The Road to Zagora

by Richard Collins

  We made an afternoon trip out by bus from Madaba to Mount Nebo: the place where Moses saw the Promised Land. It didn’t look very promising to us – just desert and scrub and a few places fertile enough to grow olives. And plastic bags blowing on the wind. Or, as Flic wrote: nothing much to see, stones, lizards, thorny bushes, ants. The sound of hundreds of goat bells tinkling.

  Jordan is not densely populated and there is not necessarily public transport to the places you want to go; after all most of it is desert or scrubby semi-desert. And so we travelled by taxi to our next destination, the Dead Sea, and it wasn’t that cheap. I reminded Flic that we shouldn’t worry about the expense too much because with my illness getting worse this would be our last special adventure together. I had used this argument from time to time in many different countries on several continents during the previous half-a-dozen years. It always seemed to work.

  At the Dead Sea we stayed in one of a number of stone chalets by the entrance to Wadi Mujib nature reserve. The Wadi was a gorge, very narrow in some places and therefore dangerous in the season in which there was a chance of heavy rain. We stood in the intense heat under a desert sun and read a sign telling us that the reserve was closed due to the possibility of flooding. This, you might say, was a low point, for we were 1,200 and something feet below sea level and at the lowest place on earth. And it was not particularly beautiful.

  Of course we bathed in the sticky water of the so-called sea. I say bathed because our bodies tended to float so high that our arms and legs couldn’t make enough contact with the water for us to swim. We laughed and paddled ourselves about with our hands like awkward boats. When we got out we found ourselves set upon by flies, the only thing that lives around there. Yes, the sea really is dead: no fish and no fishing boats and no villages lining its shores. No waves either, just the glossy viscous blue water stretching into the hazy distance. Desert all around. And Israel just visible on the far shore.

  We stayed only one night at Wadi Mujib but we spent the evening in good company. We met a couple of about our age who were travelling around having visited their daughter who worked in Hebron, in the Occupied Territories. Let’s call them Elena and Stan. And they picked up a big genial man with a distinguished accent who might have been called Tom. Elena loved travelling and Stan was amiable enough to tag along. She was English in every discernible way apart from that of her nationality, which she informed us was Dutch. Stan was laid back with something of the old hippy about him; a nice guy. We spent the evening with them and talked about all sorts of things, including, of course, Israel. Elena summed up the situation thus: Israelis are evil and Palestinians are stupid. She was a kind hearted woman but not frightened of forming an opinion. We later found out that she was Jewish herself, and had lost family members of the older generation in the Nazi death camps. I remember Elena was keen to make a list, some sort of A to Z of foreign places which they had visited. I think it may have stuck in my mind.

  Our plan was that after leaving Wadi Mujib we should travel to the north of Jordan and then into Israel to spend a few days in Jerusalem. Then we would go south and visit the Red Sea coast of Egypt, cross the water by ferry to Aqaba and travel up through Jordan again. An anti-clockwise loop. And so it was that we accepted a lift from Elena and Stan and went with them and Tom by car the next day to Jerash, in the north of Jordan.

  Jerash was another Walton on Thames or, as it was larger than Madaba, let’s say a Swindon of the Middle East. A commonplace town in a landscape of rolling hills covered by fig trees, like a humdrum version of Tuscany. Oh dear, not the beauty or fascination of the other places we had visited in recent years. Why were we here? Well, Jerash had some Roman ruins and we wanted to see them.

  At first we were underwhelmed, you might say. A few old columns amid the dust and scrub, a hippodrome, where terraced seating surrounded an arena where horse racing once took place. We walked on. A ruined temple, more columns, taller this time, lining a paved street. Flic noticed the ruts made in the limestone paving slabs by the passage of chariots. And so the place came a little alive for us and as we went further the size of the site gradually became apparent. We found a beautifully preserved Roman theatre. Then two temples with massive columns. And more. This wasn’t a few ruins but a whole town, and a magnificent one, a place you could wander around in for some hours. As such it gave us a taste of the grandeur of past civilisations. Something we were to experience a few times in this part of the world.

