Into Thick Air

by Jim Malusa

  Near the coast the stand-alone buttes are replaced with bare black mountains skirted with tremendous fans of gravel. My favorite road sign appears: “Let the engine work.” This means a big descent is ahead. If I were driving I would downshift and spare my brakes. On a bike I upshift and shoot down a long canyon at a glorious 30 to 40 mph. With fingers lightly poised on the brake levers, I bank as deep as I dare through the last sweeping curve to the Gulf of Aqaba.

  First things first: push the bike onto the beach, take off my shoes, and wiggle toes in the sand. Across the slender bay are simple stone mountains with the violet blush of day’s end. The peaks are only fifteen miles east, but it’s a long fifteen miles to Saudi Arabia, home of the most intolerant zealots on the globe.

  Or so I’m told. I’ve never set foot in Saudi Arabia. I’m wondering what it’s really like over there, when over here a young couple saunters up. The bikini beach babe and her headbanger boyfriend size me up with a single look. They must consider me outside the law. Like Eve offering the apple, the woman holds up an unlit joint.

  “Do you want to get high?”

  FREEDOM BEACH is a huddle of reed huts, each with a lightbulb, a flimsy door, and a hasp. Bring your own padlock, or pick one up in the village of Tarabeen. Beach entertainment includes a big steel cage with four monkeys so skinny they appear assembled from strands of roadkill.

  “There are only two reasons to come here,” says a young man from Cairo. “Sex, and to get high.” He’s sitting under a palapa of palm fronds with a bare-chested Israeli.

  You mean there are Egyptian women for . . . rent?

  “Oh, no! Not Egyptian girls, but Israeli girls from the kibbutz. No Egyptian girl like this for long time, the sixties in Cairo. There, along Ali Baba ... you should know these girls!” He whistles and waggles his hand. “With black eyes, like Cleopatra!”

  Oren, the Israeli, finds no offense in the reference to Israeli women. He ignites a Marlboro and asks, “You come on that bike?”

  Yep.

  He’s appalled. I tell him it’s not just a workout—the big hill down to the coast was an eye-watering blast. He counters, “You wouldn’t think so if you were in a taxi and the driver puts it in fifth gear and goes into a power death dive.”

  Oren, who wears the kind of broad headband once favored by kamikaze pilots, is currently digging Guns n’ Roses’ “Appetite for Destruction” on his boom box. Oren also has an appetite for females in halter tops; he guesses at their flavor as they pass. “Israeli. She, French. There, German.” It’s educational, and he plans on staying “till the money runs out.”

  The money goes to the Bedouin. Although legal title is tenuous, they own Freedom Beach as well as Goldenfish and Moonland—the “touristic camps.” The Bedouin were quick to realize that tending to a certain species of tourist isn’t so different from tending goats. You simply herd them to a place with water and food and they take care of themselves, kicking up their heels and foraging for sex.

  Farther north along the coast is a camp called Basata. A placid sanctuary compared to the hormonal riptide of Freedom Beach, it’s run by an ex-engineer from Cairo with a pharaoh’s goatee and an elegant robe. His name is Sherif and he’s installed an ethic as radical as Freedom Beach’s, except here there are organic veggies and recycling bins and a folk guitarist strumming “Get Back.”

  Like most of the patrons, I’ve brought my own Heineken. A barefoot man with a pigtail smiles an invitation to sit and relax beside an absurdly low table. An artist from Tel Aviv, Gershom respectfully inquires of my journey. I confess that I’m a pedaling internet journalist. A German woman sitting cross-legged wants to know more, for pragmatic reasons: she wants to be a travel writer. “But what do you write about?”

  Everything. Rocks, people, birds, history.

  “For example? How about you show me one story on your computer?”

  I dig the laptop out of my bike bag and let her read the story of stumbling upon Midaq Alley. She giggles a couple of times, then looks up to say, “That’s it? It is amusing, but I like to read for information.”

  This is information—it’s about Cairo.

  “People want to read this? Why do you get paid to do this?”

  And I can’t help but think: An Egyptian wouldn’t have said that. An Egyptian would have kindly lied—because they’re sweethearts.

