Back in the water

Well, the drought continues in Jordan - the rains are now at least a couple of months late, we've had about two hours total since I've been back in Jordan. In fact, its gotten so bad that the country had a national prayer session this Friday to ask Allah for his mercy in a special rain prayer called the istiska' prayer ... Seems unfair when it's so cold and wet in Europe, so unbalanced ...

Personally, I never thought that I'd be craving rain, but after all the desert time I've had recently, I was certainly craving water this weekend, so I jumped in the car and headed down to the Red Sea, more precisely to Tala Bay south of Aqaba. And yes, it was sickeningly fantastic - 30 degrees, sun all day, splashing about above the coral reefs ... you know. So in case it helps you guys surviving the Big Freeze, here are some pics to warm your cockles ... or something ...

After falling out with my previous Aqaba hotel (long story for another time), I went with a recommendation from friends who came down for the day. It ticked all the boxes for me - clean, lovely lovely friendly staff, and great environment to just relax, as well as a stone's throw (really!) from some great reefs. Above is the comfy swinging chair I spent many long happy hours in, reading, eating, drinking tea, crocheting and especially chatting to all and sundry ... and below is a nearby beach, which on a Friday was pretty busy with local families enjoying the day off, but still friendly and not too busy to go snorkelling off the jetty (most Jordanians are not great fans of swimming, so more than 10m out and you're only contending with the foreign tourists)

I had a great time snorkelling, there's a surprising variety from one site to the next along the coast, and there were plenty of beautiful things to see - shipwrecks, live coral like the beautiful valley of brain coral below, and of course some great fish, including a whole family (posse?) of lion fish (locally called chicken or turkey fish, very poisonous), clown fish playing around near their home anemone (in case it's not clear, this anemone looks like it has suckers at the end of its tentacles), and those incredible clouds of brightly coloured fish that you see around larger corals. I'm still working on getting the photography sorted out - one photo in ten doesn't come out blurry, damn those waves! - but hope you can get some idea from these examples ...

lovely carpets of brain coral

clown fish and their host anemone on the right

weird purple thing nestled in the coral which moves when you touch it -

think it might be a carpet anemone?

fuzzy I know, but I swear it's a lion fish!

(the little buggers hide under ledges,

and taking photos whilst diving is not easy!

And then at the end of the day, it's poolside for sunset - the hotel I stayed in was 'dry', but Aqaba itself is a duty-free zone with many alcohol shops, and lots of naughty local partakers, so I must admit to having had a sneaky beer in my room after my shower, before enjoying this view with Arab friends and endless rounds of tea - magic ...

Desert food - more meat!

One of the advantages of being in Wadi Rum over the Eid holiday (true for anywhere in the Muslim world for that matter) was the large quantities of food available at every turn - weeks of work in the gym undone in mere days! It's been a while since my last food blog, and I only just realised that I don't think I've introduced you yet to Jordan's only real claim to a national dish, so welcome to the heavy yumminess that is mansef ...

I spent an afternoon with some women in the desert watching them cooking a mansef from scratch, so below for your illumination is a step-by-step account (you won't see me helping out though, as an honoured guest I was banned from even thinking about doing any work! Never mind eh ...)

So first you need a large amount of meat - and in the Middle East, when they say meat they usually mean lamb. You will have trouble if you're not a lamb-lover here ... and forget about any veggie main courses! This lamb was sacrificed the day before to celebrate Eid, so the meat was pretty fresh, and I got to watch the man of the house cut it up ready for cooking ...

The other main ingredient of mansef is jamid, which is basically dried and then rehydrated yoghurt - here in the bowl are the last few grains of dried jamid, which is mixed with water to turn it creamy again. The drying and rehydrating process also gives it a slightly different flavour from just fresh yoghurt, more ... meaty?