  At home in between our big journeys I tended to do some research on the internet after waking at five in the morning and not feeling comfortable enough to get back to sleep. The issue of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and their treatment of the Palestinians couldn’t be avoided. I tried to see both sides of the situation but found myself increasingly sympathising with the Palestinians. We wouldn’t visit much of Israel, I thought, only the contested city of Jerusalem, where we would stay in a Palestinian owned hotel.

  And I worried about border crossings. I read stories of people being detained by Israeli security personnel for many hours, even overnight. Airport security had always been a problem for me as it was very difficult for me to get things in and out of bags or take my belt or shoes off without help. I tended to get panicky and seize up and then get waved through sympathetically. Sympathy, however, was apparently not a strong point at Israeli border checks. And politeness could often be in very short supply. I was particularly worried about being separated from my medication. I couldn’t face going over the border at the Sheikh Hussein crossing, as it is known to Jordanians. And so we put off visiting Israel for a while, abandoned our anti-clockwise route and headed south to the much visited historical site of Petra.

  I said a few words about our bus ride to Petra in chapter five. Here’s Flic’s version: on the bus to Petra the Koran is playing on the speakers. It’s interminable but not everyone is listening. The man in front of me has the red and white Jordanian head-dress and black rope. A woman all in black has gold embroidered wrist cuffs and gold sequins by her eyes. The Koran wails on. It’s Friday. In the desert are flocks of sheep and Bedouins walking slowly in front. At 12.45 the bus stops by a mosque and most of the men get off. A woman turns to us and says they are praying, it is good.

  In Wadi Musa, the town that serves the needs of visitors to the archaeological site, we found a hotel shabby enough for our taste, or I might say for our pocket as everything was more expensive here than in other places we had visited over the years. We looked through the door and could see a young man praying. It felt wrong to disturb him and we started to walk away but he came out and welcomed us into the hotel. We were soon on the roof looking out over the town.

  Wadi Musa is a likeable new town. Why likeable? I don’t know, maybe because of its setting, in a basin shaped piece of land on the side of a hill overlooking the steep rocky outcrops around Petra. There is some beauty in that red-stone, red-dirt, high landscape. And the town itself has a nice ordinary bustle to it. Right below our hotel was a big mosque with the call to prayer (seriously cacophonous in this town) sounding out and people coming and going, and meeting and greeting, on the steps outside.

  We got up at 5.45 the next morning to be the first visitors to the ruins. We were badly scammed by taking the free donkey rides down to the site and having an expensive tip extracted from us on arrival. Never mind. Then we walked down the siq, a narrow gorge that opened out after a few hundred yards and gave us the view of the treasury, a 150 foot tall facade of pillars and doorways carved out of the soft sandstone cliff. It was the first of a number of handsome buildings, or at least fronts of buildings, that were spread about over hundreds of acres of rock desert. The biggest of them, the so called monastery, had a doorway the height of an ordinary house. It was a spectacular place with, as the day went on, a spectacular number of tourist visitors.

  We went back the next day and spent nine hours exploring. We started by trying an alternative route into the site down a different siq. We were
alone there and it became impassable and dangerous enough for us to turn back. So we entered Petra the usual way and went through the shanty town of cafés and trinket shops in the busiest area. I was appalled that such a place should be spoilt in such a way. The Jordanian government promote Petra as an archaeological wonder, which it is, charge a fortune for entry, fair enough, but then allow the local Bedouin to turn it into scruffy shopping mall. I thought some more and changed my mind. The Bedouin have lived here for generations, making use of the tombs carved into the rocks to shelter their families and their livestock. And then in more recent times they have benefitted from tourism, earning some cash and improving their standard of living in an environment largely devoid of opportunities. The Bedouin are not, by the way, proud and noble tribes-people ranging over a harsh desert landscape on camel back but, from our experience, ordinary enough folk trying get by. And in Petra they deal out a great deal of humour along with the hassle.

