The Dead Sea is truly remarkable. Everything you have heard about being able to read the newspaper whilst effortlessly floating on the surface is true, and it is practically impossible to sink! But fair dinkum, dunk your head underwater and you’ll know all about it. Then again, when was I ever one to listen to the sound advice of others, especially when they tell you that you are advised to swim only on your back and not to submerge your head or dive into the water? You might not be able to sink but people certainly do still drown.
I’d made it to Amman, covering the 180km or so distance in good time, arriving just after sunset. Along the way I had the pleasure of seeing absolutely f*ck all. The desert sprawled in both directions, occasionally broken up by a small ridge of hills or some mountains, but largely it was just endless rust coloured sand. Occasionally this was broken up by black sand. The weather once again went a bit eerie on me and as I cycled along I couldn’t avoid being slightly paranoid about the possibility another sand storm would be heading over the hills to get me. As it was, there was no sandstorm, but something else I saw at first scared the bejeezers out of me. Glancing off to my right at one point I saw a twister making its way across the desert in my general direction! The whirlwind was sucking up the dry sand and the dusty, red funnel was churning itself across the desert, then crossed the road in front of me and kept on heading off to the west.
They weren’t the largest twisters but certainly big enough to cause me to proceed with caution. They didn’t fall from the sky – there were no clouds – so I can only assume that this is some kind of phenomenon local to this area. I stopped several times on the highway to wait for one to pass – all in all I noticed probably around two dozen of them, and at one point there were four at once. After about an hour of dodging them, I suspected that the dust probably made them look worse than they were, and I was right. One of them passed over a herd of grazing sheep, and besides a few extra ‘baaas’ no sheep went flying. Still, not something you see every day!
When I pulled into Amman just after dark, I spent about an hour trying to find my hotel and had to stop several people to ask for directions. Everyone was most helpful, except the last bloke who didn’t realise that the hotel I was looking for was in the building right above his shop. (I think he needs to get out more!) The city was a maze of winding streets, elevated highways and major roads winding on the valley floors with the hillsides stepped with modular buildings rising high above. Without a useful GPS map it was a bit of a nightmare to find anything, especially with all the street signs in Arabic!
Downtown Amman was a bustling market and commercial district and I cycled past the illuminated Roman amphitheatre on the way through. This is probably the only real tourist attraction that the city boasts as to be honest it is quite modern. It was only recently (20th century) that the city was named the new capital city of Jordan, and even 50 years ago it was still considered only a relatively small town. Hence much of the development has been in recent years and the city is a great example of a typically modern Middle Eastern city. It is also very westernised, and for the first time since entering this region I was once again faced with the familiar sights of McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut and all the usual international brands opening stores in the new malls popping up here and there. The difference with the people of Jordan was noticeable also. They were just as friendly as the Syrians, but there was definitely a higher percentage of English speakers and their way of life was more aligned with western culture, even if they were still Islamic or Arabic or whatever.
The Abbasi Palace Hotel that I bunked down in was one of the nicer budget hotels I’d stayed in recently. It was only about AUD $12 per night and I even scored a three bed room all to myself. Bessie was quite safe propped up against the reception desk under the 24hour watchful eye of the helpful staff, leaving me free to wander around the town and take up the option of a day trip. And so on my second day in Jordan, I booked onto a tour with several other guys from the same hotel. Six of us jumped into two cars (one had to be jump started before we even began!) and headed out to explore the surrounding countryside and take a little salty swim. We were right in the heart of the holy land of ancient Christianity and I hadn’t realised just how close I was to a lot of the places you read about in the Bible and such. In a way it was a shame that I was going to find it a bit difficult to make time for a few days in Israel since Jerusalem and Tel Aviv sounded like amazing destinations. But I would have to settle for what I could see from the Jordanian side of the border, which was quite a lot it turned out.
First up was a visit to an old church in a place called Madaba. The site is very significant because it contains an ancient stone mosaic floor in the design of a map of the holy land. It’s the oldest mosaic map known to exist, and actually one of the oldest and most useful maps that scholars and archaeologists have been able to make use of for centuries. The map covers nearly half the surface of the church floor. Unfortunately it’s incomplete due to damage from centuries of wear and tear, including surviving several large earthquakes in the region. Apparently the ruins of several old monasteries and other towns have been discovered due to their being identified from this mosaic, such is its accuracy. The Dead Sea was clearly a lot bigger back then too, but just as salty since the mosaic goes into detail showing the fish swimming back upstream once they reach the Dead Sea (they couldn’t stand the salinity). It also shows animals such as deer, indicating that once there was still a lot of forest in what is now just a huge desert. Anyway we had a nice lecture about it from a guide who seemed to know a lot about the map and other things surrounding the history of the local area.