So basically, the meat and jamid are chucked in a large saucepan with salt, pepper and plenty of water and left to bubble for ages, and that's mansef! The meat is served with rice, which is cooked with fried onions and a bit of oil so it's good and sticky, which is important because you should eat mansef with your hands - everyone around one bowl, grabbing handfuls of meat and rice, squishing them in your hands into a ball and then flicking it into your mouth. Messy food!

Or if you're feeling a bit posh, you can eat it with shrak, which is a kind of very thin flat bread. I watched this being made too, but am completely incapable of recreating it, as the skill needed to turn it from balls of dough into very large and thin discs looks like it takes years to perfect ...

The very thin bits of dough are literally thrown onto a very hot upside-down wok over the fire, and cook in seconds - delicious!

Desert people

After doing the tourist thing of touring castles in the middle of nowhere, I went down to Wadi Rum with the sole aim of resting and spending time with my many friends there who have taken care of me and my friends over the last year, and especially those who got me out of a fix when I broke my leg there ...

Those few days were bliss - no pressure to do touristy things, no programme as such, just lots of drinking tea, sitting around fires, driving around aimlessly in jeeps and reminding myself of why I love Wadi Rum so much despite unfortunate incidents in the past. Where else can you sit with multicoloured dunes and mountains all around, sharing sage tea with one or more adorable (and frankly rather handsome) Bedouins and just relaxing ...

I'm more than aware though that I still lead the charmed tourist life, so it was great for me to be able to spend some time during these holidays with the families of my Bedouin friends - a chance to get to know people in their own environment rather than in a tourist camp, meeting women and children (at last!) and seeing how they live. I've talked before about how I can't imagine living in this kind of environment day in day out - I would miss Radio 4 and the cinema too much! - but it was good to experience the lifestyle first-hand and to see that yes, it is hard, but people seem just as happy as we do in our modern inter-connected multi-faceted world ...

The Bedouins were nomads in the past (Bedou is the arabic word for nomad), but they almost all live a settled lifestyle now. Some of them have 'upgraded' to houses in villages, but there are still plenty who live in traditional Bedouin tents in the desert, and I went with my friend Suleiman to visit his granny and other family members in their encampment east of the Wadi Rum protected area.

As you can see, life is pretty simple - there was one large black hair tent, divided into three sections for cooking, living and receiving guests. Apart from that, there were areas for the animals (sheep, goats, chickens, young camels), water basins and, in these modern times, a water tanker to refill them, as well as another tented area used for toiletry needs - I must admit to not having used these facilities, so no details to report, but I'm guessing it was pretty basic - not one for you, urbancynic.

When there aren't things to be done, or when guests turn up, everyone gathers in the guest area to drink tea and catch up on the day, how ever member of the family is and any exciting news or gossip from the village. While I was visiting, some relatives from Saudi Arabia turned up and the family divided into men in the guest room and women in the kitchen, but this doesn't seem to be the way things are most of the time, and I'm guessing the rather more conservative Saudi relatives (the women with their faces covered, something you never see in the desert) were the reason for the segregation - keeping up appearances, even out here!

In the moments when everyone isn't sitting around drinking tea (and frankly, there doesn't seem to be that much time left to do anything else!), there seems to be a division of labour, although I'm not entirely sure it's a fair one. Here is what I have observed people doing over the last few months;

Children:

- herding sheep and goats

(involving walking many miles a day, occasionally comically riding small donkeys)

- carrying things for their parents

- playing

(a lot of this, with whatever comes to hand - hopscotch in the sand, rolling tyres, throwing things, banging things into the ground with stones ...)

- going to school

Women:

- cooking

- cleaning

- washing clothes, dishes etc

- washing children

- milking

- collecting eggs

- weaving, sewing etc (but not crochet I have discovered ...)

- shopping

- sitting around drinking tea

- having babies (lots of this still - 8 to 10 kids each not uncommon!)