  We wandered off away from our fellow tourists fairly quickly and were in a less visited part of the site when a couple of Bedouin children ran down to invite us to visit their family for tea. This happened to us later in other places and seems to be one part genuine hospitality and one part enterprise. We accepted and went up to their home. They lived in a big square cave-like tomb carved into the cliff decorated inside with plastic flowers and rugs and outside with more rugs, cushions and plastic water butts. We met the children’s father, Aaron, a short handsome man with a cheeky smile and enough vanity to enjoy posing with his children for a photo. He wore ordinary clothes but with a cloth around his head. He told us that he spoke Arabic and a language called tourist which seemed to be mainly English.

  Aaron made us some mint tea and told us a little more about himself. He had two wives, twelve children, and a pick-up truck as well as a Nabataean tomb with a view dating back perhaps 2,000 years for his accommodation. He looked older than his thirty-three years but I put that down to the hot sun and the dry desert air. He and his family (that is to say the two girls, a lad wearing an Arsenal FC baseball cap, and one wife that were present) were friendly, relaxed and cheerful.

  We asked Aaron to show us to the path that led up the hill behind us and ended up engaging him as a guide for the afternoon. We walked for a couple of hours up to a wild flat hilltop with a stupendous view. The land was rock desert: sandstone carved by wind and occasional rain into ridges and plateaus deeply cut with steep-sided and sheer-sided gorges. The rock was striped with red, yellow, ochre and black. There were a few spiny shrubs dotted about and narrow ribbons of green in the wadi bottoms. We could see the broad valley with the ruins of Petra and beyond it the dirty whites and greys of the town. Above us the sky was patched with clouds that gave intermittent relief from the sun. We sat and Aaron talked a little of the kindness of the late King Hussein towards the Bedouin people and the mixed feelings about the new village that had been built for them.

  Our long day got longer as Aaron took us down and some distance along a wadi. He wanted to show us something very special and very important to him. We saw oleanders and tamarisks and even a few olive and lemon trees growing. We passed by a herd of black goats wearing bells on collars around their necks. We got more and more tired but he wanted us to go on. Eventually, after an hour’s hike, we had reached our destination. Aaron asked us to stop at a point on the path a little above the valley floor. He indicated that we should listen carefully. From below us came the sound of trickling water. He pointed to a gap in the scrubby bushes and there it was, a tiny stream flowing between the rocks. I don’t know, perhaps we tried to give the impression that it was worth walking all that way. We didn’t explain that we came from a country where the sight of water was not a miraculous thing. I’m not sure that he would have understood.

  From Petra we went on southwards to the Dana Nature Reserve. We stayed in the old Ottoman village above the reserve and hiked down the valley. The village was being reconstructed as a small tourist destination and lacked heart and soul. The valley was surprisingly free of wildlife experience. But we did visit a Bedouin family at the bottom of the valley. They seemed as poor as any people we had met in the poorest parts of India or Tanzania with very few possessions and a very rough physical environment. Their tents were patched together from goat hair blankets and fertiliser sacks but were very big inside with much more space for children to run around than you would get in a council house or a Welsh cottage. Snotty nosed children did come and go along with various animals including some goats, a hen with her chicks and a rabbit. Some days I can walk and I can lie down with my eyes closed but other things, sitting on the floor of a Bedouin tent waiting for tea to be made over a fire of sticks for example, I find very difficult. So we didn’t stay long. We saw more than one old person around the encampment who looked very poor, just skin and bones and rags, as Flic described them.

  From Dana we went on to Aqaba. On the way there we had to change buses in an ordinary desert town called Ma-an where we seemed to be the only foreigners. I was sitting on an old sofa outside a café in the bus station when Flic decided to take a photo of me. There were three local men in various combinations of Western and traditional clothing seated at tables in front of the café who would inevitably be in the picture too. It seemed polite to ask if they minded and Flic gesticulated and pointed at me and at them. They misunderstood and without hesitation jumped up and joined me on the sofa. One put his arm around my shoulders and they all beamed smiles at the camera. And that’s the way people are in Jordan. For a brief moment they might look unapproachable but they are actually very friendly and full of good humour. They pride themselves on their hospitality.