  This simple sentiment rings true the next day when I pass a road sign near the international frontier. It’s just a piece of sheet metal with hand-painted letters in Arabic and English. Yet that someone bothered to write “Good-bye” in flowery script . . . well, that makes this farewell sing. I forget Egypt’s suicide taxis and hair-pulling bureaucracy. I won’t miss the pyramids of the dead, but I am fond of the living tea-happy Egyptians.

  Excluding the diabolical customs people. Which reminds me: Israel is dead ahead, and it’s time to repack my bicycle bags.

  THE ISRAELI CUSTOMS WOMAN wears a sharply creased blue uniform. Dark military eyes move between my passport photo and my face, once, twice.

  I just cut my hair, I explain. It’s me.

  “Put everything through the machine.”

  The X-ray machine. I put everything through. “Those,” she says, pointing to the water bottles on the bike. I put them through. When the bike bags go in she stares at the monitor and mutters something in Hebrew, then reverses the conveyor belt to take a second look.

  “Open these bags.” I open the most innocent of my four bags. “What’s this?” A flashlight. “What’s this?” A lantern. “What’s this?” Kerosene for the lantern.

  She does not smile. She calls over a security expert and the questions resume, except this woman wipes every piece of my gear with what look like cosmetic pads. Dozens of them. They must be the same pads used in airports for detecting explosives. Still, I can’t resist asking what they are.

  No answer.

  Are they secret pads?

  “Yes, they are secret pads.”

  The Israelis are very clever. They grow tomatoes in the desert on drip irrigation using minuscule amounts of water. They breed featherless chickens that put on tasty extra weight to avoid shivering. Surely they will find my satellite phone, toot on large whistles, and take me away.

  In bag number three she finds the computer and wipes it with a pad. Does not say a word. The only bag left holds the phone, which I’ve packed in a tangle of unhappy socks and underwear, hoping, hoping. She takes one look at the mess and says, “OK—You can go. Welcome to Elat.”

  I make a mental note: Don’t wash my socks before Jordan.

  Which is only ten miles away. Israel wedges down to its southernmost point at Elat. Important not only as a port on the Red Sea’s Gulf of Aqaba, Elat is also Israel’s playground, a resort city spiked with construction cranes. Passover is coming, and the place is already jammed. The people have come to tour the rustic stockade of the “Texas Ranch,” to throw money at the floating twenty-four-hour casino, and to see what’s billed as the “colorful laser show at the ostrich farm, telling you the story of the period between the creation of the world and the Ten Commandments. The public takes part in the festivities of the sons of Israel as the chosen people.”

  After my stint in crumbling Egypt, clean and bright Elat has me feeling like a kid in Disneyland. The buildings are the same concrete cubes as in Cairo, but in Elat they finish construction before they move in. The streets are swept and the traffic lights work and the image of a Visa credit card marks the storefronts of the chosen. But with everyone busy cleaning and working and thinking up extra-creative tourist attractions, there’s not much loafing among the residents. I didn’t realize how much I like being invited to sit for a puff on a water pipe until I traded Egypt for Elat.

  I try my luck with the leisure crowd at the beach, but am driven back by monster loudspeakers sending out disco shock waves. Wandering the streets in search of something akin to Cairo’s blacksmiths and tea shops, I find stores with stuff like gold electroplated eagles with fake
diamond eyes—the very definition of “disposable income.” After four hours Elat feels like the United States with a lot of falafel joints and Israeli flags. There’s surely more to the city, but tomorrow begins a four-day Arab holiday. The borders will close. I’ve got to get out of Elat or I’ll end up at the “Dancing with Dolphins” show.

  The border is a bulldozed berm topped with barbed wire. The Israelis let me leave more easily than they let me enter, but just as I’m about to ride to the Jordanian side a young man in a suit jogs up and says, “Sir! Sorry, but you cannot bring a bicycle to Jordan.”

  Really?

  “It is new law: No bicycles between Israel and Jordan.”

  Could this be true? But he’s a friendly civilian, not the Jordanian customs official. I’ ll find the truth soon enough.

  There’s only one car at the Jordanian border, and its driver is yelling in English at the customs man, “What is it you want? Is it this?” He waves some money, and the Jordanian says, “This is not the problem. The problem is your car.”

