At the hinge of the Middle East, Jordan is a traveler’s jewel still relatively unknown by the Arab-fearing West. At best, we may recall that the king-ruled nation meets Israel and Egypt at the Gulf of Aqaba, and Lawrence of Arabia once tramped through its vast desert, when the country was still part of Palestine.
To the tourist, Jordan means a desolate string of desert forts and castles, modern cities built from Roman rubble, and the multicolored, rock-carved monuments of Petra, a glorious testament to what man and nature can do when they work together. Jordan’s real beauty, however, lies within the hearts of its wildly hospitable population. Snack stand owners and minibus drivers, surprised to see me, insist upon giving me free rides and falafel; women hand over their jewelry when I visit their homes. I am an oddity here. A small, modestly dressed girl with innocent blue eyes does not travel alone with bags equal to her weight.
I forget to be like the big groups with the big floppy hats, protection from the mean Middle Eastern sun. They know how to keep their distance, traveling in tour buses and sticking to the main roads, putting their cameras between us and them. Joining my sight-seeing brethren in Petra, I tell myself to pretend I don’t know a word of Arabic and I don’t want to know anything but how old, how tall, how long.
To enter Petra, you must walk a half-mile through a narrow gorge, hemmed in by 100 meter tall cliffs swirling with orange, gold, salmon, and eggplant hues. In the early morning, retreating shadows cut jagged patterns on the water-smoothed rock, heightening the anticipation the eternal walk through this heavenly gate generates. At last, the rosy red columns of the “Treasury” shine through the crack of the cliffs. The Arabian Nabataeans carved the towering facade of this delicate, Hellenistic-inspired tomb from a menacing mountain of rock in the 1st A.D. Here the tourists are stuck, turning their cameras every which way to try to fit all 30 by 43 meters of this glory into their viewfinders.
Beyond the Treasury stretch miles of mountainous passageways and rock-cut steps leading to hundreds of tombs, caves, niches, baths, etchings, and assorted other monuments, all cut from the rock’s natural contours. My mind is crowded with their colors. A pattern of metallic blue frost striped with an occasional ribbon of gold fades into smudged Easter pastels of lemon, lavender and baby pink. The colors form waves and spirals, as if the hills were their own contour maps, inked up with a time-shifting palette stolen from sunsets and bruises.
The rusty-bronze skin of smart, black-eyed Bedouins camoflauges into Petra’s precipices. The tourist attraction lies in Jordan’s southern desert, Bedouin country. Bedouin families made their homes in the caves of Petra until the 1980s, when the Jordanian government, anxious to keep a tight rein on their cash cow, pushed them onto a settlement outside town.
Nomadic Bedouin tribes once wandered the Middle Eastern deserts; today, most have settled in villages or oasis towns, trading in their camels for four-wheel drives. Many Bedouins in southern Jordan now take trekkers across the red sands of nearby Wadi Rum, or sell tea and souvenirs within Petra’s confines.
Forgetting again to be a tourist, I stay past Petra’s closing time, lounging in natural wombs and thrones crawling with fat brown lizards and their bright blue cousins. I watch the sun flicker away with another female straggler and a hard-drinking Bedouin with a Cockney accent. As girls, we have no problem catching the last bus out of Petra: the police jeep. The monuments now appear as an eerie photographic negative, their colors reversed by the pale moon, navy sky and the rickety jeep’s red tail-lights.
Petra is worth the next five days I must spend in the lackluster capitol of Amman. I am waiting for a new plane ticket to Istanbul after losing mine frolicking in the rocks. The hotel employees are so anxious to cheer me up. Every day a hunchback Palestinian brings me up five tiny cups of Turkish coffee, made from boiling finely ground beans and crushed cardamom. These fleeting cups of happiness last less than a minute, their muddy bottoms a reminder that life is short.
Amman is the dead center of Jordan’s unsettled vortex of energy, a place where everything comes together but nothing happens. During my brief stay, I meet Libyans, Iraqis, Syrians, Egyptians, Sudanese, Saudi Arabians and Palestinians, here to work and wait.
Palestinians, waiting for their own homeland, make up 60% of Jordan’s population. With the Palestinian influx, refugee camps have grown like city weeds. Even though Jordan was part of Palestine before the 1948 creation of Israel, Palestinians face serious discrimination here. A Palestinian’s chance of finding a job and salary he deserves is slim; his chance of holding a high government or military post is nil.
Young Jordanian men, too, are waiting, waiting to make enough money to marry; the girls are waiting to meet a man with enough money to marry. I go to buy Arabic pop tapes. The shop keeper, a young, handsome cowboy wearing tight jeans and a Doberman Pinscher belt buckle, pulls me in his back room. Sitting too close, he pleads, “I want to go to America.” I flee, later realizing he probably just wanted to offer me his savings to marry himself into the country. Many a man covets the open-spread eagle wings embossed on my passport. They know sex, marriage and money is easy in America.
My hotel’s lobby is a waiting room itself. One Iraqi woman has been here months with her children, hopelessly trying to meet her husband in Holland. He paid some $5,000 for her visa, which was somehow lost on its journey to Jordan. She pleads her case “bailash,” “for nothing,” to the Dutch embassy day after day, carrying around a worn, misspelled letter detailing her story in English.
At the American embassy, I speak on behalf of the hotel waiter, who “wants to attend his cousin’s wedding in Detroit.” All his friends tell him not to bother trying; he insists, so hopeful. The visa cashier takes a non-refundable $45 — a week’s salary — before the next window gives him a crisp, courteous and immediate no.
Another Iraqi family, an inventor and ham radio operator, his wife, a biology teacher, and two kids, befriends me in the hotel. The father wants to talk about Salah Hotel — AKA Saddam Hussein — but only outside, as Iraqi informants are known to lurk in hotel lobbies. “I think your country had the right idea to bomb us, if it could be done accurately. It’s the only way,” he says softly.
Between the United Nations oil sanctions and Hussein’s policies, which suck all loose funds into national security, a decent wage is impossible in Iraq. Beyond money, there is the problem of “education.” Even in private schools, children are taught to worship Hussein; even in the foyers of five-star hotels, portraits of Bush and Clinton are painted for guests to wipe their feet upon.
The family sold their valuables to pay the $2,000 or so dollars the government took to let them leave the country. Here they wait for a green light from Germany, where they have a ham radio contact and possible work. They spend ten long days pacing from the vegetable market to the hotel before their application is denied.
The next day they leave for Yemen, where they have a few friends. As these two established, venerable professionals set out for a country they’ve never seen, they tell me, “You are so very brave to take this journey.”