  We stayed in the Bedouin Moon Hostel on South Beach outside Aqaba and snorkelled a little over some dead coral and looked at the tropical fish. We looked out across the Red Sea to Egypt and to the tiny stretch of coast belonging to Israel at Eilat. We noticed that Jordan is so crime-free that locals left two laptops lying around in the bar all night while the doors weren’t locked. And then we moved on. We wanted to go to Jerusalem.

  I had been to Israel something like thirty years before and worked as a volunteer on a kibbutz. When I told people about this I always explained, but I didn’t know anything of the politics then. Now I did know. I understood how the state of Israel came into being in 1948 after one third of the world’s Jewish population had been quietly murdered by the Nazis. I also understood that in 1948 700,000 Palestinians fled for their lives and lost their homes and land to remain refugees ever since. I had read of the brutalities of the IDF, the Israeli Defence Force, in the West Bank and Gaza and of the ongoing injustice suffered by the Palestinian people. We wanted to go to Jerusalem and that city, for the time being, was entirely in Israeli hands. We would cross the border at Eilat and travel the six hours or so to Jerusalem by bus. I remember thinking but the bus will be full of Israelis. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

  The first words I heard in Israel were don’t worry, bout a thing, cause every little thing, gonna be alright. They were playing Bob Marley in the customs building. And the young guy on security had long hair and wore trainers on his feet as well as a machine gun hanging casually from his shoulder. It felt like a young country. We showed our passports and were asked to wait. Then I was called into an office to be questioned. The woman behind the desk looked me in the eye all the time as she spoke. I explained why we were travelling and waited for her to ask if we would go into the Palestinian Territories. I knew that I must answer no, when, in truth, the answer was maybe. She didn’t ask. She was amazed and a little thrown by our very small rucksacks. She asked if I had been to Israel before. Yes, in 1978, I think. For how long? Four months. Four months? What were you doing all that time? I worked on a kibbutz. I was relaxed and vague. She held eye contact. And then she smiled and handed me my passport. Easy.

  We caught a taxi into Eilat and went into the bus station. There was a wait of five hours for the first bus to Jerusalem but only one hour for the bus to Tel Aviv.
We bought tickets to Tel Aviv. To pass the time we walked down to the posh hotels and restaurants at the water’s edge and then came back to the bus station. It was there, in the waiting room, in the sensitive border town of a country on constant alert to the terrorist threat, that I reached into my bag and took out a bottle of fizzy drink. Flic describes what happened next: we have put fanta in a water bottle and as Richard opens it, it explodes with a loud bang and the top flies off. A few people laugh. No-one arrests him. I remember a nice older couple sitting opposite us smiling sympathetically.

  The bus to Tel Aviv was full of Israelis and many of them were soldiers. Of course they were just young guys doing what they had to do. They didn’t look so very different from our sons, Kit and Peter. We travelled up the Jordan Valley and could see, through the haze, the great escarpment in Jordan where we had looked westward at sunset from the village of Dana. We were passing through the same barren desert of the rift valley that we had seen around the Dead Sea and on our way down to Aqaba. We had really seen more than enough of it by now. But there was a difference on this side of the valley. From time to time we would pass large areas of intensive agriculture: acres of greenhouses, date palm plantations, and sometimes groves of lemon trees. And, as we drove towards the Mediterranean coast and got closer to Tel Aviv, the sky became cloudy and the land beneath it became much greener. It felt like a relief.

  I had made a mental note of a place to stay in Tel Aviv, or at least in the old port of Jaffa, now a suburb of the city. So when we arrived at the bus station we asked how to get to Jaffa and got on a local bus that would pass close enough. Someone told us where to get off and we walked down some ordinarily unpleasant city streets towards the sea. After half a mile or so the buildings began to look older and more characterful and the sky looked different, as it often does as you get close to the sea. This felt right but it was disturbing that we were walking up hill. And then we came out on a promenade on top of a low cliff.