Next up, the bus took us to a mosaic factory where we were shown how they make the wonderful designs. Mosaics are a bit of a local phenomenon, and apparently Jordan produces some of the best mosaic artworks in the world today, and has been for centuries. There are some common designs and themes (such as the tree of life where eve stole the apple) and as well, plenty of custom artworks had been commissioned. The girls working there were all with disabilities so the place was as much a factory as it was a place looking after these women, providing secure, skilled employment. The mosaic stones were different colours, being sourced from various rock quarries all over the country. The works themselves generally took weeks and months to produce, relative to size of course. At the end of the tour, we had a good look through a shop (yes, once again the tour organisers shamelessly tried to make a buck out of all of us but forcing us to exit the factory through a giant warehouse of expensive mosaics). But still, it was interesting and had I actually had a fair bit of money, I might have bought one.
From here we took the bus up to the top of Mount Sinai. Racking my brain, recalling memories from scripture and Sunday school all those years ago, I finally realised that we were supposedly standing on top of the mountain where Moses received the Ten Commandments from God. He’s also allegedly buries up here somewhere, though the exact location is a little unknown. The view from the top was pretty spectacular, looking over towards the holy land. You could see right across to Israel, and nearly all the way to Jerusalem, and the Dead Sea was just visible to the south – the lowest point on the surface of the earth! Some of us got all excited when we noticed a column of smoke, but it was not the burning bush (or talking tree of Monty Python fame) but just a local burning off rubbish. Boo to that. We spent about half an hour up here but to be honest, apart from the view there wasn’t a lot more to see. The whole mountain is currently undergoing some construction work while they build or renovate some temple dedicated to Moses. The museum, small as it is, was somewhat interesting.
For our last stop of the day, we headed down a steep, winding road which cut through the desert sands, past lots of camels and Bedouin nomad tent camps, towards the Dead Sea. Separating Jordan and Israel, the sea soon appeared in the distance and after about a half hour drive, we reached our swimming destination. It’s not cheap to swim in the Dead Sea – once again, the shoreline is a mass of private beaches and expensive hotels. The only ‘public’ beach is still a complex that you have to pay to enter. It was the most expensive swim of my life at 15 JD to enter (about AUD $25!) but then, as you soon discover, when one goes swimming in the Dead Sea, it’s very handy to have a fresh water swimming pool and excellent shower and change room facilities to rinse off in afterwards!
You can tell that the Dead Sea is shrinking. I read somewhere that the current evaporation rate is nearly one metre every year – quite high! Despite dire predictions that the Dead Sea will shortly evaporate itself out of existence, we are informed by our guide that this is probably not going to happen. As the surface area of the sea decreases and (as a result) the salinity increases, eventually the rate of evaporation will slow down and probably stop. But there will not be much of the sea left by then. It’s unfortunate that the phenomenon that gives the Dead Sea its unique properties, will eventually also cause its demise. The Jordan River flows into the Dead Sea but the rate of flow is not high enough to replenish the water that is evaporated. Both the nations of Jordan and Israel lie responsible – they take so much water out of the river that by the time it reaches the Dead Sea it’s reduced to barely a trickle. Adding to the woes of the Dead Sea, apparently it’s located above the fault line of two tectonic plates that are gradually pulling apart. So it’s not enough that its evaporating, it’s also sinking as well – at a rate of about one foot every year! The solution of course, is to dig a canal from the Red Sea to replenish the water, but that’s unfortunately a long way off because all the nations involved can’t agree with each other. And so the Dead Sea will keep on shrinking and sinking for many years yet, and the hotels around the shores will continue to have to re-landscape their back yards as the water shrinks further and further back!
The swimming was a great deal of fun I have to admit. But it’s more the novelty factor than anything else that makes it fun. As a place to go for a regular swim I could hardly recommend it. As soon as you put your feet in the water, you’ll immediately know about any cuts and grazes that you’ve opened up over the last few days. The salt gets into any open wound and stings like hell! When you finally feel brave enough to fully submerge, the floating sensation is unbelievable. You really can read the newspaper and probably do a whole bunch of other things (use a laptop, read a book, drink a beer) with relative ease! Rolling over is probably the only real danger – those who can’t swim well risk drowning themselves – and they recommend swimming only on your back. This is also because once you get the salt in your eyes, it’s game over. Four of us were dumb enough to break the ‘guidelines’ and duck our heads under water. Thankfully none of us opened our eyes, but even still the salt got in and none of us could see for a few minutes whilst we futilely tried to wipe the salt away, only to realise that there was more salt on our skin and we were just rubbing it in essentially. The only solution was for a fresh-water shower. Bloody hell it was salty water! No wonder nothing can live in the water, hence its name. Still, I’m glad to have done it for the experience, that’s for sure!
