ONE MAN'S JORDAN

the Wadi Rum Desert


Jerash


sunset from the Citadel in downtown Amman


and of course… Petra




2:20 am, Jordan time, Monday, November 9, Amman Airport. After sitting in the crowded airplane for three hours at a miserable time of night waiting for a “minor” engine problem to be fixed, the captain finally announced the flight was “cancelled.” I knew my dreaded long trip home just got longer. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say we were then held prisoner in the nearest hotel to the airport, mediocre even by Jordanian standards, because airport security was holding our passports and we were confined to the hotel grounds. I at least found a literal ray of sunshine when I discovered an open door to the rooftop. I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to be there, but since nobody was communicating anything to us I felt entitled. After finally learning our flight was going to leave at 11 pm, 23 hours behind schedule, I watched the sun set over the flat dry landscape from my secret rooftop refuge.

One of my concerns was that I was losing the nice window seats I’d carefully arranged for months before on the subsequent flights home, but fortunately I was able to get good window seats despite the late booking.

This is a big deal for me because watching the world go by while flying over it is one of the great pleasures I get from travelling (as an example, on the flight over I had spectacular views of almost the entire west coast of Italy). I got back to work a day late but there was so little to do my first day back that I can’t imagine we lost much business.

Unfortunately the extended flight home was nowhere near the first disappointment or annoyance during my trip to Jordan. For me the biggest was the air, terribly hazy in the north and not much better in the south. A lot of people seemed to think it was mostly dust from the desert, but it looked to me like a lot of smog was mixed in - I’ve never seen such a haze persist in the deserts of the western U.S. Another disappointment was the lack of scenic drives, another great travelling pleasure for me. Even though the tour brochure clearly showed us taking the scenic Kings Highway from Petra to Madaba, one of the reasons I signed up for this particular tour, we instead took the same boring Desert Highway we’d travelled south on. And there was a lot of poor communication, both from the tour company and the tour leader. But enough of the negative…

Petra is MAGNIFICENT!!! From the Siq


the gorgeous narrow red sandstone canyon that leads to the historic rock-hewn architecture, to the dazzling “Monastery”

and the nearby viewpoints that look over the (hazy) Israeli-Palestinian desert,

it clearly deserves its new status as one of the seven wonders of the world, based on a recent world-wide internet survey (despite the claim that Jordanians stuffed the ballots – one report said they cast 14% of all ballots despite having about 1/10 of 1% of the world’s population). The “Treasury”

was a mild disappointment because we were too late in the morning to see the sun shining on it and the less-than-football-field-sized opening in the canyon in front of it was filled with hundreds of tourists. Later I was able to find some trails behind the main “street”

so I got a little bit of the desert solitare that was lacking most of the trip.

The desert of Wadi Rum is also very special. Similar in a lot of ways to the Utah I love, but with different arrangements and shapes of redrock.

Other highlights: the ancient Roman city of Jerash,


the views from the crusader castle at Karak,


snorkeling in the Red Sea, floating effortlessly in the Dead Sea, and the late afternoon views from the hill of the Citadel in downtown Amman on (I thought) my last day in Jordan.




Then there were the people.


The Jordanians were often quite friendly, even to an American. Perhaps if I’d gone around shouting “More power to Israel” (which is not something I would truthfully say anyway) they wouldn’t have been so friendly, but I still don’t think anyone would have acted in a dangerous manner. I felt very safe walking alone everywhere we went.

And I had a good group of people to travel with. Despite the frequent annoyances, we all kept a positive attitude. There was a couple from Poland now living in Amsterdam, three women from Hong Kong, a group of four from England, and five singles including me, three from England and another American, a woman from the Bronx now working as a nurse in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (yes, the stories of the suppression of women there are quite accurate). My roommate Mark, a Londoner now living in Belgium, is married to one of the leads in the longest-running television show in Belgian history (I also travelled with the spouse of a somewhat famous perfomer on my trip to Peru, described near the end of my blog on that trip below).

My decision to take this trip resulted in my decisions to not get a car and remain in my current apartment for a while. So not only did it affect more than half my vacation time for the year, but other important aspects of my life. Based on that I could easily say that it wasn’t worth it. But it feels like it was, and I’m more pleased than I thought I would be when I finally got to look at my photos on the big screen (monitor). I especially enjoyed photographing the various textures of Jordan.

the ancient Roman columns of Jerash



the flowers at the crummy airport hotel


downtown Amman



and the beautiful sandstone of Petra