Travels in Jordan

As I write this, I’m on a plane over the Atlantic, flying home after nearly five months and with a passport chok-full of stamps.  It seems strange to say “going home” after so long of bouncing around – Spain, England, Ireland, Turkey, Jordan, Israel… now the United States?  What the heck is that place?

I spent another week in Granada with my host family and friends after coming back from Sarah’s and my Great Adventure in the Middle East.  A week was the perfect amount of time for me to put things in order, pack my bags, say my goodbyes, do some sketching and some photographing, some drinking of many cups of café con leche and taking plenty of paseos on my favorite walking-routes.  I also tried a pionono for the first time, a Christmas-time sweet that I had heard a lot about but hadn’t yet put in my mouth.  I was trying to maximize my time in Granada, so I failed to continue my blog tales of my Mid-East adventures – namely, in Jordan, the final destination in our itinerary.

Sarah and I left Israel by bus on New Year’s Eve, driving along the shores of the Dead Sea along the way, which was cool in that it looked a little like another planet, this super-salty lake surrounded by rocky desert.  It reminded me a little bit of the arid surroundings of the Altiplano mineral lakes of the “Uyuni circuit” in southwestern Bolivia.

We then crossed the border back into Jordan without any problems and went directly to Wadi Musa (“Valley of Moses”), a modern town that has sprung up alongside the ancient abandoned sandstone city of Petra (well-known for its role in an Indiana Jones movie) to serve the needs of the millions of tourists that pour in every year.  And there’s a reason they come, too.  Petra was, as Sarah put it, EXCITING OUTDOORS HIKING ADVENTURE WITH ANCIENT STUFF.  In other words, my ideal.  For those of you who’ve been to the southwestern U.S., it’s like a combination of the experiences of Mesa Verde, the Grand Canyon and the modern Navajo Reservation.  You walk around, up and down hillsides with gorgeous views, and admire the colors of the sandstone – from bright yellow to an unmistakable sky blue – but then you keep passing HUGE, beautifully carved tombs, houses, shrines, and you can walk right into them, climb up rock faces, poke your head bravely into lightless tomb-rooms.  I kept saying to myself, “Yeah, this is only a MORE THAN 2000-YEAR OLD ANCIENT ABANDONED NEBATEAN CITY CARVED OUT OF SANDSTONE CLIFFS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE JORDANIAN DESERT that I’m walking through at the moment…”  It’s mind-blowing.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Sarah and I spent all of New Year’s Day in Petra itself, but New Year’s Eve we spent being bums in our awesome hostel, completely machacadas, as you say in Spanish – literally, crushed to a pulp – by our intense series of days of bussing and hopping around Israel.  We climbed into bed in the late afternoon and lay there, immovable, reading aloud to one another from the History of the Middle East section of our beloved Lonely Planet guide for a good four hours (i.e., 4 hours of reading = the Middle East is a complicated place, and also an old one – the section started with some of the earliest events in the Bible), getting a kick out of the Lonely Planet commentary.  At some point in time, we said, okay, enough of this – and went to bed.  It was by far the best way I’ve ever brought in the New Year – an educational four hours filled with good belly-laughs and then a full night’s sleep.  We woke up at a little before 7 am, to do a mini count-down in solidarity with you all on the east coast, who were at that precise time just arriving at midnight – we were pleased with our creative cheating.  Sarah is embarrassed by our supposed lameness, but I counter that it was by far the most un-lame (and most random?) New Year celebration ever.  And, in the end, that full night of sleep was much needed for our next day spent hiking around the Ancient Stuff.

As we learned by our detailed reading, the Nebatean people controlled ancient trade routes of some of the most important luxury products – frankincense among them.  They were strategically located in the Transjordan valleys, precisely where everyone had to pass if they wanted to pass between the Gulf civilizations in Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean civilizations of Greece and Egypt (and, later, Rome).  Nebatean architecture therefore has an interesting mix of styles that the Nebateans borrowed from all the places they had contact with.  It has its own quirks, too, like this capital carved like an elephant that I thought was cool (especially considering that I’m pretty sure elephants have never lived around here…), and which supposedly has only been found on Nebatean pillars:

Petra is really enormous; it’s not a site, but miles and miles and miles of sites among natural wonders – a genuine city in which you can still see a HUGE theater, water-transport systems, thousands of houses and tombs, a temple and a high sacrificial place, what were palatial gardens, public fountains… and there’s more beyond what tourists today can visit, and even more that hasn’t been excavated.  Some of the most famous sites (the most touristy):

The “Treasury”, which is actually a tomb but was dubbed “Treasury” because of a Bedouin legend that claimed that a king had hidden gold in the urn at the top of the huge façade:

The “Monastery”, so dubbed when it was converted into a church during Byzantine times:

The Road of Tombs:

Temple ruins:

We also saw the End of the World, which sounds ridiculous…

…but which actually is the most amazing view I’ve ever had – though this picture doesn’t quite capture it, you can see all the way to Aqaba, a 2-hour drive away:

We did reach some places where there weren’t many people, though, which is when we stumbled upon my favorite parts – namely, climbing rocks…

…poking my head into innumerable buildings carved into the hillsides…

(welcome to my new home)

...watching the goats…

…and observing stone colors.

It was a long day but a super fun end to our Great Adventure.  The next day we headed back to Amman so that we could catch our flights the next morning (which meant, for me, at 4 am).  There, we didn’t do very much, but we did manage to go up to the citadel, where there is a small and slightly disorganized but pretty cool archaeology museum that included some of the Dead Sea Scrolls!

From there, Sarah headed back to Cairo for a few days and I headed back to Granada (via Budapest, where there was *shockingly* snow on the ground!  Such strange stuff, snow – and this is what awaits me at home!)  It was a horrendously long day for me – I left the hostel where I was not officially staying at midnight, waited in the airport ‘til my 4 am flight, had a long layover in Budapest, and then when I arrived in Madrid had a 5 hour-long bus ride back to Granada.  But I survived!  It’s funny to think that that was precisely a week ago, and here I am again, on another long day of boring travel, headed back to another one of my now many homes on this planet…

…and I’ll be back at Bryn Mawr next week!  (*what?*)