Finding friends on the internet and the hazards of public beaches

I am leaving for Dana Nature Reserve today after work. This is one of the places I really hoped to be able to see while in Jordan, so I’m looking forward to it. I’ll be traveling with some girls that I searched out on the internet.

After traveling with Ethan and having a blast, I realized the importance of a good travel buddy. Unfortunately, hanging out in an office in Amman is not the best way to meet other backpackers, especially not ones that have to adhere to a tight work schedule. While I in general don’t mind traveling by myself, Jordan is not a huge single backpacker’s destination, which means meeting people on the road is hit and miss. And certain places, such as nature reserves, are not really as fun or as safe to do on your own. I’m a fairly independent traveler, but even I don’t fancy striking out into the desert for a solo hiking trip.

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner, considering how much I rely on the internet in just about all other facets of my life, to look for friends there. You can find everything on the internet! At any rate, when I stumbled upon a travel forum, I found some girls in Amman, whose story is surprisingly like my own. One is a graduate student doing an internship as well, and the other is a language student doing a summer language study. Both are environmentally and socially interested and inclined, and we had almost identical agendas for places to see, Dana being near the top of the list.

I haven’t written much about Aqaba other then my friendly run-in with the police. Other then being able to snorkel in the Red Sea though, it wasn’t my ideal trip. And once again, it brought home the importance of finding like-minded people to travel with. Even like-minded complete strangers.

As an environmentalist, I am always aware of the impacts of my surroundings, whether I can control them or not. For this reason, resort like hotels in environmentally sensitive areas are particularly uncomfortable for me. On the one hand, I’m a beach bum/water baby at heart. I love swimming pools, palm trees, clean beaches, the works. On the other hand, I’m here to work for environmental improvements, water conservation, and SUSTAINABLE development. And I’m pretty sure the places we went don’t fall into that category.

One huge issue that I have with Jordan is the question of public and private beaches. Now I am all about public institutions, especially recreational places like parks and beaches. Access to nature and the outdoors should be available to every single one of us—rich, poor, temporarily broke students, bums, etc. This sentiment does not seem to be shared here. When I tried to convince my friend (let’s call him Fred) that we could stay in a modest hotel (meaning one without a private beach), he looked a bit scandalized.

“We’re not even going to be there that long,” I justified. “We’ll be spending our time at the beach.”

“But what beach?” he asked.

“There are public beaches” I said; “we can go there.”

“The public beach??” he exclaimed. “The public beach, it’s dirty.”

This, in a country where the road is your trash can. Of course it’s dirty.

“It won’t be that bad,” I insisted. When dirty failed to detour me from my determination to enjoy what I consider to be a common good, he tried a new tact.

“It’s dangerous,” he tried to convince me; “Just ANYONE can go there.”

I was still unconvinced, but in the end, at a whopping 42 degrees C, it was too bloody hot to hang out for long on the beach anyway. The first day we spent at a slightly shabby beach club to appease me; the beach part was public and access to the club (which was little more than a slightly run down club-med looking swimming pool with an island and a bridge over it for that tropical look) was included with our equally run-down hotel.

I say run-down, but by my standard it was actually quite nice. The hotel and club looked like they had seen their glory days in years past; the architecture and design was straight out of the 50s, but in that authentic, accidental retro way—as in the lounge furniture has been sitting in place for fifty years waiting to come back into style. Compared to the places I usually stay when I travel though, this was downright swank.

Fred did not agree.

The next day we checked out, and decided to go to a beach for a bit more sun and water before we headed back to Amman. Fred looked so distraught at the thought of going to another public beach that I acquiesced when he proposed we find the type of beach club he generally prefers.

This brought us to a private, gated community in the very south of the Aqaba region; across the Red Sea was Egypt, and just a few kilometers down would have put us squarely into Saudia Arabia. Fred used the name of a friend who owned an apartment there to get us in, and talked the club into a discounted rate. 10JD got us access to a very swanky pool facility with a private beach that was sufficiently guarded from any riff raff by the fact that it was surrounded by other private beaches.

