Next stop: Nabatean Empire

Our drive to Jordan included a stop just before the border in Bosra. The environment around Damascus is mostly rocky desert, but south of the city the desert turns into maybe the most fertile agrictultural region in the country. Bosra was the first city in the Nabatean empire of ancient Arabia (4th century BCE) and is famous for its well-preserved Roman amphitheatre, which, along with the later Islamic citadel surrounding it, is made from the black basalt stone that is characteristic of the region. The theater was pretty sweet (see pictures) and despite all the great Roman ruins we’d been visiting, still fully impressive in its intactness.

Outside the citadel were craftshops, amid further ruins of the Nabatean age.

Then onto the border, by far the nicest and most orderly of the border crossings that I’ve been to yet in Syria. Jordan clearly keeps its northern neighbor in shape. There was landscaping and wide lanes and palm trees and a large duty-free shopping mall where we ordered sandwiches to go for lunch. I didn’t see as much of the crazy cigarette smuggling as my friends had told me about (men stripping down in public and stuffing their clothes), though we did see the guy with the worst job of all—the man in the hole in the ground who has cars drive over him then he knocks on the floor of the car to check for secret compartments. Apparently they knock in the same exact places every time so the secret compartments are carefully placed accordingly). We bought our visas at the border with no trouble and were greeted by smiling pictures of King Abdullah and his entire family.

[Side Note: there is a notable difference between the styles of portraying the country’s ruler. Both SY and JO’s leaders are relatively unintimidating, though the former is often in army uniform, aviators and a mustache looking off into the distance, while his Jordanian counterpart is shown in any number of outfits and circumstances. You will see full family photos of him, his wife and their four kids, or him in full Arabian headdress, or him and his father and their fathers/previous kings of Jordan next to a superimposed drawing of Hashem (the great-grandfather of Mohammad, whom the royal family claims to be descended from, hence the name the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), or him in western clothes, or military dress, or endearing photos of him greeting a sick person in a hospital, or having his cheeks pinched by an elderly woman.]

The first thing we noticed upon entering Jordan was the orderliness, particularly in their driving, relative to Lebanon and Syria. There are also billboards praising the police force (with a woman police officer!) and our taxi driver kept commenting on how much cleaner/better Jordan was than from whence we came. Our one stress of the day was making the bus to Petra (they stopped running after 4) and it was exacerbated by choosing to make a stop in Bosra, crossing a border, and our taxi driver announcing that he couldn’t actually drive within city limits and therefore we would have to get another driver to take us to the station.

We arrived at the station with about half an hour to spare and were the last passengers to board a bus ready to leave the station. The drive was desert, desert and more desert for about 3 hours until they dropped us at our hotel in Wadi Musa, the town just outside of the site of Petra, which only recently came into existence with the government’s forced resettlement of the Bedouins living in the caves onsite for generations (though some are clearly still living there)—it is also a convenient location for the restaurants and hotels that service Petra’s many tourists. Wadi Musa = Valley of Moses, and just north of the town is ‘Ain Musa (Moses’ Spring), which is thought to be the spring that Moses created when he struck the ground with his staff and water sprang forth.