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.
The Abtouqs of King Hussein Camp
Walking into the dingy corridor of a small house nestled amongst the steep, narrow alleys that criss-cross the Palestinian refugee camp on Amman’s Jebal King Hussein, I’m not quite sure if I feel comfortable or not. I had met 47 year-old Kamal minutes before, chain-smoking through yellowed teeth, as he stood on the steps outside his house. Upon learning I was British he told me how he once loved a British lady he had met in Lebanon, but that was a long time ago, and nothing had come of his affection.
He invited me in to take a tea and to meet his family. Through the doorway from the hallway came the sound of the Qur’an being read on television, a channel that I had seen many times before in the restaurants and cafés of Syria. In this room his father sat on a chair at the foot of his wife’s bed; she was recovering from a broken leg and so her life passed in this room. I initially hesitated as I entered; the father moaned & beat his chest, and I wasn’t sure that I was very welcome here. My fears, however, turned out to be totally unfounded. His “moans” were actually expressing “very nice to meet you”; seven years ago he had suffered a stroke which left him paralysed down one side, and with problems speaking.
This man had trained as an accountant in Lebanon, and had had a successful job, traveling all over the world thanks to his knowledge of business and his English skills. He comes from Jaffa, near Tel-Aviv, but was forced to leave in 1948 with the creation of Israel. He has since lived in this refugee camp with his family, and what was once a good standard of living has given away to relative dilapidation.
Kamal’s brother, Mahmoud, joined us and acted as a translator for his father. His father evidently understood everything I said, but his mind had trouble finding the words he wanted, and his body prevented them from expressing them. Both Kamal & Mahmoud had inherited some of their father’s English, and when they successfully explained his slurred Arabic to me, they were followed by emphatic cries of Aywa! Aywa! (“yes” in Arabic). When he couldn’t express himself, he tried to incite his words to come-out by slapping his forehead.
On the side-table next to his chair lay a photograph of the family at a hotel in downtown Amman when his now middle-aged offspring were still children, Kamal beaming at the camera. The hotel is now out of business, and Kamal, in particular, shows little hope for his life. He is evidently depressed at having reached his age without having raised a family; he asks me “who is more beautiful? Me or Brad Pitt?”. Did I think he would have a chance with Angelina Jolie, or Katie Holmes? Hollywood hasn’t passed him by, whilst he feels his life has.
Jordan offered citizenship to the Palestinians who arrived in 1948 & 1967, as Mahmoud testifies as he shows me his Jordanian passport. But whilst he is classed as a Jordanian citizen, his family still lives in the UN Refugee camp that was created here as a result of the huge waves of immigrants who fled Palestine during the wars there, and the quality of life is fairly minimal.
The Abtouqs are still suffering from the double-dealing that the British undertook following the Balfour Treaty, from the repercussions of the failed British mandate in Palestine. But the welcome they afforded me in their little house in Amman didn’t show any rancour of my nationality. The most important thing I could do, Mahmoud told me, is to tell people I know that “We Palestinians don’t hate Jews, like the media says. Our problem is with the Zionists. Jews & Arabs have lived together for many years.” They just need to get back a quality of life, one that cannot exist whilst they are still living as refugees.