arabia
Incense Trail
Besides exotic merchandise the Silk, Scent and Spice routes also carried new ideas, technologies and religions across vast distances, shaping the history of humanity. The oldest route was the Incense Trail, which linked the frankincense-producing regions of Arabia with the empires of antiquity. The Silk Road was the longest of the routes, stretching across mountains, desert and the steppes of Central Asia, joining the markets of China with those of Europe and the Middle East. The Spice Route connected the great civilizations of Europe, India and the Orient for over 2,000 years. Arab dhows, Chinese junks and Spanish galleons would sail this route laden with precious spices from South-East Asia and the treasures of the Orient. Their trade of these routes bred international rivalries and conquests, and the search for these riches impelled Columbus to cross the Atlantic and Magellan to circumnavigate the globe. There has been an Incense Trade Route for as long as there has been recorded history. As soon as the camel was domesticated, Arab tribes began carrying incense from southern Arabia to the civilizations scattered around the Mediterranean Sea. By the time of King Solomon, the incense route was in full swing, and Solomon reaped rich rewards in the form of taxes from the incense passing into and through his kingdom. The records of Babylon and Assyria all mention the incense trade but it wasn't until the Nabataean tribe of Arabs dominated the Incense Road that Europeans suddenly took notice. For the Nabataeans completely monopolized not only the Incense Road but the Silk Road as well. Up until 24 BC the Nabataeans moved large caravans of frankincense, myrrh and other incenses from southern Arabia and spices from India and beyond to the Mediterranean ports of Gaza and Alexandria. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder mentioned that the route took 62 days to traverse from one end to the other. Many of these stops were cities or towns while others were simply watering locations or dry encampments in the desert. They averaged between 20 and 25 miles apart. The Incense Route was not fixed. As towns or kingdoms tried taxing the caravans passing through them, the merchants would switch their routes, using different passes or treks through the desert. As a result, towns along the route would wax and wane, depending on the route that the caravans took. At its height, the Incense Route moved over 3000 tons of incense each year. Thousands of camels and camel drivers were used. The profits were high, but so were the risks from thieves, sandstorms, and other threats. Soon after 24 BC, the Incense Road began to be replaced by the Incense Sea Route. As Nabataean dhows carried Incense from ports along the southern coast of Arabia north to Nabataea and Egypt, the inland route slowly passed out of existence. The question which naturally arose (and I have posed this in numerous history forums) is why the Romans themselves didn’t want to control the incense directly and keep paying the exhorbitant taxes and high prices which arose. After all they ruled half of the known world at the time. After running the Jordan Cup we traveled Jordan to Syria and then flew to Sanaa where we followed the incense route. This travelogue describes the route as was traditionally followed and we detail the traditional caravenserias and the routes.
Why? And this was asked by almost everybody. Middle East is not the first destination which came to mind of many in 2002. The churn and the saber rattling were already in motion when we were deciding on our trip. Perhaps it is our uncanny ability to unconsciously land up in controversial places at controversial times. But possibly it also hits the heart of why we travel. Not to see places, but to make contact with interesting people at interesting moments. Having finished the trip it remains to date, one of the most exhausting trips we have had. It wasn’t the 112 miles Jordan Cup prelude to the trip we started, but the complicated logistics, the explosive moment of the situation (impending Iraq war, unmanned drones wandering the skies), the border crossings, the wonderful sights, and juggling with Amal and his demands, made it quite challenging.
