Return from the Hidden City

Last time I told you about how getting to Petra, and everything we did there. But getting back was an adventure in and of itself. Also, this has been one of the most boring weeks ever, so I'm working the Petra story for all it's worth until something else exciting happens.

We set out from Wadi Musa to Aqaba fairly early, wanting to get the 12:00 fast ferry back to Egypt. Since there were no minibuses or public transportation, we were forced to use the hostel's pickup truck, at pricy $40 for a 2-hour ride. But it was a lot of fun driving through the Jordanian landscape, and it really had me very thoughtful and pensive the whole way. I wasn't able to get many good pictures because of how fast we were driving, but the landscape is very desolately beautiful - rolling dry plains and rocky mountains, extending onwards and onwards under a massive blue sky. Joe reminded me of a very perceptive quote - a historian who said that it was no wonder monotheism came from this land with nothing in it but hills and rocks and sky. In the fertile valleys of Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, Rome, and Mesoamerica, the people could make gods for everything - trees, rivers, sun, earth, animals, the sea, and so on. But herding sheep in the dry hills of the Levant, there's not much to worship aside from the sky.

And it really hasn't changed that much...we drove for an hour without seeing much more than hut-like homes and black Bedouin tents with their herds. The same sense of wide-open wilderness still prevails in many places. It's a land that makes you feel very small and alone, out beneath that immense sky.

But that ended as we drove through the desert valley leading into Aqaba, finally culminating in the sprawling, modern port city. A massive Jordanian flag easily 50m across waved lazily in the breeze. We got to the ferry-port - and there were no spaces left on the fast boat. This condemned us to the "slow boat", a conventional ferry that departed at 3 - nominally - and took 3 hours instead of 1. So standing around the port at 10 in the morning, we prepared to wait.

And wait.

All told, we were there for 7 hours before departing. We sat in the cafeteria, hid from the sweltering sun and heat, and tried to pass the time, reading all the books we had, writing in journals, talking, drinking coffee, and staring off into space. There were really two ways it could go: sit there in utter misery at our predicament, or laugh it off as one more ridiculous 3rd-world transit adventure. Fortunately, we chose the Douglas Adams-esque latter option, and ended up having a pretty good time just laughing and chatting. Never underestimate the presence of a good travelling companion - without Joe to converse with, I would have gone totally bat-shit.

And speaking of Adams - although he said "always know where your towel is," in the middle east I think that gets translated to "always know where your kaffiyeh is." I've heard the epithet "towel-head" used for Arabs and now, frankly, I don't think it's insulting at all! A kaffiyeh is the world's most useful garment. Wrap it around your head to keep the sun or the rain off, around your shoulders as a shawl for the sun, around your face in a dust storm, use it as a towel after washing, pile it beneath your head as a pillow, put it over your eyes to help you sleep, and of course it's always a stylish scarf. I used it for all these things in the course of 2 days - it's my new favorite item of clothing. It would seem Adams knew what he was talking about!

Anyways, we also spent part of the time at the ferry part talking to two travelling companions, a Saudi entrepreneur and a taciturn Japanese retired engineer. They fulfilled their stereotypes perfectly - the Japanese man was a prolific traveller, very polite, with limited English, and when I mentioned Boston he got really excited about Matsuzaka. The Saudi was a loud, arrogant man in a brilliant white robe and mirror shades, who talked incessantly about money and the correctness of Islam, and used one of his two camera-phones to show us pictures of his horse, his motorcycle, his farm, his daughter, his car, etc., etc. Yes, he really just mixed his daughter in with all his other possessions. As a sociological sample, he was interesting, but as a person he was dreadful...I can only hope all Saudis are not like that. He also had a weird way of shifting from telling dirty jokes and making crass comments about women to talking about how shameful the way Western women dress is and how terrible alcohol is.

We boarded the boat around 4, and spent another hour and a half waiting for it to leave while they loaded trucks, cars, and so on. I tried and failed to take a nap, so I spent the time just conversing with Joe. Our conversation lasted almost two hours, so we were well on the way by the time it ended. We decided to get dinner, a not entirely dismal affair, and then were ambushed by the Saudi guy again. We went to the top deck to chat, and when I got sick of him, I went down to a lower deck to nap, which lasted until our arrival.

But a bizarre thing happened on our arrival - we were on the upper uncovered decks, enjoying the fresh air, and they locked the doors. Every single door leading down into the ship was chained shut. Though probably just for crowd control, it was very disconcerting, and we joined a couple of sheikhs in yelling at the officers until they let us out. Sometimes being an ajnabi, foreigner, really helps. We finally shuffled out through the car deck, almost unbreathably inundated with diesel fumes, and slid through customs in tenth of the time it took back in Jordan.

It was now about 9:30 or 10 at night, but fortunately there was a night bus to Cairo. While waiting for tickets, we met two travelling Libyan entertainers - one was a singer, the other an actor. They were really fun and funny guys, who spoke very clear Arabic. One of them was even diabetic, and we commiserated about that. As Arabs often do, they bought us water and food without even asking, and we passed the time chatting to them until the bus left. It was a welcome change from the Saudi bore.

The ride itself was weird, but not bad. My seat "broke" - which meant it reclined 90% into an almost perfect bed on which I slept for about seven of the ten hours. Unlike the journey to Nuweiba, which had shown an ancient C-quality Sinbad movie and The Man in the Iron Mask, the movies on the inbound bus were bizarre Arabic drama/comedies with lots of yelling. I put in my earbud headphones, wrapped my kaffiyeh around my head, and slept.

I woke in Cairo, feeling cheerful and rested, and though we had to argue at the bus station taxi drivers about prices, we eventually beat it down from 50 pounds to 20. The taxi driver even brought me a glass of tea, which was pretty difficult to drink as he careened through the streets. But my lightning reflexes kept me from spilling any, and we arrived in good enough spirits to not collapse for the whole day.

