A fitting end

“Over there we’ve got some fuckin’ Yankees, and you’re a fuckin’ Brit” an old guy at Damascus’ Karajat Samariyeh said as I queued to buy my ticket for Beirut. He has one leg, fewer teeth, and talks in a broad Arabic-Brooklyn accent, having learned all his English from American sailors that were posted over here. “Fucking Al Capone style” he says, when I comment on his brogue.

Talking of the British and American troops he had met during their time in his country, he says “you Brits are so cool”, referring to the “cool & calm” nature in which we deal with things. “That’s smart”. According to him, “[the] Yanks are all fast money and fast cars”.

Fuckin’ ay.

Autoportrait — Leaving Damascus

I spent three months in Syria. A month traveling, a month studying, and a further month doing a bit of both. During that time I met many fascinating people, some of whom I now count amongst my friends, friendships that I really value.

Arriving back into the city from Jordan, the familiar site of Jebel Qassioun appeared before driving back down the Mezzeh highway, past the university where I spent eighty gruelling hours between November and December, and then the Old City popped up. It dawned on me how much I was going to miss the place, and the people in it.

So thank you to you Damascenes, and inshall’ah, we will meet again soon.

Once again, I don a keffiyeh, strap-on my backpack, and climb in the back of a servees bound for the bus-station. The long route to Africa will wait a little while longer; next stop, Beirut.

An Enterprising Folk

I am amazed at how much stuff people dabble in here in Syria. This country — which gets such a bad-wrap in the international news, and is marred by a repressive autocracy — seems to foster a very free-thinking, enterprising youth.

I feel that back home, we complain that we never have time to do all the things we want, and we face much fewer barriers to whatever it is we want to do. But here — taking the example of one friend alone — is someone who at the age of twenty-five, is completing a degree, has worked as a journalist, is involved in a film-project as an assistant-director, is organising a massive cultural project, all whilst applying for international universities. Along with that, writing, drawing and painting feature as pass-times. Oh, and she’s female, in a country where it is true to say that women do not face the same freedoms as their male counterparts, and are up against social pressures based on their sex.

Males, however, do have to contend with the looming threat of military service. One Syrian friend has been advised not to follow through on his proposed subject for his film & photography studies final-piece due to the content, which is based-upon just this. And regarding his own military service, he lists his two options, once he reaches 25, as leaving the country (indefinitely), or suicide. Rather worryingly, it is the latter that he is currently contemplating.

Riddles & Recorders

The approach to Petra’s “Monastery” is a long, winding route of stone steps, made even more arduous by the constant hounding from folk lining the route proposing donkeys and trinkets and that most dubious of all offers, free shay. But arriving at the top, the sound of a flute came emanating from the huge, carved out hall within. As we got closer, this sound was mixed with the smell of hash. Inside were a couple of guys, stoned out of their mind.

The next half an hour was spent sat with them as they smoked, posed riddles and repeated the same tune — over & over — on the flute, to us and the two Israelis who rolled up. My mind had already been tuned-into Middle Eastern logic by a taxi driver’s riddles between Kahta & Mt. Nemrut in Turkey, so I earned myself some brownie points solving a couple.

All I need now is the kohl.

La grotte est à nous

This is Arwhen. He is born of bedouin stock, and his family have been living in the caves of Petra for generations. Indeed, he was born in one of them. Thirty years ago, as more and more visitors came, the government constructed a village a few kilometres away, a place where all the bedouins could move to rather than inhabiting the caves. Except that these people didn’t want to live in houses in a town. They like the troglodytic life.

So despite having a house in town, Arwhen spends most of his time living out here. “It’s more peaceful” he says. In the town, there are too many people, too much noise. The traffic. Here there is nature, the stars at night. A warming fire.

For the time being, this habitation of the caves is tolerated by the government, although tourists are not permitted to stay and camp in the area, and technically, they are not allowed to stay with these people. But Arwhen will continue to seek refuge here from the hubbub of the town, once we, the tourists, have left the place for the night.

Autoportrait — Petra

Whilst the tombs, façades and carvings of Petra are magnificent, the landscape is absolutely mind-blowing, too, and well worthy of some hiking.

…and hand-stands on cliff edges, of course.

Here begins a small series of auto-portraits.

