on our goal of getting to Madaba. He flipped through an extremely battered tourist brochure while driving in order to ask whether I wanted to detour to some nearby attractions (I didn't; and the brochure was in Spanish, so I'm not clear on what they were). He stopped to pick up car parts, get coffee, and chat to people, and also wanted to pick up some friends and give them a ride to Amman (I refused on grounds that, among other things, we weren't actually going to Amman). It also turned out that he wasn't totally clear on the way to Madaba. I won't say anything about our struggle to actually find the hotel, because I'm saving it for either an epic poem or a saga (depending on which of Homeric Greek and Old Norse I manage to pick up first).
But we did get here, which made me happy. I slept properly for the first time in three or four days, waking up a little after dawn. I would have liked to have slept longer, but when the sun comes up in Jordan, it's hard not to know about it. I had my first cup of coffee in three days. It was instant coffee with non-dairy creamer (hotel breakfasts in Jordan run heavily to instant coffee and Tang), but it was pretty glorious.
Tomorrow night I leave for Delhi, with its twin epidemics of Dengue fever and crumbling sports facilities, and I hope to be fully recovered by then. Turning up in Delhi already sick would be ridiculous. Taking food poisoning to India would be a bit coal-to-Newcastle, and it's a country I'll need some energy for -- particularly as my flight gets in at 4:15AM.
