On getting lost in a wadi, embroiled in a shady tourist cartel, almost driving off a cliff, and making ones way back home

In the past 5 days I have been up and down the country of Jordan several times. My road looks something like this:

Amman and Beyond

I started with a roadtrip down the King’s Highway with the girls that I wrote about previously. They turned out to be great travel buddies, and we had an eventful drive through some of Jordan’s most beautiful terrain that included Lisbeth re-learning how to drive a stick shift over the steep slopes of Wadi Mujib, trying to maneuver the Jordanian roads, in which highways have speed bumps, and nearly driving off a cliff in Dana Village, while donkeys looked on.

From the King's Highway

The next day we started the morning with a “self guided hike” (which in the states we generally just call a hike) into the Wadi (which is Arabic for valley, but can mean anything from valley, gully, riverbed, or anything else that you find at the bottom of a steep slope or cliff). As we were starting off a couple of shabab (young men) popped out of a tree and offered us some apples. We accepted, which then obligated us to a polite, bilingual (choppy Arabic from us choppy English from them) tour of their fruit farm, and the water source that maintained it, of which they were very proud.

We got a bit off the trail in the wadi, and our offroading and subsequent attempts to guess what constituted a path led us through olive groves, a very tough and brambly oasis of sorts—really a collection of very bad ass plants growing protectively over every drop of water they can get—down a 4WD road, back up the same road, and then up a fairly intense scramble up a rocky wall, which put us directly under the guesthouse. There were a couple of fairly sketchy moments when I was questioning my sanity in wandering into a desert wadi without a guide, but at a pivotal moment the fabulous Bedouin guide from the guesthouse spotted us and pointed out the trail from above. After we scrambled up over the rocks and made it back, we were chastised with a cup of tea and the admonition that that path was for sheeps, not for people, sillies…

Morning mist over the Wadi

That afternoon I headed for Wadi Musa, which I have branded in my mind as Tourist Purgatory. Wadi Musa is the town that has sprung up around Petra to accommodate the huge numbers of tourists that flock there, which means that it has absolutely nothing to offer other than a grungy selection of cheap hotels (and some nicer hotels that I could not afford to stay in), throngs of men trying to rip foreigners off, and the general toughness typical of tourist trap towns that I had yet to experience in Jordan until that point.

I arrived in Wadi Musa alone, hoping to meet my friend Caryn, who is studying in Syria and was coincidentally traveling to Petra that same evening. The hotel I went to first on a recommendation from the Lonely Planet message board was full, but the guy working there was very nice and helpful. He sat me down, gave me some juice, and called another hotel that arranged to come and get me and give me a room. Although I’m always a bit weary of what people want out of me in these situations, he seemed genuinely friendly, and we chatted about travels and travelers.

Unfortunately the hotel I ended up at was not as nice as the one I had aimed for. It was a bed for the night though, and for what I was willing to pay, that’s about all I could ask for. The workers of this hotel were much less friendly and a bit over solicitous for me to feel comfortable. Furthermore, my phone battery was dying, which would make it next to impossible for Caryn to find me. The thrill of the great morning was quickly fading, and by evening I was tired and cranky. In addition to being shabby, my room bordered the street, and bad Arabic pop music blasted from some unknown shop continuously, alternated with the revving of truck engines and honking horns. Caryn managed to get a hold of me long enough for me to tell her the name of the hotel, but my battery died right after. I couldn’t set foot out of the hotel without getting stared at, and the hotel lobby was full of smoking Arab men. Unable to think of what else to do, I read a bit in my room and went to bed.

Given the music, trucks and honking, I had only half dozed off when there was a knock on my door. Caryn and her friends had found me despite my dead cell phone.

Caryn and I studied Arabic together at Middlebury last summer, and she has remained one of my favorite people—even though she lives on the East Coast and we hadn’t seen each other since last August, we had managed to keep abreast of each others lives. She’s one of those friends who I may never live near, but when I do see her it’s as if nothing has changed at all. Especially after a month and a half of traveling alone and meeting new people, it was so lovely to see a familiar friend! She was traveling with three friends from her classes in Syria, one of which, Alex I also knew from Middlebury last year and was happy to see. The other two were Bernard and Mateo, another American and an Italian.

We got up early the next morning to be at Petra by 6, when the gates opened. This proved to be well worth it as we beat not only the heat, but the majority of the tourist traffic. We virtually had the place to ourselves.

