Think of a vast river system, with hundreds of rivulets twisting out of the peaks and braiding into streams, which wind around spurs and valleys and in turn knit together to form tributaries flowing into broad, snaking rivers.
Now repaint the hills in black, and replace the water with still yellow sand. That’s what I see from the window of the Etihad Airways aircraft as it coasts over southeastern Jordan, bound for Amman. It’s like sclerotic venation, quite literally a heart-stopping sight.
The wadi sand systems give way to crouching camel-coloured hills, and we touchdown at Queen Alia airport. The chauffeur from the Evason Ma’in Hot Springs & Six Senses Spa escorts us to a black-tinted Cadillac Escalade that zips along at 120kmph. It’s just as well. We only have four days in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, whose much-loved King Abdullah II and Queen Rania beam a welcome from large posters everywhere.
Driving southwest of Amman, we pass splashes of grass thick with white and yellow wildflowers that have at least a little to do with a spectacular storm that had lashed West Asia a couple of days ago; but mostly it’s swathes of sand punctuated with hardy olives and slim poplars. The desert is always a bit surreal. One of the low, sand-coloured buildings in the middle of nowhere is called ‘Center for American Doors’.
Forty minutes beyond Madaba, a town famed for its mosaic-work, a curve reveals a spectacular coastal view: the blue waters of the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth, with the cliffs of Palestine rearing up on the far side. At the turnoff to the resort, under opposite-pointing signs reading ‘Dead Sea’ and ‘Madaba’, an impossibly beautiful woman in tiny champagne-coloured satin shorts and blouse models for a photo shoot.
The road plunges into a dark-walled gorge. The Evason Ma’in resort sits deep in the JordanRift Valley region, an extension of the Great Rift Valley that stretches from Northern Africa under the Red Sea up to Lebanon. A sign marks sea level; the next, 200m below sea level. The sign on the front porch of the resort tells me I’m 264m below sea level. Supposedly I weigh an extra kilo here, what with all the extra air pressing down on me.
The only sound is birdsong and the muted rustle of the hot springs that cascade into thermal pools . From high above, this property looks like a severe rectangular institutional building, but up close it’s a beautiful place fragrant with herbs and trees, with a 500-year-old olive tree in the middle of the terrace. There is tasteful upholstery, wooden lounge furniture, soothing lighting, piped music, a library. Outdoor bowers with hammocks are scented with rosemary and basil.
The staff are admirably calm and cheerful, given that the storm rained boulders and mud down on them. They’ve spent the last couple of days doing a massive cleanup job with bulldozers, but some parts of the property are still closed, including, alas, the spa. The famous hot springs are also off-limits, because chunks of damp mountainside are still caving in. But it’s restful just to look down the quiet gorge or stare at the waterfall. And there’s always food: an excellent tapas lunch at the Brown Bar, and a tasting of some good local Madaba wine and cheeses at The Cellar before a dinner of salmon steak. Perhaps it’s all the extra air pressure, but I’m exhausted by 9pm and can only manage a cigarette on my balcony, gazing at the lights of Jerusalem, before I fall asleep.
In the morning we leave early for what the BBC called one of the 40 places to see before you die: 2,200-year-old Petra. This rock-cut city, filled with the cave dwellings, tombs and temples of the ancient Nabataean people, is the pride of Jordan and was recently voted one of the new Seven Wonders of the World.
Along the way, flocks of fat hairy brown and white sheep trickle down the mountainsides, herded by grizzled men or boys on donkeys. I think idly that this looks awfully like Bible country, then remember that it is. The Wadi Musa is named after Moses, and Bethany beyond Jordan is where Jesus was baptised. We pass the rich Bedouin settlement of Manja; Sheikh Mohammad Rashid of Dubai conducts horse races here, and is building a palace to which a special road has been built from the airport. Jordan isn’t all rich, but it’s one of the more liberal economies in West Asia. At the end of a three-and-a-half hour drive, we see the lumpy set of dark mountains from which ancient Petra is carved.
