Skip to main content

Middle East Day 6: Amman

It's about 45 minutes as the Boeing flies from Beirut to Amman, but a bit further than that in terms of culture and politics. Jordan has no oil, so unlike other gulf countries the citizenry can't go importing folk from other lands to sneer at and make do all the work. Unlike Lebanon, Jordan has also enjoyed a long period of peaceful, benificent and generally level headed government.Just like Pepsodent you can feel the difference. Everything is brighter, whiter and cleaner. Whiter, certainly. The place is built on limestone. It shows in the soil and it is quarried for the buildings. All the houses, most of the shops and some of the public buildings are glistening white, straight edged and regular. There are 2 million people in Amman and the little white cubes stretch off to the horizon in every direction.

The cars are newer and shinier than Beirut, and the traffic behaves itself. Not that it used to. Jordan was once reknowned for the most reckless traffic in the Middle East, but a few years ago they had a massive motorway pileup in which many people were killed. It was too much for King Abdullah. He gave orders. Now there are undercover cameras, checkpoints, traffic patrols and lots of warning signs. And today the traffic flows in an ordered and restrained fashion.Whether or not Plato was right about benificent autocrats, this is a country with systems and order, and one in which the government, while it may not be by the people in quite the same way that we are used to, is by and large for the people.

We are travelling in Jordan with a guide. He is Ibrahim, drives a new Hyundai minivan, speaks excellent English, and for $100 a day each we get him, his Hyundai, all our accommodation and all our breakfasts. Last night we stayed in the Canyon Hotel, which is 3 star (* = Grotty ** = Basic *** = Comfortable **** = Hey! Not too shabby! ***** = Snap! Plump my cushion again, if you please, Fatima ). Today he took us south to Jerash, which is the Ancient city of Gerasa, one of the ten cities of the Decapolis mentioned in the New Testament. It is the largest and best preserved Roman city in the Middle East. Although only 15% of its 800,000 square metres have been excavated, it is impressive. The main street is all there with shops, ingenious sewage system, running water system and ancient stones piled together into temples, fountains and columns. With its mosaic pedestrian promenade running beside the chariotway it must have been a truly beautiful city.

On the way we passed over an insignificant river. I realised, later, that it was the Jabbok, beside which Jacob lay to wrestle with angels and dream of ladders and have his name changed, and I had the oddest sense of homecoming. This was the landscape of my faith. we were driving through the Kingdoms of Aram and Moab, traversing country once walked by Jacob and Rebekkah and all their wily clan. Personally, the Jabbok runs deeper in my imagination than does the Jordan, which we will see tomorrow, and I almost missed it.

We left there to go to the castle of Ajlun, one of several fortresses built by Salah ad-Din. It is in remarkable good shape considering its age and the purpose for which it was built. The interior was dark and cool and quirkily unpredictable. There were a number of people clambering about in it as we were, and amongst them was a party of Jordanian teachers. Clemency being Clemency, joined their group, sang their songs, played with their children and left the castle with maybe a dozen invitations to lunch and the promise of lots of new facebook links.

Ibrahim took us to a local Jordanian diner, where few travellers go, except the ones he takes there. Lunch was delicious. The system is that the food is put in the middle of the table with a basket of fresh, steaming hot Jordanian bread and a variety of relishes. The waiters hover, and when they see a dish is getting empty they replace it with a new one. This continues til no-one is left standing. The cost for as much as 5 people could eat was a little over 15 Dinar or about $NZ25. Later Ibrahim introduced us to Kanafeh, which seems to consist of equal parts of cheese, honey, olive oil and pastry. It needs a fairly reasonable scientific calculator to work out the calorific load per bite and it is absolutely impossible to leave any of it on the plate. The diet will start as soon as I return. Honest it will.
Labels:

Comments

Merv said…
WOW! to the photos.
Not all your readers might realise that by clicking on your photos they are rewarded with a much enlarged & more detailed scene. Beautiful.
Did you consider a self-drive rental car vs. car & driver?
13 July 2010 at 14:18
Kelvin Wright said…
Yes we did, Merv, but the deal which included accommodation and all the incidentals like addmission to various sites seemed too good to pass up. Besides we are only here for a few days and the driver's knowledge has been invaluable. We were put off also by the reputation of Jordanian traffic. As it turns out, I would be happy to drive in Jordan but not yet in Lebanon. Not in Beirut anyway. Give me a few more days there though....
13 July 2010 at 15:03
Lee said…
Let the diet start later. Enjoy every bite of your holiday!
15 July 2010 at 12:32
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...
10 comments
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
3 comments
Read more

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...
8 comments
Read more

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...
Post a Comment
Read more