Back in Amman for the night, I went out for some dinner at a place called the Cairo Restaurant. They served up awesome hommus dip with unlimited leb bread, and the mixed grill and the pasta was cheap and beauwdiful. After this I wandered back around the downtown market area sorting a few things out. I found a helpful young kid with a sewing machine who fixed a tear in the crotch of my jeans – I think the result of some hardcore partying a couple of weeks back – for the ridiculous price of about AUD $1.50. Then I got chatting to the owner of a shop that sold the traditional Arabian headscarves and robes. Two chai teas, a Turkish coffee and 20 dinars later, I had acquired my very own Arabic kit. Trying it on back at the hotel with the assistance of the lovely receptionist lady and several amused onlookers, I was the spitting image of Yasser Arafat with my red/white hand-woven keffiye wrapped around my head, secured with black rope agal and flowing, crisp white thoub (robe). Sensational, can’t wait for an appropriate fancy dress occasion. I also picked up a second headscarf in the sky blue and black colours of Cronulla SLSC. The headscarves in particular I decided could actually be useful since they are designed to be pulled up over the face during a dust storm, and you never know when one might hit the beach in Alexandria!
On my third day in Jordan, I left Amman aboard a Jett bus, heading for Aqaba on the Red Sea coast. I really did want to visit Israel but I just couldn’t see how it was possible unless I had an extra 3-4 days up my sleeve. The sightseeing trip out to the Dead Sea and Mount Sinai confirmed this. The terrain was a bit too brutal, everywhere you went there were passport checkpoints, and I just couldn’t afford for any mishaps that would prevent me from making Cairo in time. As it was, I probably made the right decision. On arrival in Aqaba, I booked into a fairly swanky hotel called the Days Inn. The bed was so comfy and the weather so hot outside that I didn’t leave the room for a few hours, and when I did surface, I discovered that Aqaba didn’t really have a lot going for it. The only reason you would come here is if you were transiting through the ferry port like I was, or if you were interested in Scuba Diving. It was possible to do a day trip out to the ancient city of Petra, and I was just starting to look into this, when I found myself finally struck down with food poisoning. It was bound to happen sooner or later, even though I’d done pretty well in managing to avoid it for the past four months (with the exception of one small case in Albania). Still, food poisoning is never fun and I sweated in bed for nearly 12 hours, constantly running off to the dunny and pretty much eating nothing but one meal per day. Even the free brekkie didn’t pick my appetite, and I hate not getting value for money at those all you can eat buffets, especially with a bloke there ready and waiting to cook your eggs in any fashion you like. To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was actually the hotel brekkie that gave me the shits in the first place. After eating on the street the entire trip, I thought it ironic that I’d probably been struck down my eating the buffet at a four star hotel at the end of my trip!
After the two dullest days of my entire trip spent bunking down in Aqaba, I finally cycled the 15km out to the ferry port, only to find that due to it being a Saturday, the regular ferry service wasn’t operating. “Also, did I know” said a ‘helpful’ taxi driver “that you can’t buy ferry tickets at the port, you need to buy them in Aqaba?” No I did not know that, and once again cursed the stupid systems that seem designed to inflict the most amount of inconvenience on unsuspecting travellers as possible. Of course, for a mere 10 JD the taxi driver would take me into town and back. He was one of three taxis waiting at the gate to the ferry port to prey on tourists stuck without tickets, like me. Well, I had four hours to kill until the next ferry apparently, and despite the wind, decided that I wasn’t going to get suckered in on their scam and I cycled back to town to suss it out. I was still suffering from the food poisoning and it was about 38 degrees outside. It was the last thing I really wanted to do, but after about two hours of searching and asking people for directions, I finally found the one place in all of Aqaba that you can actually buy the ferry tickets. I couldn’t believe how difficult it was to find, even with precise directions on a map given to me by a police officer. Anyway, I rock up to the counter to find that the first boat I can get leaves at midnight – a good fifteen hours away. With no hotel to go back to, I was now stuck outside in the heat with nothing to do in a boring town. Aquaba really is a dull place and the best I could do was spend the first five hours in a McDonalds reading a book, toilet handy in case I needed to throw up or something. Just before dark, I cycled back out to the ferry port and managed to get all my paperwork and departure tax payments sorted with very little fuss. And there I spent another six boring hours on the dock with about two hundred other Arabs waiting for the ferry. It was mind-blowingly boring but little did I know that it wasn’t going to get any better.