Scarred by Tourism

After having got used to taking offers of tea at face-value and happily stepping into peoples’ homes, the town of Wadi Musa came as a bit of a culture shock. The whole of the town seems to be geared-up to do one thing, and that is to provide rooms, food and souvenirs to the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit Jordan’s premier attraction: Petra.

The hotels are keen to remind you that Petra’s famous Treasury featured in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, playing the film every evening. But emerging from the siq, it is indeed an awesome spectacle, and indeed worthy of its fame.

Petra is an immense site, and whilst the Treasury is perhaps the largest and most ornate of the sights, the sheer number of these façades and tombs, as well as the huge effort that must have been employed to carve them out of the rock, is what I found the most amazing.

It is, however, an attraction you will pay dearly to visit. A single-day pass costs 31 JD (1 JD is roughly the same as one Euro), and this summer the price will be rising to 58 JD. Some of the guys working there (who, incidentally, invited us into their office and did offer tea without any ulterior motives), told of how the price next year will be upwards of 90 JD for a single-day pass. This is going to put it beyond the budget of most backpackers… And if you really want to discover the charm of Petra, a day is not enough. I found two days a little short.

The site itself is therefore a huge money-spinner for the country, and the people working inside will do their best to extract more money from visitors. Lining all of the main sights are a mass of faux-bedouins, plying their wares. The steps to the Monastery are lined with carts selling souvenirs, and everywhere you walk, persistent offers of a donkey/horse/camel to ride will follow.

Rain Cold Stops Play

Cloud rolling in over the village of Dana.

It was snowing as we walked up to Qadsiyya, 3km up the road. Snowing. In Jordan. I thought this was the Middle East?

Dana Nature Reserve

A servees deposits you at the outskirts of the small town of Qadsiyya where a road drops down to the village of Dana, which lies at the head of the valley which constitutes the heart of the Dana Nature Reserve. This is the “show-piece” of the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature, and is famed for its hiking as well as its wildlife and flora. Whilst Syria has got some beautiful landscapes, it doesn’t have this sort of “accessibility” to its outdoors.

The village of Dana is a collection of stone & adobe buildings seemingly cut-into the cliff-face at the end of the Dana Valley which stretches out to the desert plains on the horizon. Nowadays, the only real permanent inhabitants of the village are staff of the four hotels & hostels that provide respite from the cities and the tourist trail. The Tower Hotel is the cheapest, and its rooms are full of graffiti along the lines of “I came to Dana for one night, and ended up staying for 11”. I came for a couple and stayed three… Maybe if the weather wasn’t so bad for the last couple of days, it would have been longer.

The visitor centre of the reserve has very little information about the hiking on offer, the staff saying that “you need a guide” for most of it. Pft. All you need is a sense of direction, a pic-nic, and some strong calf-muscles for the steep climb back up to the village from the valley floor at the end of the day.

The Road to Wadi Mujib

The notion of going to where you can get to, rather than finding a way to get to where you want to go, is a luxury rarely afforded back home. I had wanted to get to Dana, but on a Friday — the Muslim day of rest — there were no buses going that way. When I then asked “where can I get to today?”, the question seemed lost on the locals and I was just told to go back to Amman to get other buses from there. Taxis offered the ride at an exorbitant rate.

I noticed “Dhiban” written in Arabic on the side of a bus that was slowly filling up with people. The map showed that it lies on the northern edge of Wadi Mujib, Jordan’s “Grand Canyon”, and in vaguely the right direction. That would do.

This change of plan meant a new acquaintance in a bus rarely used to seeing foreigners; after a phone call to his wife back home, extra places were being prepared for lunch in a little village somewhere north of Dhiban.

The lift back to the town that afternoon was in his friend’s mini-van, filled with veiled women who giggled away in the back on their way to a wedding. “You cannot look at them”, our driver told me as they spoke to me. The umpteenth cultural lesson of that day.

Walking down the winding road into the wadi (“valley” in Arabic) evening was beginning to draw in, and passing drivers warned of the danger in the valley bottom at night. The “wolves” they had warned of were avoided thanks to four retired men, dressed in full Jordanian garb, who stopped to offer a lift as the sun was setting. A fitting end to a day of improvised traveling, and proof that where you want to go is not always the best place to be.