  I roll up on my problem bike. The border agents say “Welcome to Jordan!” and enthusiastically shake my hand. “How far on bicycle?”

  Cairo, I say.

  “Ooo-wee! You have visa?”

  I sure do. Look: from the Jordanian embassy in America. They’re impressed. A quick stamp in the passport and a slap on the back and “No problem! Enjoy Jordan!”

  I pedal away like a bicycle zombie. Can it be so easy? Of course. Come to think of it, I’m usually never searched at borders. The innocuous bicycle traveler. I’m afraid to look back, but I do. Nobody coming. I pedal faster. One mile, two, then three, uphill and into the wind. Almost to the city of Aqaba when a car comes up behind me, slows, then begins honking.

  It’s two soldiers. “Sorry. Problem. You must go back to border.”

  Back we go. The apologetic soldiers usher me into the office of the top dog, a trim mustachioed officer. “I am sorry,” he says, “but there is problem. You cannot bring a bicycle into Jordan.”

  I smile and explain that I am a journalist with special permission not only from the Jordanian embassy but also from Mr. Salim Ayoub of the Jordanian Ministry of Information. I pull out my Discovery Channel Online press pass, my Egyptian press pass, and my bank guarantee addressed to Jordanian Customs, a document I never understood but sure looks good.

  It seems like Cairo airport customs again, but I’m wrong. The head of customs doesn’t like enforcing a law prohibiting bicyclists from crossing the border. He tries to call Mr. Salim Ayoub, but apparently he’s left for the day.

  Two hours pass. He keeps trying to reach Salim, and between calls we make small talk on family and home and my pregnant wife. He flips through my passport, which the Egyptians stamped with evidence of the still-unmentioned secret agent satellite phone. Something catches his eye, and I catch my breath as his finger comes down on a page.

  “I see that our birthdays are almost the same, only six days apart.”

  It’s true, and the coincidence binds us in a peculiar way. Forty years earlier we were squalling infants, separated by fate and 8,000 miles until this day on the border of Israel and Jordan.

  He opens a window. The sun is going down, the granite mountains flaring orange. He paces a circle around his desk, sits and scribbles down a phone number. “I think tonight you go to Aqaba. Tomorrow you call Mr. Ayoub and tell him to please call me at this number with the permission for the bicycle. Please enjoy Jordan.”

  I pedal away, and an hour later I’m enjoying Jordan with a gigantic bottle of Amstel beer in the lounge of the Aqaba Hotel. For company there are jolly Russians on holiday and a feline Jordanian in black satin and glittering bangles crooning the Egyptian hit “Habibi, Habibi.” The rhythm stirs nocturnal imaginings, but they don’t last. Not tonight. One beer and I’m ready to tip into the sweetest dreams, because I’ve cleared the last border between me and the Dead Sea.

  IN THE MORNING I fail to reach Mr. Ayoub of the Ministry of Information. Of course: it’s the four-day holiday. After convincing myself that all I must do is avoid the border crossings, I ride north from Aqaba. The road leaves the sea behind as it climbs 3,000 feet through valleys of blond sands washed out of the granite mountains. The air lightens with every mile from the sea, and the sands darken as the granite knobs are replaced with sandstone the color of yellow and red potatoes.

  Bedouin camps are tucked into canyons, but for fifty miles there are no towns until the valley of Wadi Rum. It’s a perpendicular place. To either side of a mile-wide avenue of pink sand are buttes up to 2,000 feet high, crowned by pale domes of sandstone swirled like cinnamon buns. The valley is treeless. There are only stiff shrubs armed with anti-goat spines.

  The village of Rum is a scatter of tents and concrete-block homes with fluttering laundry, cannibalized cars under sprays of purple bougainvillea, and parked camels with their snouts in feed bags. A stroll through the streets earns me the usual lemming-rush of children, dirty barefoot goobers with toy cap guns. When a shoot-out erupts, I take cover in the only store in town, among the cans of condensed milk and motor oil. There are tea glasses, too, made in Russia, and ChocoLazer cookies. All the essentials, including a television tuned to a fat lady making a disastrous run down a playground slide: America’s Funniest Home Videos. I hope nobody asks where I’m from.