Men:

- driving tourists around

- driving around looking for their camels

- mending the car

- killing and chopping up animals

- hunting

- training camels and/or racing them

- sitting around drinking tea and smoking nargileh (hubbly bubbly)

blokes actually doing some work ... and drinking tea

As you can see, some things are the same the world over - women keeping the ship afloat, while I can't help thinking that men get to do more fun stuff ... but at least out in Wadi Rum, everyone seems to find the time for family, friends and to just kick back and relax. And drink a nice cup of tea ...

Desert castles

East and north of Amman, there are several old sites which are often grouped together and called the 'desert castles' - although actually, they're not all castles, and strictly speaking one of them isn't even in the desert ...

But anyway, handily a good number of them are situated off a circular route from Amman which you could maybe do in one very long day with a nazi tour guide beating your legs to keep you running, but which we decided to do in two days in order to really have time to wander around and soak it in - and even then, we only managed four castles and part of one ruined city, with so much more to see ...

(There really is too much to do here, how could anyone really consider that they've 'done' Jordan in a week? Madness!)

So, here for your delectation is a whirlwind tour ...

First up was Qasr Al Hallabat - described in the guidebook as "sadly little more than a jumble of crumbling walls and fallen stones", so we were pleasantly surprised to see that a hell of a lot of reconstruction work has been done since the 2009 edition of Lonely Planet. Now there are some nice little jewels to visit, including a hammam with mosaic floor and a nearly completely rebuilt mosque (above).

This was originally a Roman fort and was then turned into a pleasure palace during the Ummayad Muslim caliphate - another reminder that these caliphs and their sheikhs knew how to have fun as well as build and fight! They used carved basalt stones stolen from a site further north for some of the walls, so that there are random inscriptions all over the place. And the rest is brick walls and arches of light sandstone in amazingly good nick (hard to tell how much is new, but it looks pretty authentic)

Next up was Azraq castle, a full-scale military fort that is best known for being where Lawrence of Arabia gathered the Arab troops for the last push to Damascus during the Arab Revolt - and it's certainly on the tourist circuit, we spent a good deal of time dodging packs of interested grannies.

As well as the room where Lawrence lived and planned his attack in the tower above the entrance, I was taken by the stone doors, the church converted into a mosque, and the many basalt carvings recovered and placed artistically in one of the old stable rooms - including the example below, a reminder that this area had elephants, lions and even hippopotamuses (hippopotami?) once upon a time, but various generations of hunters whittled away at the animal population until we came along and shot everything left that moved ... doesn't it make you proud to be British?

Next up was Qasr Al-Amra - this place is a classified world heritage site, and although it's tiny compared to somewhere like Petra or Persepolis, the amazing frescoes really are worth the trek out into the middle of nowhere ...

This was a hunting lodge, again built by the Umayyads under Walid I - a very enthusiastic builder who also built the great mosque in Damascus and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. This is obviously a lot smaller than those, but is really interesting because of all the human and animal imagery that are used in the decoration - the ban on images of living things in Islamic imagery came after Walid's reign. And some of the images here are pretty risque - let's just say that it's not just hunting that was on the minds of those sheikhs who came here for a bit of R&R away from the wife and kids ...

Last up on our little tour was Qasr Al Kharana - a bit of a poor cousin after the previous castles, but still a nice ten minute detour on the way home, and having the distinction of looking like a castle but not being one (the 'arrow slits' are only for light, you would need to be about 12 foot tall to actually use some of them). We're going with the 'caravanserai' theory, a stopoff for travellers, especially with the camel height stables by the entrance ...

But then I guess this is one of the fun parts of visiting old historical sites, trying to work out for yourself what was going on and what different things were used for by imagining yourself there - although I still haven't decided on what I think was going through the mind of whoever painted this picture (or possibly through his bloodstream?) ...

No such thing as "The Desert"

We've had a week off for Eid el Adha, and I've spent most of the time wandering different parts of the desert from north to south. The one thing I've thought about a lot this week is how different the desert is from what I was expecting - not just miles of dunes with the odd splotch of green around an oasis, but different landscapes, different vegetation and even different kinds of emptiness. So the next few posts will have a desert theme, in an attempt to get across the sense I have of the many many things that the desert has to offer; people, animals, landscapes and history stretching back and back ...