Yemen - Arabia Feelix
Overlooked by many, Yemen is a country that surprises the visitor from arrival to departure. These consist of breathtaking landscapes, incredible stone and clay towns, and above all a genuine and extremely hospitable population. Towns with a refined and unique architecture, burning deserts and cultivated plains. Veiled women in black dresses, who live in houses with multicoloured windows. An enigmatic and seductive country. Every little part of this land has been the object of man's millenary work. From the terracing system, which chisels with the cultivated fields the steep slopes and carves the highest peaks with steep spiralled gradines like babel towers, to the countless hydraulic works, embankments, dams and cisterns, which turn a dry desert into perfumed valleys and gardens. This is the ancient Yemenite science: to live using every smallest available resource, to snatch from the desert and aridity the cultivable land, to turn an inaccessible and hostile environment into a happy island. The great mosques and the extraordinary palaces built on steep ravines attest the ancient wealth of this country, whose legendary history, which lives in the name of the Queen of Sheba, is narrated also by the Bible. The imams, the spiritual guides of the country, kept Yemen out of all forms of "contamination" from the western culture. This in the past made travelling in this country a difficult task, but today it reveals the great value of a country with an intact culture. North Yemen was a kingdom in the second millennium BC, later successively coming under Egyptian and Ethiopian rule. It adopted Islam in AD628, formed part of the Ottoman empire from 1538 to 1630 and was occupied by Turkey in the 19th century. In the 1960s Yemen was formed by two independent countries: the Yemen Arab Republic, in the north, and the South Yemen, with a communist government. After some civil wars, North and South agreed to unite, and in 1994 that union was finally achieved. Yemen exports cotton, coffee and grapes, and in 1980s discovered a new potential source of wealth in the form of oil. But border disputes resulting from discovery of oil have deterred foreign investments and postponed economic growth, leaving Yemen one of the poorest of the Arab countries. Yemen is one of the world's most ancient countries and played an important part in Middle Eastern trade, supplying the ancient world with such exotic items as frankincense, myrrh, spices, condiments and other luxury items.
Our trip from Amman to Sanaa was quite late in the night. We had to get back from Allepo (northern Syria) crossing the borders and everything to be on time at the Amman airport. We left early in the morning from Allepo this being the month of Ramazan different services along the way would be closed. The flight was uneventful except for the time when the pilot mentioned to take a look at Mecca glittering brightly for miles on, in the dark Arabian desert. We landed in Yemen around 3:00am dishevelled and haggardly and fitted right in. A Yemeni at first glance looks quite menacing, his mouth swollen with Qat and with his jambiya hanging menacingly. Some of them carry rifles. We got our bags and decided to take a taxi to old Sanaa. At 3:00am kids hussled to take our bags to the car. The driver decided the price wasn’t enough, so he decided to wait for another flight for more passengers. In the meantime, my pant got caught in a exposed upholstery and completely tore my bottom. He drove us to a hotel (funduq as guesthouses are called). Till we woke up in the morning and took a look outside the hotel window. Stayed in a wonderful hotel in Old Sanaa with excellent views of the old city.
Located at a height of 2360 meters above the sea, Sana'a is one of the most interesting and extraordinary cities of the world, a true open-air museum which offers to the visitor the stunning scenery of its fairy architectures: white mosques and minarets, magnificent palaces which are more than 400 years old, built of basalt stone and bricks, finely decorated with whitewash embroideries and intricate friezework, enriched by a skilful play of piercing, crowned by towers and embattled terraces. The old town transcends every description. Strolling through the narrow streets you are wrapped in a magical atmosphere. It's perfectly preserved and, if you don't mind the electric wires and the cars, everything seems like hundreds of years ago. From the architectural point of view, there's no trace of modernity and it is a bit like stepping into one of the tales of Orient. Everywhere you lay your eyes, enchanting foreshortenings come into sight. The houses merge each other. The architectural style, while it's uniform, it offers countless variations on the theme, turning a stroll around Sana'a's streets into a continuous discovery of motifs, decorations, arabesques, where the dominant colours are the ochre of the bricks and the white of chalk and plaster. Where the decorators' fantasy has gone beyond every imagination is the "takhrim", i.e. the complex stucco decorations of the windows, whose empty spaces are closed with coloured alabaster (in the older ones) or glass. The tower-houses of Sana'a, with their richly decorated facades, endure the memory of the artistic skills of sabean architects. This city has the ambience and the charm of the tales seemingly straight from the pages of "A Thousand and One Nights" and, at the same time, it's a lively city, with one of the most charming traditional souk of the Eastern world. Today Sana'a is a touristic city and it suffers all the problems of the big cities, including the unfailing plastics and cans along the streets. The Yemenite society, that once used to reutilize and recycle all the waste, now it's not prepared to face the non-spoiling scum of modern industry. Sana'a offers such anthology of inventiveness, skill, sense of proportions and chromatic taste, of decorative inspiration and structural solidity, that UNESCO declared it "World Cultural Heritage". Every now and then, we met some Yemeni people. The men are all dressed in the same way: a long shirt (usually white or ash), called "futa", upon which they wear a jacket (usually black or dark coloured). Round the waist, they always have a velvet damask belt, where they slip their "jiambiya", the typical Yemeni knife. On their head, or on the shoulders, they wear the "kefia", the typical Arabic headgear. Usually it is red and white, but sometimes is black and white or black and yellow, or completely white. Women are covered with black veils and sometimes carry a basket on their head.
