Travelling in the Eastern Desert (promised to no one)

The Desert Castles, as the name suggests, were very much in the desert. Jordan itself is very much desert, but driving and driving and driving and seeing nothing but signs for Iraq and Saudi Arabia brought home the desert-ness pretty well. However, unlike the name suggests, the buildings are not actually castles, but instead fortresses, hammams, farmhouses, or retreats for rulers from the Umayyad dynasty, centered in Damascus.

Our first stop was Qasr Kharana, which resembles both a fortress and a khan but LP suggests that it was probably a meeting place for Umayyad rulers and Bedouins. The many rooms were empty but well-restored and fun to explore, particularly the closed-off rooftop access, from which we enjoyed a good desert panorama. We figured that since whoever was in charge of the site didn’t bother to get out of their tent/souvenir shop to regulate entrance into the building, they probably wouldn’t pay attention to us checking out the rooftop views.

From there, we visited the 8th century Qusayr Amra, one of the best preserved of the many Umayyad desert dwellings. You can still see and (attempt to) appreciate the frescoes that cover the ceilings and walls, despite the fact that all of them have been ruined by graffiti and also appreciate how unusual it is to see paintings of topless women or any form of iconography in an Islamic building. The building contains a hammam and audience hall for hosting dinners, meetings, parties, exhibitions and entertainment and is generally considered as a “pleasure palace” for rulers who wanted to escape city-life in Damascus and reconnect with their Bedouin roots in the desert.

Our last stop was in the town/wetland reserve of Azraq, a hunting and military base that was occupied by the Romans, Byzantines, Umayyads, Ayyubids, Ottoman Turks, and of course Lawrence of Arabia (we visited the room where he lived/wrote parts of Seven Pillars of Wisdom). The building is much larger than the others that we had seen and built from black basalt stone and as our guide pointed out, only black basalt stone with no wood or any other materials used (this is probably why most of the building collapsed in a 1927 earthquake).

One of the reasons for the fortress was probably that the Azraq (it means “blue” in Arabic) Basin used to span an area of wetlands larger than Lebanon. Today, LP calls the site an “ecological disaster” which is not a hyperbole, considering the fact that water has been drained from the basin since the late 60s to feed the growing cities of Jordan and by 1991 managed to dry up the area completely. This included fossil water (over 10,000 years old) and the lifesource for the area’s wildlife and vegetation, which has virtually dried up along with the water. The government now pumps 1.5 million cu m of fresh water each year, hoping to restore the wetlands to 10% of its original volume. (Jordan is one of the Top 10 Water-Deprived countries in the world.)

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We returned to Rachel's apartment in the city exhausted and famished from not eating for the last nine or so hours (there are few pit stops in the desert).

Luckily we came back just in time to go out for dinner. One of her classmates, Kitty, was hosting a fus'ha-only dinner at her house, with herself and her two roommates (both American), Rachel, Amy and myself, and her two Iraqi friends who served as moderators of sort / keepers of the Arabic language. The dinner was pretty successful and it was a relief to have a "safe" environment where we could all pretend like fus'ha was a language that we could ever learn/need to know how to speak.