Travel Saturday

T.E. Lawrence’s home away from home, Jordan.

It was my second time in Jordan. After landing, I rented a Duster, and in less than an hour, a buddy and I were nearing our hotel in Amman. Pop music poured out of the radio as we saw snow starting to fall. It was just before Christmas. We were on a two-week “fact-finding” trip that would ultimately result in us spending six months in Jordan.

For now, we watched as Amman’s infrastructure ground to a halt. In the hills, we passed two cars sliding backward downhill, their drivers unable to control their vehicles. Reaching our hotel was a relief. The next morning, the streets were soupy with mud and slush.

Amman is a study in contrasts. Near Queen Alia Airport, the highway is wide and clean. The old section of town, near Talal Street and the Roman Theater, is a Byzantine maze of shops, markets, and homes cut into the sloping hillsides. There is opulence in the mega malls and luxury stores, and abject poverty in the slums near Az Zarqa. The people are friendly: Palestinians, traditional tribespeople, and foreigners. In a sea of red-and-white and black-and-white keffiyehs on Friday, the call to prayer is made, as in every Middle Eastern city, but in Jordan, it seems to fit into the heartbeat.

The heartbeat of Amman is its people. They are open, funny, and share what they have with guests. They are also rapacious hagglers who will not take no for an answer. Despite, or maybe because of this, I enjoyed Jordan.

One day, we drove out into the eastern desert with two Jordanian military officers. As we turned off the road and started making our way across the desert, they accelerated, and we struggled to keep up.

“Why did you go so fast?” I asked.

“If you go fast enough, you glide across the bumps,” the officer replied, a grin breaking across his face.

The officers were Bedu. They still had family who lived in tents, herding goats and camels. They had long since given up that life and lived in Amman and Jerash. We bought a sheep from one of the herdsmen nearby. As I moved to slaughter it, they stopped me in protest.

“Justin, you cannot. It’s haram.”

They slaughtered the goat, which we then dressed and cooked on a fire made from old wood pallets. It was delicious, though I worried about the effects of eating food cooked with treated lumber on galvanized steel grating.

The sunrise in the desert is magnificent. The sky lights quickly and moves from pink to blue. In the winter, the sunrise brings wind that can be bitingly cold. After one night sleeping under the stars in the desert, the Jordanian officers had their fill of returning to their roots. As quickly as we crossed the desert, we headed back, this time following several of the old Bedu tracks to the road.

With every city, there are hundreds of stories I could write. My memory does not do justice to the food, people, events, or sites that make Jordan.