Travelling in the Promised Land

Monday was one of Qasid’s days off (they give Mondays and Fridays off) so I went with Rachel, Sonya, Amy and their German student-friend to visit the Dead Sea, only an hour from Amman. The Sea is the lowest and saltiest place on Earth—and it gets a little lower and saltier every year (already 422m below sea level and with a 33% salinity) due to irrigation, evaporation and potash production (I don’t know what that is either). Therefore, in an effort to keep the Dead Sea alive (and not dry up in the next 50 years, as predicted), the Jordanian government is planning the Red to Dead project, aka a canal between the two seas, to to restore water levels and provide hydroelectricity to JO and I & P.

There is one public beach at the Dead Sea, with an entrance fee of about $5, but my group opted for one of the private beaches at the luxury hotels lining the coast, which had a $20 beach access fee that pays for the bonus of being able to swim in a bathing suit without being harrassed. After a long float, a mud-facial for Amy, and a lot of discussion about how long it would take someone to float across to the West Bank (it is surprisingly close, but not being able to submerge yourself would keep you pretty inconspicuous), we ate lunch, enjoying the view, and then everyone else returned to Amman.

Rachel had decided to take the next day off from classes, so after checking the cost of a room at the hotel we were currently in (200 JD!) we opted to visit the town of Madaba, not too far from the sea or from Amman. Using our seasoned traveller’s skills, we managed to get one of the hotels in Madaba to send a taxi to pick us up for less than half the price of what the hotel offered (45 JD!). We read by the swimming pools, waiting for our taxi to come. Our driver was very friendly and ended up making a free stop for us so we could visit the Moses Memorial on Mt Nebo, where Moses looked out over the Promised Land and then died at the age of 120 (though the burial spot/bones are yet to be located).

Madaba is a nice small town, less than an hour from Amman, and is known for its millenia-old Byzantine mosaics. We walked around the city by night/as much of it as we could since most of the streets were being rebuilt with international funding (other things supported by international funding/USAID: local souvenir shops and shawarma shops; why?), and enjoyed a delicious dinner of things I can’t quite remember (stuffed mushrooms, something with tomatoes, lamb in tahini sauce?). When we got back to the hotel, we arranged for a taxi to take us the next day to visit the Desert Castels in the Eastern Desert, and then drop us in Amman. Considering that public transport doesn’t exist to these sites (even travelling between Madaba and the Dead Sea = 2 microbus rides and walking/hitchhiking) it was particularly unusual that the hotel arranged trips for fixed prices to most of the tourist sites in Jordan.

Tuesday we woke up early for a rooftop breakfast at the hotel, then walked the streets looking for various old churches and archaelogical sites that hosted these mosaics. Mosaics are not that exciting to write about, beyond the fact that the word for mosaic in Arabic is fissifissa’ and Rachel and I were discussing the root of the word (usually Arabic words only have 3 roots, this has at least 4) and she said she looked it up once and found instead the verb from which “fissy” is derived, and that hopefully is a joke only the Coussa family will understand.

We were a little late coming back to the hotel to meet our driver (the streets, being ripped up and replaced, did not exactly follow the map we had) but Rachel made it up to him by buying a taster’s plate of local sweets from a shop we passed on the way. How To Make Someone’s Day, for only $3!