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.

Free tea sans the carpet-selling

Whilst the main reason to come to Madaba is for the Byzantine-era mosaics, it was wandering the market streets & quartiers populaire that I enjoyed most. The town centre seemed too shiny and new, rather fake, with its shops catering to the tourist crowd. Carpet anyone?

Walking back one evening, surrounded by a gaggle of young teenagers gabbling away in Arabic (and me trying to understand & reply), a mini-van pulled up. “There is a cup of tea waiting for you at my house” said the driver, his wife sat behind him.

Ten minutes later we entered a house in a southern district of the town, met the rest of the family, and enjoyed a delicious, sweet, milky, spiced local-style chai. Like most Arabic homes I have visited, they had a television blaring away, and when the Turkish pop-music came on, their seven year old son duly danced along for the benefit of everyone present.

The house had had several storeys added to it over the year as the family grew and finances permitted. He proclaimed the importance of having his family close to him; each of the storeys corresponded to one of his children and their future family. This addition of storeys meant that from the roof, there was “the best view of Madaba” with the church spires & mosques’ minarets rising up under the stars.

The Jordanians, it seems, are just as hospitable and keen to entertain foreigners as their Syrian counter-parts. And this time, there were no dodgy questions questions in the ride back.