Nobody here but us camels

Petra is one of those places that I’m not even going to try to describe, at least not here. I had considered passing it by because of time constraints, and I’m incredibly glad that I didn’t—it is truly a spectacular site.

Getting out of Wadi Musa proved to be a challenge. It was Saturday afternoon, and considering what a tourist trap the place is, public transportation is a bit thin on the ground. Bernard and Mateo really wanted to go to the Dead Sea; in a bus we would have had to go back to Amman and then switch busses and possibly hitchhike to get to a Public Beach (see previous post for thoughts on this). This was still substantially cheaper than a taxi, and we would have had enough time for it had it not been for a snafu with the shady hotel, in which they made us miss the bus so that they could then peddle a sleazy driver for three times the amount of money. By the time we sorted it out though we realized that we wouldn’t be able to get a bus back to Amman, and were left with little choice but to accept the sleazy driver. We reached this conclusion after trekking back to the first hotel that I had stopped at where I appealed to my new friend—he again took us in, sat us down for some juice, and talked over our options with us, determining that the price we had managed to bargain with the driver was not unreasonable for a chartered car to the Dead Sea and back to Amman, with a two hour break at the sea for us to swim.

“Just don’t pay him until you get to Amman,” my friend warned us, and gave us all his card, which read “Peace Maker” and had his cell phone number on it, should we run into any trouble. Although we were all hot, flustered and felt a bit cheated, we had to laugh at the card; especially since this was the service we had been seeking.

The driver’s name was Yahya, and he spent the rest of the day trying to win our confidence by stopping at scenic spots for us to take photos and buying us a snack when he stopped for gas. After our initial confrontation at the hotel, we accepted the situation, and were polite, if not distant, but we never quite trusted him. His van was decked out with fake flowers and sequences, and he played bad American then Arabic pop music loudly. His hair was slicked back in a greasy mullet, and he chain smoked throughout the ride. Every time he went around a bend he made a dramatic flourish with his hand as he turned the wheel as if he were an artist putting the finishing touches on a tacky tableau. Furthermore, he kept trying to convince my friends to go to a hotel in Amman that his friends ran—the rooms he offered were ridiculously cheap, but we had no inclination to be embroiled in this shady tourist cartel any longer than necessary, and we said no. In spite of this he still drove us to the hotel once we reached down town Amman, and sulked when I emphatically insisted that he drop us off at the Arab Bank, from where I took my friends to the hotel I had stayed at upon my arrival in Amman. Although it was a few dinars more expensive, it had a double layer of recommendations—I had stayed there and found the staff incredibly helpful and welcoming, and it had been recommended to me by a friend in my Arabic class in Monterey, who knew the owner.

Before we reached Amman though, we did stop at the Dead Sea. I had been indifferent on the matter of whether we stopped there or not, having already checked that off my tourist list, but I’m very glad that we did.

The first time I went to the Dead Sea had been with the same friends I went to Aqaba with, and it had been a similar conflict for me—lovely, fancy resort leads to major environmental guilt complex.

This time, I was traveling with equally poor students who were keen to go to the cheapest beach around, which was Amman Beach. It was with no guilt that I sank into the saline water only to bob straight back up to the top, and slather myself with Dead Sea mud, renowned for its healing properties.

There are few experiences like floating in the Dead Sea before sunset; if you lay flat and let your ears go under water, it’s like laying in a cloud; all the sounds around you are muffled and dim, and the water props you up with absolutely no effort on your part; it’s the opposite of gravity. The sun was dropping towards the hills of the West Bank, which is directly across the sea, so the light isn’t directly overhead. It gives off a comfortable glow after the earlier day’s glaring heat. We got out and watched the sun set from the shore.

Sunset over the Dead Sea

I didn’t get home until about 11, having stayed downtown with my friends to show them the hotel, and have some dinner at Hashim, which is THE restaurant to eat at if you’re ever in Amman. Ask just about anyone in Amman and they will know this place, which is apparently so legendary that even the king has dropped in for their incredible hummus, ful and falafel, which is mostly what they sell. For less than a JD you can fill up on this and other mezze—this is about all they sell, but they do it so well that I’ve never heard anyone wanting more.

After an exhausting day I said my goodbyes to my new friends and then my old—I was sad to see Caryn go, especially since I don’t know when I’ll see her again—soon in shah allah. As I went around and gave everyone a hug we got hissed at by an old man in the corner. In the company of Americans I had completely forgotten that it’s taboo to hug men in public—cultural oops. Salt crusted, stuffed with hummus and exhausted, I headed home.

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