My itinerary over the last week

Just as a taster, here are a few shots of the landscapes I've been through in the last week, in my roamings ...

Point 1 on the route was in the basalt desert of the north east - very little vegetation, lots and lots and lots of dark hard rocks, and the odd oasis in an otherwise completely barren landscape, all the way to Iraq and beyond ...

Then after only an hour's drive, we found ourselves at point 2 in Azraq, which was once the largest oasis in the Eastern Desert, on the edge of where the basalt desert becomes sandstone - in fact this was a massive wetland which has been pumped almost completely dry, but there is a very small area left where you can imagine the previous lushness of it all ...

Point 3 was at one of the desert 'castles' in the sandstone desert east of Amman - the vegetation and colour have gone, and we were in the middle of many miles of light sand littered with sandstone pebbles and rocks. The very fact that there are castles here shows that once upon a time there was at least some water and vegetation here, but now it's just flat and empty ...

And then I was down south in Wadi Rum - truely beautiful, sands of every colour, mountains rising up in all directions and lots of vegetation of different types supporting plenty of wildlife and the Bedouin's flocks of sheep.

So this is why I don't just think of "The Desert" any more - there's not one big empty space, but rather a kaleidoscope of different desert landscapes, all of them with those huge skies, all interesting in their own way, many beautiful and some just endless. I always find it amazing that people manage to scratch out a living in every one of these places ... I just cannot imagine it, battling the elements every day, nothing to do but survive a lot of the time, and whenever I'm feeling sorry for myself, I remember these guys out in the middle of nowhere (REALLY in the middle of nowhere) and thank my lucky stars I was born when and where I was - although if I had to live in any one of these desert areas, I know which one I'd go for ...

Tea with Suleiman in Wadi Rum

Off with his head!

Another day, another trip to a fantastic historical location hidden in the far-flung valleys of Jordan ...

The country ground to a halt yesterday so that the elections could go ahead (of which more later), and so after being a good girl all morning and hitting the books, I decided to make the most of yet another gorgeously sunny day (sorry) and visit one of the many many sites I just haven't got around to yet - Mukawir castle, overlooking the Dead Sea. And I mean overlooking - it's situated on one of the last hills before the ground drops down into the Great Rift, and all around are canyons falling into the deepest place on Earth - good strategic positioning!

The castle that was on this hill was built in the 1st cen

tury BC by the Hasmoneans, but is most famous for being Herod the Great's castle, where John the Baptist was imprisoned and where Salome danced in exchange for John the Baptist's head on a plate - gruesome. Like so many of the sites here, there is stuff just lying around, unprotected and unmarked (we had to tell one bored American teenager off for trying to kick over a 2000 year old wall!). There was also a rather jarring attempt to reconstruct some of the central courtyard, a good example of what constitutes too much / poorly done reconstruction, but with good intentions I guess ...

The hills here have lots of natural caves, some of which you can see under the castle which were used as dungeons - they say that the head-chopping deed happened in one of them, but I can report there are no tell-tale bloodstains. You can easily imagine it though ... and then all around the castle, there are other caves in the hillsides that have also been converted and seem to be used by shepherds, who somehow manage to find enough for their animals to eat ...

But the thing I loved most about this place was the emptiness, the quietness, the majesty of it all - perched over a silent and empty world with the sea and Israel in the distance, the odd bird call and plenty of time to imagine the comings and goings of the ancient past ...

Wierd and Wonderful - the Return

Nobody could have predicted what we were treated to during a visit to Amman's citadel this week. It's a great place to wander around anyway, with new little nooks and crannies to explore every time I go, but this time we had something extra special waiting for us at the end of the high street in the old Ummayad quarter ...



And yes, they did play "Scotland the Brave" too ... so wrong, and yet so right ...