Yemen seems to proceed with binary systems indeed: up/down, wild environment/elaborate architecture, North/South, water/desert, man/woman. The last one is striking and subtle at the same time. It's based on the man's ostentation and the woman's concealment. The manifest masculinity and the hidden femininity are carried to the extremes. Just to begin, men have a knife, the jiambiya, slipped at their waist, as soon as they reach the age to be considered a man. This knife has a richly decorated sheath, often made with silver, point upwards (maybe to hold it at the belt, but the phallic reference is evident). Not to mention the handle, which comes out in a scheeky way, well up towards the chest. The fact that the male's hand and the force of gravity place the jiambiya with an angle-shot of 30 from the body make the exhibition definitive. The jiambiya is a precious object: it's socially invaluable, in that it qualifies the owner's social standing. As if the knife wasn't enough, the Yemeni males show off all kinds of fire-arms, from the revolvers to the most modern machine-guns. Among all these weapons stands out the Kalashnikov, a myth. As the men's nature is eruptive, as the women's life is obscure and imploded. Women wear long black dresses, black stocking and a veil from which sometimes the eyes appear. Women are protected by their houses; here and there, on the high mud walls, you can see a little window jutting out, covered with a tangle of arabesqued gratings. From there women look at the street, the public space. Their home, the private, the dark, are their reign.
Located at a height of 2360 meters above the sea, Sana'a is one of the most interesting and extraordinary cities of the world, a true open-air museum which offers to the visitor the scenery of its fairy architectures: white mosques and minarets, magnificent palaces which are more than 400 years old, built of basalt stone and bricks, finely decorated with whitewash embroideries and intricate friezework, enriched by a skilful play of piercing, crowned by towers and terraces. The old town transcends every description. It is one of the oldest Arab Medinas intact with its original architecture. What is interesting is that until about 10 years ago you could walk 1km from the center and not see any modern architecture. Strolling through the narrow streets you are wrapped in a magical atmosphere. It's perfectly preserved and, if you don't mind the electric wires and the cars, everything seems like hundreds of years ago. From the architectural point of view, there's no trace of modernity. Everywhere you lay your eyes the houses merge each other. The architectural style, while it's uniform, it offers countless variations on the theme, turning a stroll around Sana'a's streets into a continuous discovery of motifs, decorations, arabesques, where the dominant colors are the ochre of the bricks and the white of chalk and plaster. Where the interior decorators' fantasy has gone beyond every imagination is the "takhrim", i.e. the complex stucco decorations of the windows, whose empty spaces are closed with colored alabaster (in the older ones) or glass. The tower-houses of Sana'a, with their richly decorated facades, endure the memory of the artistic skills of sabean architects. This city has the ambience and the charm of the tales seemingly straight from the pages of "A Thousand and One Nights" and, at the same time, it's a lively city, with one of the most charming traditional souk of the Eastern world. Today Sana'a is a touristic city and it suffers all the problems of the big cities, including the unfailing plastics and cans along the streets. The Yemenite society, that once used to reutilize and recycle all the waste, now it's not prepared to face the non-spoiling scum of modern industry.
North Yemen was a kingdom in the second millennium BC, later successively coming under Egyptian and Ethiopian rule. It adopted Islam in AD628, formed part of the Ottoman empire from 1538 to 1630 and was occupied by Turkey in the 19th century. In the 1960s Yemen was formed by two independent countries: the Yemen Arab Republic, in the north, and the South Yemen, with a communist government. After some civil wars, North and South agreed to unite, and in 1994 that union was finally achieved.
Every now and then, we met some Yemeni people. The men are all dressed in the same way: a long shirt (usually white or ash), called "futa", upon which they wear a jacket (usually black or dark coloured). Round the waist, they always have a velvet damask belt, where they slip their "jiambiya", the typical Yemeni knife. On their head, or on the shoulders, they wear the "kefia", the typical Arabic headgear. Usually it is red and white, but sometimes is black and white or black and yellow, or completely white.