  They do, of course. Wadi Rum reminds me of my home, I say. The clerk replies, “Yes, we know there place Arizona like Wadi Rum. We see on television, with cowboy.”

  They know. With televisions snatching unseen signals and turning them into music videos and Marlboro men, it’s no wonder none of the locals at the rest house are surprised when I dig my mobile communications studio out of my bike panniers and prepare to send a dispatch with my phone. They were expecting it all along. The only person attracted to my gear is a friendly German with a lumpy rucksack.

  “It is a good feeling, no, to have the satellite phone for emergencies?”

  He imagines that I’m having a wonderful electronic time. I aim the phone antenna out the window, and the invisible data surges over the southern horizon, possibly bothering a vulture or two, and further stimulating the German.

  “You will probably carry it on all trips now, no?”

  No, I admit—it’s not a good feeling. And, no, I won’t bring it along unless it’s my job.

  If he hadn’t been summoned to his tour bus, I would’ve explained. Travel is a kind of running away from home, and with a phone on my bike I never completely cut free. A lifeline is also a leash. Even when turned off, the presence of the phone blunts the tingle of self-reliance—the feeling that if I screw up badly enough, the show is over.

  That night I camp just outside town at the toe of a cliff, a black wall whose height is impossible to gauge. I’m in my sack, tucked behind a boulder, hiding from the night wind whistling through my bicycle spokes. The flame of my little lantern flickers in the breeze, and the voice of a village dog echoes off the cliff—but the closer it gets, the less sure I am it’s a dog. Maybe it sounds like a dog but is really a bone-crunching hyena, the slouching prince of poor posture and worse dental hygiene.

  But the creature is also afraid of me. It keeps its distance, and I find bedtime solace in a passage from Burton Bernstein’s book Sinai that I jotted in my notebook before leaving home.

  A traveler who slept in the desert asked a nomad if there were snakes he should worry about. The reply: Don’t worry. If God sends snakes, he sends snakes. You can’t go to sleep every night and worry about snakes. There are certainly snakes in the desert, but one must sleep. God willing.

  The little anecdote is a nice sleeping pill. When the sun comes blazing over the cliffs in the morning, I sit up and can hardly believe that I fretted in the night. On my way over to the rest house, the only carnivore I see is a limping pint-sized goat-hound.

  The faint strains of a string quartet drift from the rest house sound system. While I breakfast on eggs and flatbread, the tour-bus drivers go
ssip and toss back olives, stab at slabs of white cheese, and wipe yogurt from their thick mustaches. Across the valley is a butte the size of Australia’s Big Red Rock, Uluru. I consult my photocopied pages from Walks and Scrambles in Wadi Rum and discover that it’s possible to hike not over but through the butte via a flood-scoured passage to the other side. The canyon is not visible from my vantage, and that only enhances its allure.

  The obvious way across the valley is by sand taxi: the camel. Outside the rest house a crew-cut kid in Streak tennies urges me to choose his mount. “Hello! Special price!” No thanks, I’ll go with the respectable adult over there, the quiet one in the robe. He names a price. I accept, and mount a deflated sack of fur that suddenly groans and slobbers and rises like a zeppelin until it seems I’m forty feet off the ground. It’s a big camel, with feet like a one-ton duck’s. I figure the owner will climb aboard his personal ride and we’ll set off together. Instead he hands the reins to the crew-cut kid and off we go. The kid walks while I ride.

  I don’t object. All I really want is to sit atop the chug-a-lug champion of the world. A single thirsty camel can shame an entire fraternity house, sucking down the equivalent of 120 twelve-ounce bottles in twelve minutes. Once topped off, the camel is a water miser. Within that long nose are damp and thankfully unseen baffles of tissue that keep its lungs humid, yet allow precious little moisture to escape through its nostrils.

  As for the fur coat, the tireless physiologist Knut Schimdt-Nielsen once spent an entire day shaving a camel. After that, it lost 50 percent more water. The naked camel probably lost 100 percent of its friends as well, but Schmidt-Nielsen had proven his thesis: like a Bedouin’s robe, the fur keeps the sun off the skin. And when the camel inevitably heats up in the land of little shade, it needn’t break a sweat, because its body temperature fluctuates up to 10 degrees daily, a swing that would drop a human in his feverish tracks.