The Siq, a fissure in the rock, leads to the city. The remains of a collapsed arch mark the start of a dramatic walk through a sheer gorge with walls up to 120m high, roofed with a strip of blue sky. Wild fig trees grow from the rock; fossilised bones lie in it; iron, phosphate and sulphur light it up in reds, pinks, whites and yellows. The floor retains patches of 1st century BC paving (romantic, but hard on the ankles). The Nabataeans’ expert water managers lined the gorge with water channels and sedimentation basins, and built an 88m tunnel outside the Siq to divert floodwater. Still, as late as 1963, a group of French tourists were killed by a flash flood, so officials built a dam to secure the gorge.
There are baetyls, or sacred rocks, carved into the walls of the Siq. The god Dushara and the goddess of beauty Al-Uzza are represented by vertical rectangles with square eyes. Erosion has made an elephant’s head out of rock. The lower half of an unfinished cameleer figures melts into the rock, and the belly and legs of his camels swells out of it. Some figures have had their heads cut off, possibly by the Nabataeans themselves, from the time in the 4th century AD when Christianity arrived under the Byzantine banner.
I’m disgorged smack opposite Petra’s most impressive monument, known for half a century as the Treasury. Nobody knows its real name or function, but the locals named it after the huge urn sculpture that was thought to contain treasure. It is pockmarked with bullet holes, where eager people tried to shoot the rock apart for gold 200 years ago. Corinthian columns and Greek pillars, carvings of Nike and Isis, soar almost 40m high. The sheer size and unexpectedness of it makes me gasp. I can imagine the thrill that Johann Burckhardt must have felt when he rediscovered Petra in 1812. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was filmed here.
I walk down the so-called Street of Façades in what John William Burgon famously called “a rose-red city half as old as time”. There are tombs where bodies were wrapped in a sheet laid under a slab of stone, long plundered of gold by grave robbers. In the main city, where 35,000 people lived, the rock is beehived with dwellings, some with beautifully coloured natural striations. I climb inside one and try to imagine being a Nabataean, growing olives and grapes and barley, defending my animals from wolves in the mountains, sheltering against desert temperatures, finding water or escaping it, and protecting my trading caravans. I’d have died in five minutes. The vast amphitheatre — seating capacity about 5,000 — cut out of a single face of live rock suggests that cooperation was not to be sniffed at.
Little boys fling stones at the wonders of Petra and get yelled at by irritated guides. The place is filled with souvenir shops and refreshment stands, kids selling postcards and pretty rocks, and men offering horsecart, camel or donkey rides for the weary. “It’s 50 per cent off something that’s 300 per cent over,” grumbles one British tourist. The vendors are mostly Bedouin: tough, dashing kohl-eyed men with a propensity to hardsell and flirt. “Stay the night in Petra!” one of them exhorts my colleague. “Where you staying? Amman? No problem. I drop you to Amman in the morning on my donkey.”
Our guide Mahmoud says that people lived in Petra until as recently as 25 years ago, when they were resettled nearby. They still come here to sell their wares—silver, cloth, beads, fridge magnets. I’ve always wondered how they create those bottles of sand with pictures of camels and sunsets in them, and watch with delight the delicacy and skill of the artist as he makes up a bottle with my name in it.
There are steep hikes up to, for instance, the High Place of Sacrifices, or the magnificent Royal Tomb at the base of which a Japanese couple stand with hands folded, praying to it. But it would take four days to see Petra properly, and I only have a couple of hours. I drink a cup of Nescafé and start the walk back out, running the gauntlet of vendor testosterone. “Nice woman. I love her.” A young horseman expresses his admiration of Amitabh Bachchan. (Everyone in Jordan seems devoted to Bollywood movies.) I say goodbye after a brief chat. “I love you,” he replies sunnily.
Back at the resort, it’s time for a massage in the in suite spa rooms. Do you mind a male therapist? I do not. The gentleman turns out to be from Irbid, near the Syrian border. He administers something halfway between a classic massage and reflexology, with olive oil grown and pressed by the resort (they’re very big on local, organic, green living). He asks if the pressure is okay. “Your back muscle very tight,” he says ominously. An hour later I emerge rather battered, to find that my far smarter companions insisted on gentle massages, and are glowing and dewy and half-asleep. Next time no reflexology, just a date scrub and wrap.