Independent travel in Yemen has been curbed since 1998. You need to have a registered guide and hire two security personnel (about $5 for two people per day) if you want to go within certain regions of Yemen (specifically Marib and Shihara). Bedouins displaced by privatization of oil fields in villages with no government help, kidnap tourists to demand infrastructure such as schools, hospitals. By and large captives had been treated well for couple of days/weeks and then released when their demands were met, until 1998 when a few tourists were killed and led to extra regulations on independent travel. We visited Marib a city about 200km from Sanaa, famous for ruins from the Queen of Sheba times. The desert dams and the old Balkis palace. Cities which grew rich by levying taxes on passing caravans. Subsequent days we visited Wadi Dhar a very elegant rock palace, Thila, Shibam and Kokabam. Each of these cities a mountain village, ferociously independent until about 40 years ago even under independent Yemen till they were brought under unified control by aerial firepower. Again each city has its own Jewish quarters/Turkish quarters signified by either a six star (star of David) or a eight star (turkish). Guns are very prevalent in regions outside Sanaa. The number of firearms in Yemen is about 2-3x population of Yemen. People like to be photographed and almost except folks who sold live firearms refused to be photographed (I didnt want to be the one to "shoot first and ask questions later" :). The next day we visited Shihara another mountain village very remote (about 4 hrs on dirt road)famous for its 17th century mountain bridge joining the villages across a gorge. Since Shihara is under a different tribal control, we were asked to leave our vehicle and be accompanied by their own guide and security personnel.
The final few days we spent in a wonderful mountain villages of Manakha/Al-Hajjara again with their own unique architecture and brilliant use of local building materials. Al-Hajjara has no road which can take a vehicle and the whole village is a museum. Finally we visited Al-Hutayb a site very famous among the Bohras and Ismailis (whose religious origin in Yemen) a Masoleum of Syedna Hatim and the wonderful mosque at the top of the hill. The mountains around Manakkha are wonderful for hiking and the scenery comparable to the Inca trail. In Yemen we got a chance to stay in funduqs (guest houses of Yemenis) (at Shibam and in Manakkha) and got to enjoy their home made food and in Manakkha a singing and dance party (a tourist trap :)
An almost 35hr tiring flight back to SFO with Amal was another endurance finale.
Yemen was very rewarding. The people are wonderful and you can carry out an informed discussion with anyone on the street. Yemenis chew Qat leaves, a mild narcotic, spending about half to 3/4ths of their income on this-- apparently chewing this for couple of hours gets you high and is Islam compliant. Qat bears heavy on the local economy competes with other food growing. Yemeni coffee is also very popular. Although
Ethopians discovered it, Yemenis made it popular and Mocha coffee gets its name from Al-Makha where it was originally grown.
And the most interesting part of the trip was that on the Amman-Sanaa-Amman night flights the pilot pointed out to us the cities of Medina and Mecca in Saudi Arabia below and in the flood of lights, we could see the dark patch signifying the Kaaba, an awesome and revering sight even for a kafir like me. With a billion people pointing their compass bearings to this place. And how do you understand a faith of so many people by simply analyzing its scriptures, without understanding the rugged desert geography or its tribal history or its people?
Jordan
This run matter is finally done and we can get on doing other things. Today we went to a dive site 15km from here in Aqaba, close to the Saudi border (Apparently the best in the region). Reena managed to get one dive, tomorrow is my turn.
Petra was very exciting. Lots of stuff and horse, donkey and camel rides for Amal. Went to Dier Monastery and getting back a kid asked "You want donkey like her?" at which I couldnt figure if he was referring to Reena or the donkey :) Anyways we took the donkey and Reena and Amal had interesting time coming down.
Syria - Axis of Evil Jr.
We took the early morning bus to Damascus from Amman, I'd been counting on clearing customs with a tourist visa and a smile but the border guard asked us to detail our money, why we were there. When our first bus left, Reena used her assertive voice to get at the bottom of the issue and turns out there was no issue at all – enforcing my usual operandi, when in bureaucratic hassle let your wife handle it. We boarded the next bus to Damascus.