Even when we were finally allowed to board the ferry, it was delayed by three hours due to the loading of an unbelievable amount of luggage which consumed nearly the whole lower deck. I swear, entire families were moving house and taking everything with them, including the kitchen sink. Bessie got buried and wedged between some kind of satellite dish and a sack full of blankets and it took me about 20 minutes to clear the stuff from around her when it came time to disembark. But that was a good while off also. It was a horribly slow five hour crossing – I could have cycled the same distance in about two hours. I spent the entire time trying to sleep on the outside metal deck because inside the air conditioning was giving me the chills – the food poisoning was still in full swing. Egyptians who couldn’t figure out why the ‘western man’ was sleeping outside when there were free lounges inside, kept poking me awake trying to help me out and chat. They just didn’t understand that I wanted to be left alone to sleep. One guy in particular was being so clingy that I just knew he was going to end up being trouble when the ferry landed. The type of trouble that you land in because he wants to help you get a hotel, a bus or whatever else you need – and take his baksheesh cut. I shrugged him off finally as the ferry landed. But even still, it took another hour to unload the luggage on the ferry before there was a path clear enough for passengers to disembark. And when I finally did get off, I had to go visit the Immigration Office to collect my passport which I’d had to hand in to the officer on the boat in order to obtain a Visa. I never like being out of sight of my passport, but thankfully it was where it was supposed to be. Unfortunately, in a system that was starting to reek of similarity to that of Syria, I had to go to the bank first to pay for and acquire my entry visa. When I arrived, the bank wasn’t open and I had to wait another hour before a staff member showed up. Then I had to disassemble the bike in order to get it through the security metal scanner, and finally I was at the port gate buying a bus ticket to Cairo. The whole ferry trip took ten excruciatingly slow hours, not counting the additional fifteen I was waiting the previous day.
I was right about one thing – with the kerfuffle surrounding the ferry, there would have been no way I could have squeezed in Israel and still come this route. With that decision I was pleased at least. Finding a bus to Cairo was also particularly easy. Getting the bike on board was not. The bus driver had no problem taking a bike, but there simply wasn’t enough room underneath the bus. In the end, Bessie was wedged at the back of the bus with the rest of the passengers and about twenty more suitcases full of junk. It cost me twenty Egyptian pounds to get it on board, but at least I was now set! The whole bribing mess is definitely worth a mention. From the time I arrived at the port in Nuweiba, until the bus pulled into Downtown Cairo, I had to pay more baksheesh on my first day in Egypt than I’d ever paid out before in the entire trip. Everybody wanted a piece of the pie! The bloke who sold me the ticket, the bloke who loaded Bessie on board, the bloke who ‘watched’ my bags for twenty seconds whilst I unloaded my stuff, the bus driver and some other guy who seemed to be the organiser of everything on the bus trip. Helpful, but when you are starting to run out of change it becomes problematic. They never give you change when you tip them so if you hand over a 100 pound note, you can kiss it goodbye!
The bus took off and before you knew it, there was nothing but more desert once again. The Sinai peninsula, or what I saw of it, seemed somehow even more bleak and barren than the deserts of Jordan and Syria. I was extraordinarily glad that I had not chosen to cycle the remaining 500km into Cairo. Occasionally it was broken up with little settlements and we did pull over at a cheap roadside diner for a break. The only other point of interest was when I noticed a huge container ship that seemed left stuck out in the middle of the desert. Then I saw another, and on closer inspection, they were actually moving. Then I realised we were about to go underneath the Suez canal. IT was pretty amazing seeing these huge carriers and tankers going by. Each one looked as if it were just sailing on the desert sand! The security around the tunnel was something else too – machine gun turrets and soldiers everywhere, protecting the canal and no doubt in close proximity to the troubled area a bit further to the north with the Gaza Strip / West Bank on the Israeli border. And after another seven hours of transit, the bus hit the outskirts of Cairo. I was a day behind schedule, but I had still managed to beat the Cronulla team by one day. They would all be flying in at 5am the next morning and at some point I would meet up with them. But first things first, I needed to find my hostel that I’d booked for the night, and get about ten hours sleep. I was buggered!
I’ll leave this blog here, because Cairo really does deserve an entry all of its own. What an amazing place! But I will say that, at this point, after my last couple of days in Jordan, I was very relieved to have arrived. Despite nothing really going wrong that I couldn’t live with or handle properly, the past week had still felt like the most draining of the whole four months. The food poisoning, the long transits, the desert and hot days and the lack of appetite and just generally doing nothing but watch BBC news on the satellite TV over and over – it had all added up to take a heavy toll and I was exhausted. I checked in to my hotel and was in bed by 7pm, and I slept like a baby for about twelve hours, ready to take on the new city and new country. Interestingly enough, I thought I’d be much happier and elated at making it to Cairo. It was not the fulfilling, satisfied feeling inside that I was expecting. I did not feel like going out for a celebratory beer, I still didn’t even feel like eating a full meal. Even the smell of food was turning me off it. I think the anticipation of getting to Cairo was, in the end, better than actually arriving. As they say, it’s the journey not the destination. No doubt this would change once I was feeling better and my body was back to normal. Oh well, it was still going to be great to see some familiar faces tomorrow. Bring on the Pyramids and Rescue 2010!
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