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Don't be guiri!
We are about to fly to New Delhi, and we are able to take stock of our first destination. Including a night in the dessert, Jordan is a wonderful country, although we cannot say the same about its people. At least no without hesitation. They are Muslims and many of them act as such. We are not saying this as an offence, but as a fact. If you are walking in the street, they are not going to insult you or pull a long face just because you don’t profess their religion. However, if you are a woman, some will ignore you as a person and others will besiege you like animals. They have their wives well covered, so that nobody can see them, as if they were buried alive. The Muslim man look the other women up and down as if they were camels in a cattle market. For instance, one of the guides in Petra, in front of 200 tourists, compared, with no sense of shame, choosing a woman for marriage with buying a horse. The worst part was that some westerners laughed at his antics. Those are probably the ones that, without second thoughts, would sell their wives for a piece of stale bread. According to the exchange rate, it amounts to nothing, more or less what they are worth.
However, we started to have doubts when we realized that not one or two, but many Muslim women looked at blondes with tank tops as if they were the Devil wearing Zara. They accept, with no act of rebellion, that the right thing is to walk with veils and tunics under a 40º C weather, while their husbands swim wearing shorts. Some of these women, are actually in love with their warders, and they don’t mind sharing their beds and husbands with other women. The strange thing is that after getting lost in their streets and roads, having a flat tire in the middle of the dessert, eating with them and sleeping in their hotels, you cannot stop liking them for the way they treated us. Then, you wonder if it is possible that there are millions of monsters in this world, or perhaps it is the way they were raised, or maybe it is the religion they were taught that is evil. I only know that it is not possible that this charming people are able to be so wicked at the same time. Or maybe it is possible, and without our knowing, all of us have some evil inside. Maybe it is just a few who insufflate many others with their divine ideas and their infernal threats. I wonder whether we carry it in our genetics or it arrived in the carriage of a fake god.
So, if it is not ours or theirs, whose damn fault is it?
Madaba, city close to the Dead Sea
Who didn’t dream about being Indiana Jones, Lawrence of Arabia, or even Captain Nemo? All of them, real or fictional, captivate the imagination of thousand of adventurers in shorts, all over the world. But there is only one country where all of them would have met by chance: Jordan. In the Lost City of Petra, in the red dessert of Wadi Rum or the underwater gardens of the Red Sea, but always Jordan. Three adventurous souls like these, would have connected immediately, would have kissed three times on the same cheek, and would have smoked nargileh (the famous water pipe) until dawn.
http://www.way-away.com/
Nowadays, Jordan is better known for two sculptural beauties (Petra and Rania), than for those three characters. Petra was carved on dessert walls by human hands and chisel. So spectacular that it earned the title of Wonder of the World. Rania, however, is a product of Marketing. She has been modelled to such extent that is, now, the image of the Reign of Jordan in the West. Rania is today the best ambassador of a monarchy, invented by the English people. She has been able to turn the country into a peaceful oasis, something very unusual knowing its neighbours. However, if one day you visit Jordan, don’t ask about her. Not even Allah knows her. It is a real fake. She is like an impostor who looks really hot in magazines, but cuts no ice in that country. Here, the portraits of the king and his father are found everywhere, but from Rania, not even the crown. The same happens to the planes flying over Arabia, where veils appear and disappear. Outside the country she is a queen, inside nothing.
But Jordan is much more than just that fake Princess. It is a biblical land where you can be baptized with the same water that Jesus was, or miraculously float in the Dead Sea. It is a museum-country where, out of nowhere, templar castles, Greek cities, and Roman temples appear so well preserved that you would say that they were covered with sand, not by mistake, but so that fortunate people like us could contemplate them undamaged several centuries later.
The best of Jordan, however, is not buried in the dessert, neither forgotten in its chasms. It is sunken in the Red Sea. Just enough to be able to see, with just regular goggles and flippers, dozens of gigantic oysters or swim over the Japanese Gardens, a valley of underwater bonsais placed so careful and beautifully that not even Jules Verne could imagine it in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
One league is the distance that a person covers in one hour, almost five kilometres and a little bit more than 3 miles. The Earth’s circumference is 40,000 km=8,000 leagues=almost 25,000 miles. If there were a bridge all around the Equator, it would take us an entire year to cover it, walking 20 hours a day.