Fifteen minutes, total, and Damascus came into sight. That was all it took to see the enemy capital in the distance. Fifteen minutes and you were further into the mystery of Syria than the United Nations was at the time. Just 15 minutes and you were closer than Saint Paul was when he was knocked off his horse. Fifteen minutes and you were as close as Muhammad supposedly ever came. Arriving with his armies in a.d. 630, he compared the first sight of Damascus to a glimpse of paradise, but he only saw the city from afar, at night, and never entered its gates. Another 15 minutes across a dust bowl and we roared into the city and screeched into the central taxi yard so hot you'd think an Israeli tank column was on our tail. We learned three things in Damascus: The enemy has terrible taste in music. The Syrians probably invented food. And Muhammad had a point: At night, the grit disappears and the hillsides glitter with amber lights. Heaven, even here. In automobiles and other ways, Damascus, like Havana, can look like the city the world forgot. It is arguably the oldest living settlement in the world, inhabited for almost 10,000 years, yet now best known as a capital of tyranny, headquarters of a military regime isolated by international opprobrium and feared by its own people. Syria is your friendly neighborhood thug, its government a milder variant of the same Baath Party (secular, socialist, and sadistic) that held Saddam’s Iraq in its grip. Syria has taken over the role of rogue state. Axis of evil, junior division. But if Syria’s government has been cast as the black hat in international affairs, the Syrians themselves make the sweetest of villains. Things began to look up when Assad the younger took over dictator Hafez al-Assad died. Cell phones were made legal, then satellite dishes, which now crowd the skyline of the capital, challenging the monopoly on information. Tourism has grown 5 percent a year, with Europeans and even American Christians drawn to a breathtaking stockpile of Greco-Roman–Byzantine–Crusader ruins, religious shrines, and social graces drawn from the golden age of Islamic civilization.
But the pleasures of Syria (uncountable historical treasures, sympathetic people, sublime food) come with drawbacks (blistering deserts, Mad Max roads, a murderous police state). Only the smart bombs know the coordinates of the future. The one sure thing is that, squeezed between Iraq and a hard place, Syria is in for a bumpy ride. Like Cuba in 1957, this twilight shall not come again. And so, to the tune of the saber rattling, we went to sing the praises of the enemy one last time.
Everything in Damascus is fabulously, incomprehensibly filthy, coated in talcum-fine desert grit. It is a city of more than a million, with an outermost layer of cement plants and car dealerships, the dry skin shed by a snake. Inside that husk is a noir new city, a wilderness of empty architectural gestures, never-finished towers of rebar, and abstract avenues that lead to theoretical traffic circles. Orwell designed this Damascus: The Ministry of Information prevents anyone from having information, the Ministry of Economy and Trade strangles the economy, and the Ministry of the Interior meddles in other country’s affairs. Every car, shop, and house carries a painting, photo, or decal of President al-Assad—Hafez or Bashar, take your pick.
At dusk, this new city drops its shutters, leaving scattered pockets of seedy nightlife—“superclubs” that open at midnight, stocked with expensive liquor and Ukrainian dancers. But in the mornings the Old City still girded with an oval of Roman walls pierced with nine gates, this ancient Damascus is packed with sweet shops, antique dealers, minarets, and, at its heart, the eighth-century Umayyad Mosque, where the relics of many religions are placed side by side.
On the way back through the Muslim quarter, we were lost in a maze of alleys.
Transition is a Syrian euphemism. A transition to something unspecified, a world after. After Bashar? After a cruise-missile strike? A civil war?
In 1909, before he was "of Arabia" and when Syria was still part of the Ottoman Empire, 21-year-old T.E. Lawrence had set out in similar circumstances—instability, banditry, and halting Arabic—to write his Oxford thesis on the Crusader castles scattered along Syria's coast. For two months he mapped the dozens of visually linked keeps and signal towers built by the European invaders in the 11th and 12th centuries, sleeping in Arab houses and walking huge swaths of the Nusayriyah Mountains with a sketchbook, a pistol, and a Boy Scout shirt tailored by his mother with extra pockets. Reaching the first and greatest of these castles, Krak des Chevaliers, was a three-hour drive on good roads and the edge of death. I'd quickly learned to pick older, feebler taxis, but the rounded Renault was still squeezed from both sides by trucks going 70 as grinning motorcyclists and panicked donkeys wove crosswise through the mix. Occasional interlopers shot at us headlong, down the wrong side of the divided highway. The bleak landscape was interrupted only by giant statues of the late dictator, Hafez al-Assad, and a road sign that read thank you for visiting hama. Hama is where dear old Hafez used tanks to kill at least 10,000 of his citizens while crushing a 1982 rebellion.
Tucked up inside a pass, controlling the high ground, was Krak des Chevaliers, Castle of the Knights, a staggering work of medieval ambition with exquisitely preserved double-curtain walls, towers, battlements, and, yes, a spot for dumping boiling oil on the enemy. Lawrence said it was better than any castle in Europe. From the top of a tower once occupied by Richard the Lionheart, we could see, a dozen miles to the northwest, a small fortress clearly visible against the sky, the next link in the Christian war machine that held much of this coast for close to two centuries.