Voyage to the Hidden City, Pt. 1

My adventures for this weekend revolved around visiting Petra. Strictly speaking, however, most of my time was spent in transit - an experience, I can assure you, was a bit less than exemplary. As a study in how the Middle East basically seems to work, however, it was pretty invaluable. So I'm going to drag you through every excruciating moment of it. I will, however, refrain from using the phrase "Rose Red City," throughout, because I'm thoroughly sick of that epithet.

We set out from Cairo late Tuesday night to take a bus to Nuweiba, a little port city on the Red Sea in the Sinai Peninsula. The plan was to take a ferry from Nuweiba to the Jordanian port of Aqaba and from there another bus to Petra, about two hours inland. There's another way to get there, by cutting through Taba in Egpyt and Eilat in Israel, but that involves getting an Israeli stamp on your passport, which is the kiss of death for trying to enter any Arab nation except for Egypt and Jordan.

Little did we know that Nuweiba is pretty much the sphincter of Egypt. It wasn't quite a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but it was pretty damn close. Apparently the tourist part of the town is actually quite nice, but the port authority area is a sprawling mess of dirty cafes, loading docks, shipping offices, and filth. This place was seriously disgusting even by lax Egyptian standards. We spent most of our time in the shaded courtyard of the ticket office, which was the least awful of the available locations.

Don't even get me started on the cement-block hole-in-the-ground Egyptian squat toilets. The most foul truck-stop restroom in America wouldn't even be able to hold a candle to these - in fact, if they did there might be some sort of explosion. I will never be able to understand how an Islamic culture which places such a high value on personal cleanliness and regular ablutions allows its streets and especially its washrooms to become such vile cesspits.

The bus which we had taken was actually chock-full of AUC students, but most of them were going to Israel, so they got off in Taba to head north to Jerusalem. There were a couple of others with is in Nuweiba, including two crazy guys who planned to visit Petra, Amman, and Damascus all in one weekend. And even though it often takes 8+ hours to cross the Syrian border - if you get across at all - they still probably spent less time in transit then us.

Joe and Ben - another guy visiting Jordan - and I chilled in the ticket office until they finally decided to start boarding the "fast ferry." After being shuffled through six or seven different waiting areas, having our passports and tickets checked innumerable times, and being put on buses that sat idling for 10 minutes to travel no more than 500 ft. from the terminal to the boat, we finally boarded the ship - only to have our passports confiscated for "processing."

Now, being out of control of your passport is a worrying state of affairs at the best of times. Giving it over to the grimy hands of the Jordanian/Egyptian state port security services would be enough to give the Dalai Lama an aneurysm. But, we bore it with admirable patience, and after finally shuffling everyone around, the boat took off from the dock. And it was a fast boat - the "slow ferry" was still boarding trucks when we arrived in Aqaba an hour later, around 6pm. We were optimistic that we would be in Petra by 8, and happy that our investment in the "Fast Boat", about twice as expensive as the regular ferry had paid off. So we pulled into port...and waited.

And waited.

And waited some more. We sat in our seats, with no one telling us a bloody thing about what was going on. A few other foreign nationals were let out but they weren't letting Americans anywhere. Mind you, they still had our passports during this whole ordeal. Finally, over an hour later, they relented and let us out of the boat and put us on another 500m bus ride to the Jordanian customs/arrival terminal.

Where they didn't have our passports. Now, I'm used to Egyptian bureaucracy and official stupidity, but I have never before encountered a customs bureau that had simply vanished our passports. For almost an hour, I couldn't get a straight answer out of any of the duty officers as to where they had gone. People walked back and forth. There was shouting in Arabic and a fair amount of gesticulation. We were repeatedly assured that the wait would be "10 more minutes." Some of the Americans' passports emerged, while others inexplicably remained hidden in the bureaucratic void. It finally emerged that they were "processing" each passport for security, a process which appeared to take about 5 minutes per passport. They trickled out over the course of the hour, emerging in small, illogical batches - one guy got his while his girlfriend didn't, while a Korean family was handed all of theirs - except for their 5-year-old daughter.

Finally, having determined that Joe and I and two middle-aged travelling companions from Ireland and Oregon did not represent pressing security risks to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, we were allowed out around 9pm - to get a bus to Petra. At this point, Joe and I had been travelling for 24 solid hours, with only brief naps on the bus and boat. But we got a taxi, and after being shunted between four different drivers and twice as many arguments about something - Allah only knows what, although it undoubtedly involved money - we were on our way to Petra.

I was honestly only conscious for the first bit, where our driver pointed out the world's biggest damn Jordanian flag flying over Aqaba port and bought jerry-cans of petrol from a station run exclusively by eight-year old boys. Then it was off into the Jordanian countryside. Fortunately, Joe was able to make conversation with the middle-aged couple who had gotten stuck in the same trap as us, and I was able to lie back, sleep and have my head repeatedly slammed into the doorframe of the car by the squealing hairpin turns that led to Petra.

We got to our hotel, and found that two other groups of AUC students were already occupying it, so that was an interesting surprise. Fortunately we had booked ahead of time, and through the incompetence of the hotel staff we were for some reason given a four-bed room for the price of the two-bed room we had booked - not particularly useful, but it at least gave us clean linen for each night we were there! They briefly tried to charge us the 4-bed rate, but we were so thoroughly fed up that we took our bags upstairs and told them we expected the right rate when we returned. They obliged.

That was the end of our voyage to Petra - or strictly speaking, to Wadi Musa, the village just outside Petra. The next day brought all of the good, awesome, and beautiful stuff. Stay tuned...