God bless Oneworld and the people who invented the World Round Ticket!!!
September 11th, 2007. It is the third day of our journey and the sixth anniversary of the Al Qaeda attack against the United States. We are in Jordan, a stone’s throw away from the most troubled spot in the world. Actually, no matter where you throw that stone, it is going to fall in the middle of a war, next to some terrorist group, or on some hot-headed beast. Even though we were told that Jordan was an exception among its troubled neighbours, the first day, we felt uneasy driving around those dark roads. What’s more, when we got lost so many times that we couldn’t do anything but continuously stop to ask for directions. If we are all the same when the lights go out, even more when you are dressed with a jellabah, with dark skin and a beard up to your belly bottom. Just like the receptionists at the hotel. Arriving at the hotel at night they all looked like Bin Laden, but in the morning, they were wonderful people. They were so good, that they even recommended a Bedouin camp to spend a fairy tale night, including a luxurious “hayma” (tent used by nomad people in the North of Africa), and a moonlit dinner.
Without a second thought, we went there. Wadi Rum is one of the most spectacular desserts in the world and the natural border between Jordan and Saudi Arabia. It was here, where Lawrence of Arabia learned to ride a camel. Walking on Mars cannot be much different from entering those reddish dunes. Just like meteorites fallen from the sky, hundreds of rocks sink around you, creating such an unreal landscape, that it is more a mirage about to disappear than the home of the man of the dessert. Or one of the few left, because most of the ones around here drive a 4×4 and have last generation mobile phones. They are impostors or ghosts that are going to call “The Oasis of the Dessert” any raggedy rug as long as they can pay their mobile phone bill.
Our Luxury Camp was one of those. Nothing of luxury and everything of camp. Only one thing: exclusively ours because there were no tourists in sight. Only a couple of skinny dogs, which rather lie down on top of a cactus than sleep on one of the filthy mattresses used as beds for guests. Given the time it was and that we did not have any other place to sleep, we put a brave face on it and decided to spend the night there. Sharing the evening in front of a bonfire with the Bedouins and listen to them and their stories about the unmerciful life in the dessert, did not sound so badly.
We pulled a stupid face again when, while dusting our sleeping bags, our Palestinian scarfed guides, taking advantage of the confusion, ran away. We guessed, to sleep in their homes, the real ones, of course. With Ikea furniture and warm showers. All of them ran away, except for one. Somebody would have to stay and watch us, just in case we had a rage attack and destroyed their camp to take vengeance on them. The poor miserable wretch, felt sorrier for us than the other way around. That is saying a lot! With his fake Adidas track suit, tried to keep us talking, in a macaronic English:
“I understand you. You honey-moon don’t want problems. Sorry. I love too. My wife in Irak. I run from Irak because they want kill me. I worked for Sadam. She and my children cannot come because of me. I don’t see them in 4 years. From then, I sleep in the dessert everyday”.
We don’t know if it was the reflection of the fire, or our eyes open like two tennis balls, but for the first time we saw Sadam’s face, in front of us apologizing. If it was not Sadam himself, it was one of his doubles, because he looked very much like the one in the Mosad picture cards. Still looking at us, he put his hand in his pocket and started taking out a metal object. What would you think if you were in the middle of no-where in the dessert, with nobody near to ask for help, and with Sadam in front of you with a singular beeping object in his hands? With no second thoughts, we took his side. “Inch Allah and death to the imperialist pigs!” Whatever it is necessary as long as we win his affection. “Blair is not Bush”. And so on, we talked nonsense until we realized that the “scary beeping sound” was just his prehistoric mobile phone. His wife was calling him.
“Habibi, habibi”(I love you, I love you)
Wadi Rum is near to nowhere and far from any location in which putting a mobile phone antenna would make sense. In spite of that fact, our Sadam double had enough coverage to receive a phone call from Irak in the middle of a civil war and to tell his wife he loves her over and over again.
If the trip was about seeing life, we can come back home now, because nothing can beat this.