Above the city, the last green juniper forests of Syria concealed another incomprehensible, absurdly grand castle, Qalat Saladin.
It was Syria that put the "Orient" in Murder on the Orient Express, and Aleppo, the great highland city of the north, where her sleuth, Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, waited for his train. Christie was writing what she knew: Married to an archaeologist, she spent much of the 1930s living in a mud-brick house at a remote dig site outside Aleppo, typing furiously. Despite the murals, Aleppo has changed at a glacial pace over the past 6,000 years. Recent big events have included a sacking by the Tartars, in 1260.
We wandered Aleppo's enormous Armenian quarter, packed with ancient churches and vendors of delicate sweets. (They also have the head of John the Baptist's father, in case you didn't get your fill in Damascus.) There were miraculous and medieval sights around every corner—soccer-playing imams in one place and, down the next alley, cheery children hammering metal inside a Dickensian workshop. Like any police state, Syria has little crime, so the only danger I faced in the souk, the huge covered marketplace, was being run down by a donkey messenger. Crumbling but alive, too poor to be ruined by progress, decorated with old cars and European tourists, Aleppo is a desert flower that persists only in the adverse conditions of geopolitical hostility and a moribund dictatorship.
Outside the great Umayyad Mosque, black cars disgorged "regime elements": colonels, generals, and secret policemen in tracksuits and dark glasses. Shiites and Sunnis pushed up against each other, crowded by Christians and Kurds. Even a congenital atheist could be swept up in the riptide of faith.
A once prosperous stop on the Silk Road, Palmyra may possess the greatest array of antiquities in all of the Middle East, which is really saying something. Colonnaded avenues led for three miles through temples, courts, senates, and bathhouses, ending finally, fittingly, in mortuary towers that ran into the far desert. The futility of empire, the dusty brevity of human ambition, came crashing home, punctuated by the roar of Syrian MiGs passing overhead on their evening patrol. Iraq was about 80 miles away. Like the past, the future is now.
For an hour we paralleled the invisible border, nothing but dust between here and the war. A traffic sign with a huge arrow pointed left: baghdad, it read. We went right.
As we raced for Damascus, straight as an arrow, a huge chocolate-brown hawk dropped into formation beside the car. The bird coasted above the roadside ditch at 60 miles an hour, barely moving a feather, grazing the top of the weeds, head down, hunting.
Jordan
Aqaba was nice to dive. A guided dive introduced us to several endemic corals and fishes and taken some nice photos. Returned back to Amman via the Dead Sea road and stayed there for about 5 days. The Madaba church housing the famous middle-east mosaic, Mt. Nebo the site of Moses death, Jerash to a Roman city north of Amman, some magnificient Ummayad desert castles in the sandy plateau along the Amman-Iraq border and mud-bath on the Dead sea. As usual Amal drives our pace along the road. We are now experts on backpacking the middle east with a baby during Ramadan. Shops close around 4pm and services are highly erratic. However the times we have tried
we have always found a good soul to haul us back. We then setup base for couple of days in Allepo and city just below Turkey and Euphrates river. The caravan stopped here in khans or resthouses as we checked into a Russian/Armenian hotel. The Allepo souqs and citadel are magnficient and kababs are great. The city caters to lots of Russians who come here with their goods exchange them and return back with goods to sell there. Visited Hama an old city famous for its water wheels and also infamous for Assads genocide of 20,000 shias in the 80's. Yesterday we visited on St. Simeons basillica and well preserved church and the biggest one in the middle east. Hitched a ride back to Allepo on back of a pickup truck and took a night bus back to Damascus.
We drive by bus to the "desert castles" which were built for the caliphs in the 8th century as places of residence and hunting lodges through meager landscapes. The Qasr Al Hallabat which was built of bright sandstone and basalt is only a ruin. The Qasr Al Azraq served legendary "Lawrence of Arabia" as accommodation. From here he organized the resistance and the battle of Akaba. We see impressive frescos and mural paintings in the Qusayr Amra (little castle). It was presumably built of the caliph Al-Walid. It was used as a relaxation and entertainment place. Qasr Al Kharana rises on a ledge. It is still controversial, whether this castle was set up for the defense because the narrow embrasures are laid out quite exceptionally anyway. Jerash is our aim the next day. One also calls it Gerasa. This ancient town belongs to the biggest and the best and complete received Roman provincial towns of the world. It is called the Pompeji of the Middle East and the town of the one thousand columns.