One of the cons of a private beach was that as we strolled along the shore, after about 100 yards, we were stopped by a guard. Apparently we had wandered a bit too far onto somebody ELSE’S private beach, and we were politely informed that our 10JD did not so much as extend our right to coastal access any further than where we had already wandered. The stretch of our particular private beach meant that a nice stroll along the shore was really a nice pace back and forth over the same 100 yards.

As we wandered back, I expressed my discomfiture with the idea of private beaches again. Fred acknowledged that it was unfortunate that we couldn’t walk as far as we wanted, but insisted that public beaches were dirty and dangerous.

“That’s because you throw trash everywhere and wait for someone else to clean it up!” I burst out, sounding more hysterical than I intended.

Now Fred and I come from COMPLETELY different worlds. That we can be friends at all is a testimony to something…tolerance I suppose. I didn’t blame him, but my frustration was deep seated, and it just kind of overflowed and dribbled out into the Red Sea. The issue of public vs. private beaches was to me at the root of a very complex dilemma that I have when I travel in places like Jordan (read: the developing world). I frequently feel frustrated with two things: 1) the elitism that is deeply set into the culture and 2) the lack of concern that the said elite feel for what I see as pressing environmental and social issues. As far as I was concerned, private beaches just about summed this up.

As an environmentalist from the developed world, I realize the risk of a ‘we know better than you’ approach. It’s not fair, and it’s not true either—we’re not doing so hot on the sustainability front either (we being the so called first world). That said, I can’t help feeling disgusted by the trash everywhere, frustrated by the people who stand on the street and water the sidewalk in one of THE MOST WATER POOR COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD, or despairing when I see children playing in dirt mixed in with broken glass. As a non-religious person frequently bombarded by requests to see the light though, I know how obnoxious and non-effective proselytizing can be on any value based issue. And I increasingly see environmental ethics (or lack thereof) in this light.

I have to remind myself in a taking a deep breath kind of way that if you look at the whole picture, the average Jordanian has a tiny environmental footprint compared to the average American. I think it’s our hankering for SUVs. And houses with a bathroom per person.

So what does this have to do with a private beach in Aqaba, you may ask. There’s a connection here, I swear—and if it’s not a clear one it’s because I’m still working through it in my head. But I think it’s a self perpetuating cycle. The elite have bought up the beaches and sold them to foreign interests. The government has concessioned 90+% of the public sea front property to foreign developers. The tiny public beaches left become crowded with those who can’t afford to pay 20+JD to lounge by the resort swimming pool, and filthy with the trash that everyone throws everywhere, waiting for someone else to pick it up. So the beach is either a crowded, hot, messy experience at the public beach, or a sterilized, generic, catered experience at a private beach. Either way, nobody really has the chance to connect to nature–the beach the way I think of it, with long walks, sandcastles and sand between your toes.

All in all, nature, natural nature (and I realize this statement is a whole philosophical conversation waiting to happen), is short on the ground in Jordan. There are a handful of parks and reserves (including one that I am working on expanding—more on this project later); I am going to visit a very prominent one tonight (Digression: I know I am assimilating just a tiny bit into Arab culture when after a statement about the future I chant ‘in shah allah’ inside my head. This means ‘god willing’ and it’s a way of saying that while you have every intention of carrying out the said action in the future, it’s really all up to god and whether he decides to humor you with that future or not.). But it seems to me that the reserves are mostly for the much sought after eco-tourists (like me!) who are willing to pay good money to look at…trees and shit.

Which brings me back to the conviction that education is key—without it, nobody understands what there even is worth saving, let alone how to do it.

Sitting on the shore of the Red Sea with Fred, I tried to verbalize a little bit of my frustration with the world and everything that we are continuously destroying. I of course tried to do this in a non-hysterical, conversational kind of way. After I said my bit, he sighed, and turned to me.

“I just don’t know anything about this,” he said. “They don’t teach us this in school here. So I just don’t really care. How do I learn how to care?”

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