In the morning we drive to Mount Nebo, the sanctuary of Moses. It’s a hill fragrant with a herb or flower that I can’t identify. Tinkling bells provide the soundtrack to another Biblical pastoral, a flock supervised by a languorous shepherd on the lower slopes. A priest is leading mass on the open hilltop; the 4th-century memorial church is closed for repair, but its famous mosaics are laid out for view under a shelter. The only one preserved in situ is in the Baptistery. There’s a lookout where Moses gazed across the Dead Sea at the Promised Land; I do too, pretending to have a long white beard, and find that it’s unexpectedly moving, for an atheist, to experience the power with which an old story can inform an entire land. Also, I’ve finally gotten a fix on the geopolitics of West Asia.
A tree in the Mount Nebo complex looks awfully familiar, with bits of plastic and thread tied to the branches. Guess which nationality of tourists started that wish-making tradition?
The Greek Orthodox Church in nearby Madaba is also filled with mosaics. The town is stuffed with mosaics, bookshops, wood and silver shops, ‘caffee’ shops, and alluring Dead Sea health and cosmetic product shops. I’m a tad insolvent, so I save it for the real thing.
The real thing is in abundance at, well, the Dead Sea. I’m acutely aware, as we drive even further downhill from the resort, that I’m going to the very lowest point on the surface of the earth. “Be careful of the fish,” says our driver Baha’a, making sinister hand-wiggling motions. “They’re two, three metres big.” Huge hilarity. The Dead Sea is so called because the lethal salt content, eight times higher than in the ocean, kills everything in its waters except bacteria and some algae.
It’s a special thrill to wade in — 422m below sea level — through sticky, sucking, world-famous black mud, and experience one of the weirdest things in the world: the Dead Sea float. The salt makes the water unusually buoyant, so you just bob about like a cork without trying, as if you were sitting in a deck chair just under the surface. You can read a book, sip a drink, possibly get your hair done, just sitting there in the water. This is insane amounts of fun, and highly recommended. I float around with Jordan to my right and Palestine to my left, and refrain from splashing hypersaline water into my eyes. This area was home to five Biblical cities, including Sodom and Gomorrah.
Eventually, struggling back to shore (it’s actually hard to force your legs through the water so that you can stand), I get smeared with mineral-rich black mud from crown to toes. This stuff is zinging with minerals that for millennia have been known to help diseases, skin problems, circulation, metabolism and general vitality. When the dried mud is hosed off, I feel like a million bucks and a beer, so we watch the sunset from a seashore bar before taking off for a large Lebanese meal at Panorama restaurant. We’re too late for the real beauty of this spot overlooking the sea, which is at sunset, but the lights of Jericho are glowing — the Biblical Jericho, one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited settlements — and everything looks good when your mouth is full of hummus.
In the morning, before the flight, we have time only for the briefest wander in the ‘First Circle’ of Old Amman, though I can see by gazing out at the so-called city of seven hills (now more like 19 hills), that this is a place worth spending some time in. The city’s sharp slopes, its shop windows full of miniskirts and its outdoor cafés lend it a hip, European feel; at the same time, men smoke hookahs on balconies, many women wear headscarves and abayas, and the signs are in Arabic.
At the impressive Roman amphitheatre complex, we browse the museums. The game Jordanian sense of humour is exemplified in the display of a donkey-skin puppet named Karaköz, the star of the eponymous shadow puppet show that originated under the Fatimids in the 10th century and remained popular for 900 years. Then it’s time for a spot of lunch at Restaurant Hashem, famous for its falafel, and a fabulous dessert called kunafa — a sweet crust over the most delicious cheese — at Habiba’s.
The faces on the street reflect a cosmopolitan mix of people — Palestinian and Iraqi settlers, Jordanians, Chinese and Africans among the population of about two million. Dress reflects a moderate, chic kind of Islam with brightly embroidered abayas, even edgy leather ones. The weather is sunny and cool, and all I really want to do is poke around in the smoking shop and the souq, and talk to people about the food and politics and nightlife, but it’s almost time to check in. I have to tear myself away.
I wave goodbye to King Abdullah and Queen Rania, and submit to the McWorld of airport processes. But the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and I have unfinished business. A date scrub and wrap is the least of it.