The next day leads us to Madaba. We look at a map of Palestine laid out as a floor mosaic which served the pilgrims as a guide in the Greek orthodox church.
We reach the mountain Nebo across bendy streets in 800 m of height. According to the Bible this is the mountain of which the praised country saw from Moses. He also shall be buried here. The look goes far over the Jordan valley up to the dead sea and to Israel. Inside, the cloister admires lovely mosaic work. On the continuation of the journey we suddenly stand in front of a deep valley. The Wadi Mujib or grand Cannon of Jordan separated the people of the Ammoniter and the Moabiter from each other in earlier time. We drive on to the crusader fortress Kerak over the king street. This was built by crusaders and taken by the arabs and further improved later in the 12th century.
We approach the highlight of our journey now. Petra, the "red town" of the Nabatäer, is a town fascinating, chiseled from the new red sandstone. After a restful night in Petra we go to the Siq, the entrance to the rock town, in the morning. We wander through a narrow, deep ravine which could be defended excellently. After an inflection we see unexpectedly the "treasure house", Petra's most famous monument. In front of itself, it is already very impressive to see the 40 meters high and 28 meters wide façade which was hit completely from the rock and looks always very well. On the right of the treasure house the ravine then gets broader again and a natural arena opens. We passes by the theater across the "street of the façades" which offers 3000 visitors place. We hike further across a street surfaced well. The ascent to the Deir (cloister) is arduous. One is compensated by a lovely landscape through which one has to stride. The Deir is presumably a temple which was dedicated to the King Obodas and is hit to the rock face. A gigantic room has been hammered out with an outstanding acoustics inside.
Aqaba is Jordan's only port, located by the red sea directly besides the Israeli Eilat. Dealers offer their goods for sale in the bazaar streets. The red sea invites us with its warm, clear water for bathing and snorkeling.
The last section of our tour is a stay at the dead sea. The water which is strongly salt and containing mineral is successful remedy particularly for skin diseases. The salt lake is 400 meters under the sea-level. By the high salt content the impetus is so high in the water that you can not go down while taking a bath.
After three days relaxation we return to Amman for our flight home from this fascinating part of the Orient.
Summary: It is not personal, and truth be told, Arabs are lousy drivers. And since the friend of my enemy's enemy is the enemy of my friend's friend, we did find it quite universal to be driven like crazy, with no regards for their (and our) lives or personal property. Squeezed between Iraq and a hard place (the US), the Middle East (and their roads) are sure in for a bumpy ride. In busses when people started to smoke, I would immediately open all the windows drawing in freezing draft. In minutes, people would apologize and snuff out their cigarettes. Heck if they wanted to smoke in front of Amal, they better bear the cold. For Arabs, hospitality is among the most highly admired of virtues and lies at the heart of who they are. How well one treats his guests is a direct measurement of what kind of person he or she is. It is common practice whilst preparing food to allow for an extra portion in order to cater for the unexpected guest. When a meal is over, there should always be a good portion of food left over otherwise one might think that a guest had not been fully satisfied. We found ourselves being offered the choicest portions of the drug Qat, Amal was offered the choicest portions of chicken as he wandered around old souks. We played a little mongrels with our cultural, religious, national or ethnic identities. If they insisted on being nosy, I would tell them about our stay in Israel – and out of respect or just confusion not one would say a word. Reena sometimes would suddenly decide to assume her strong Hindu identity with her bindu and kumkum (maybe she was experimenting with parts of her Berkeley thesis) immediately turning herself into some Bollywood exotica alluring more than her usual share of roadside Romeos. Some would sing to the tunes of Raj Kapoor. In Yemen, knowing fully well that the news suggested that bin Laden was hiding somewhere in his ancestral town of Northern Yemen, I would ask my driver if he thought what we heard in the news was true – and he would reply – that we were soon going meet him. It did freak us out initially, with the Iraq war looming in the background and the constant back of the head reminder that we were being tracked by the FBI, the CIA and the Al Qaeda alike. In most of our trip, I always had that feeling that the smart bombs being assembled in the Gulf knew our coordinates to greater accuracy than we did ourselves. Here is some of the potraits of the people we saw.
