182. Jordan Israel Border

182.

Jordan/ Israel Border: 

Here, the armies of the world’s most famous mortal enemies, the Arabs and the Jews, face off across an old two-lane highway bridge over a trickling irrigation ditch.

Good Lord! This dinky structure is the historic and renowned Allenby Bridge and this slimy irrigation ditch is the celebrated River Jordan!

This IS a VAST disappointment; but only the first in a long line of disappointments in this accursed “holy” land of myth and legend.

Nothing moves. The heat is intense.

On both sides of the “river” Boredom seems to rule the sandbagged machine gun nests and camouflaged tanks pointing their cannons at each other.

I cross over Jordan as the song says and...

Officers in the Israeli customs building make a most thorough check of all my belongings. Every container is opened, smelled and tasted. All my paper articles are taken away for careful scrutiny.

Thank goodness I had the sense to toss out the Palestinian’s letters—even if they were innocent personal notes, whatever they said might have thrown me into prison here!

But I am clean. My passport is stamped and I am permitted to sojourn for a while in the Promised Land. 

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181. Undelivered Letters

181.

Next day, wishing all my new tourist friends and the Palestinians farewell, I climb aboard the bus to Israel. 

As I board, some of the Palestinians hand me a few letters for their friends and families in Israel and ask me to deliver them when I arrive since no mail is permitted between the countries, but as the bus crosses the few miles of desert to the border I reflect that these letters, written in Arabic which I do not understand, could cause me more than a heap of trouble so I tear them up and toss the fragments out of the bus window.

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180 Sunny

180.

Sunny

I climb a big pink rock for a better view and meet a young American woman who has just climbed the other side of the same rock for the view. She is the only other tourist in the ruins.

We walk together the rest of the afternoon and share stories. She is so bright I call her “Sunny”.

She has traveled in Africa for the last six months and has come to Petra from the Red Sea, which is closer to the south than Damascus is to the north. Like me, she is heading for Israel and plans to spend the winter there working on a kibbutz. She has a master’s degree in economics but has been turned off by the Viet Nam war and by the scene in the States and, like me; she is hoping to learn more about life from traveling around. She is a quiet, good head.

Together we hike to find another touristic site, “The Monastery”, but can’t. It is probably not in this small group of canyon ruins. We do find an interesting black pillar, some crushed plates of sandstone and two Bedouin girls, perhaps thirteen years old, who have made a small campfire among the stones. They offer us “Bedouin smoke” and some tea. The smoke is pretty raw and makes me cough which makes the girls giggle, but the herb tea is tasty. These shepherd girls are dressed in black with red trim and sequins and tend a few sheep wandering through the ruins. There are old looking, worn petroglyphs covering the stone where we sit.

Sunny and I search our pockets for something to give our hostesses. Sunny finds an orange and a boiled egg and I give them some salted pumpkin seeds and a bar of soap. They seem delighted.

As the sun sets, we walk back to The Treasury and find the guide with the horses waiting for us as he said he would. Sunny was going to stay at the guest house but instead decides to come with us to Amman since she planned to go there tomorrow anyway if transport was available.

There is a room for Sunny at our hotel so we all eat yogurt and fruit and spend a pleasant evening talking. I have all the necessary documents and a bus ticket so I plan to leave for Jerusalem in the morning.

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179. Petra

179. Petra

Jauntily we go riding rented horses down into the narrow, twisting dry gorge that conceals and contains the hidden city. Rounding a bend, we are suddenly confronted with a classic-style building facade, perhaps seventy feet high, carved into the sandstone cliff. This unexpected work of art is called “The Treasury”.

Other huge, elegant building facades adorn the ramparts of the deep and narrow chasm. All are carved directly into the native sandstone, which is streaked with pleasing colors: rose red, pale blue, yellow, beige and white. This hidden city looks like it is sculpted of soft Neapolitan ice cream!

What a lot of time and effort were expended here in this desolation!

We thought we had rented the horses for the day, but the guide that comes with the horses wants to take them back to the guesthouse to rent to other tourists if any appear. I argue and raise hell, but of course he takes the horses explaining that he will return with them for us in the afternoon, and walking around the ghost city soon cools my temper. Horses are certainly not necessary to enjoy this compact “city”. 

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178. Stoned Snake

178.

Next morning, Sandy, Rob and I decide to rent a taxi together and go visit the ruins of another nearby abandoned Roman “city”, Petra.

Here we go in the air-conditioned comfort of an old black Mercedes taxi. A crack in the windshield is winking at me.

Out on the desert our driver suddenly slams on the brakes and we come to a screeching halt. He leaps from the car, grabs a rock and beats a six-foot black snake to death. This is not a dangerous reptile but the driver says he doesn’t like snakes.

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177. Balmless Giliad

177.

Our fellow hotel resident then drives us to see another much larger Palestinian camp near Jarach.

He says one hundred thousand people live in this camp in one-room concrete-block shelters; ten families, he says, share a single bathroom.

The camp is a miserable sight indeed and the information, unfortunately, may be at least partly true, but because of the holiday, the refugees are dressed in their best folkloric costumes and seem quite happy.

This camp is located in the dry hills of Gilead. There is a lot of frustration and anger but no balm here!

Every evening a group of middle-aged men gather in the shabby lobby of our cheap hotel to watch TV. The shows they watch are always Egyptian or American and are always about the usual glamorous young actors and actresses chasing and shooting as they always are on the tube.

The men sit, sweat and drink beer.

Alone in my room, I sketch my friendly backpack, which is smiling at me.

~:~

176. Amman, Jordan

176.

Amman, Jordan:

Six young Palestinian men meet me on the street my first night in town and invite me to share a good chicken dinner with them at one of the nice restaurants.

After dinner we adjourn to a teashop for conversation. They all speak excellent English. The stories they tell me are more than interesting. One thing is perfectly clear. They want to return to the land that they consider theirs but which is now the State of Israel.

Next morning, when I visit the ruins of Amman’s old Roman theater, I meet a pair of congenial young Canadians, Sandy and Rob, who are making their way, very slowly, to Australia. They are staying at a cheap hotel and I move my things into the same hotel.

Since today is the final day of the Moslem holy month of Ramadan, the hotel owner invites us all to join him and his family for an after-sunset dinner of mutton, rice and a powerful alcoholic beverage called “arrack”. Of course, drinking alcoholic beverages is forbidden to Moslems, but not all Moslems obey this law.

Later the same evening a Palestinian guest in the hotel takes Sandy, Rob and me for a drive around the city. We visit the university and then a large permanent settlement of Palestinians. He completes his free city tour at a disco on the edge of town where we dance to American rock and roll. When the DJ plays some traditional Jordanian music, a local girl does a belly dance that knocks me out!

The next day, after much talk, joking and even some chess, the Palestinian drives us over to the ancient Roman town of Jarach.

On the stage of the ruined theater, we perform an imaginary scene from my unwritten drama: “The Map of Edge City”.

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