Incense Trail
Besides exotic merchandise the Silk, Scent and Spice routes
also carried new ideas, technologies and religions across vast distances,
shaping the history of humanity. The oldest route was the Incense Trail, which
linked the frankincense-producing regions of Arabia
with the empires of antiquity. The Silk Road was the longest of the routes,
stretching across mountains, desert and the steppes of Central Asia, joining
the markets of China with
those of Europe and the Middle East. The Spice Route
connected the great civilizations of Europe, India and the Orient for over 2,000
years. Arab dhows, Chinese junks and Spanish galleons would sail this route
laden with precious spices from South-East Asia
and the treasures of the Orient. Their trade of these routes bred international
rivalries and conquests, and the search for these riches impelled Columbus to cross the Atlantic
and Magellan to circumnavigate the globe. There has been an Incense Trade Route
for as long as there has been recorded history. As soon as the camel was
domesticated, Arab tribes began carrying incense from southern Arabia to the
civilizations scattered around the Mediterranean Sea.
By the time of King Solomon, the incense route was in full swing, and Solomon
reaped rich rewards in the form of taxes from the incense passing into and
through his kingdom. The records of Babylon and Assyria all mention the incense trade but it wasn't until
the Nabataean tribe of Arabs dominated the Incense Road that Europeans suddenly took
notice. For the Nabataeans completely monopolized not only the Incense Road but
the Silk Road as well. Up until 24 BC the
Nabataeans moved large caravans of frankincense, myrrh and other incenses from
southern Arabia and spices from India
and beyond to the Mediterranean ports of Gaza
and Alexandria.
The Roman historian Pliny the Elder mentioned that the route took 62 days to
traverse from one end to the other. Many of these stops were cities or towns
while others were simply watering locations or dry encampments in the desert.
They averaged between 20 and 25 miles apart. The Incense Route was not fixed. As towns or
kingdoms tried taxing the caravans passing through them, the merchants would
switch their routes, using different passes or treks through the desert. As a
result, towns along the route would wax and wane, depending on the route that
the caravans took. At its height, the Incense
Route moved over 3000 tons of incense each year.
Thousands of camels and camel drivers were used. The profits were high, but so
were the risks from thieves, sandstorms, and other threats. Soon after 24 BC,
the Incense Road
began to be replaced by the Incense
Sea Route. As Nabataean dhows carried Incense from
ports along the southern coast of Arabia north to Nabataea
and Egypt,
the inland route slowly passed out of existence. The question which naturally
arose (and I have posed this in numerous history forums) is why the Romans
themselves didn’t want to control the incense directly and keep paying the
exhorbitant taxes and high prices which arose. After all they ruled half of the
known world at the time. After running the Jordan Cup we traveled Jordan to Syria and then flew to Sanaa where
we followed the incense route. This travelogue describes the route as was
traditionally followed and we detail the traditional caravenserias and the
routes.
Why? And this was asked by almost everybody. Middle East is not the first destination which came to
mind of many in 2002. The churn and the saber rattling were already in motion
when we were deciding on our trip. Perhaps it is our uncanny ability to
unconsciously land up in controversial places at controversial times. But
possibly it also hits the heart of why we travel. Not to see places, but to
make contact with interesting people at interesting moments. Having finished
the trip it remains to date, one of the most exhausting trips we have had. It
wasn’t the 112 miles Jordan Cup prelude to the trip we started, but the
complicated logistics, the explosive moment of the situation (impending Iraq
war, unmanned drones wandering the skies), the border crossings, the wonderful
sights, and juggling with Amal and his demands, made it quite challenging.
Yemen
- Arabia Feelix
Overlooked by many, Yemen is a country that surprises
the visitor from arrival to departure. These consist of breathtaking
landscapes, incredible stone and clay towns, and above all a genuine and
extremely hospitable population. Towns with a refined and
unique architecture, burning deserts and cultivated plains. Veiled women in black dresses, who live in houses with
multicoloured windows. An enigmatic and seductive
country. Every little part of this land has been the object of man's
millenary work. From the terracing system, which chisels with
the cultivated fields the steep slopes and carves the highest peaks with steep
spiralled gradines like babel towers, to the countless hydraulic works,
embankments, dams and cisterns, which turn a dry desert into perfumed valleys
and gardens. This is the ancient Yemenite science: to live using every
smallest available resource, to snatch from the desert and aridity the
cultivable land, to turn an inaccessible and hostile environment into a happy
island. The great mosques and the extraordinary palaces built on steep ravines
attest the ancient wealth of this country, whose legendary history, which lives
in the name of the Queen of Sheba, is narrated also by the Bible. The imams,
the spiritual guides of the country, kept Yemen out of all forms of
"contamination" from the western culture. This in the past made
travelling in this country a difficult task, but today it reveals the great
value of a country with an intact culture. North Yemen was a kingdom in the
second millennium BC, later successively coming under Egyptian and Ethiopian
rule. It adopted Islam in AD628, formed part of the Ottoman empire
from 1538 to 1630 and was occupied by Turkey in the 19th century. In the
1960s Yemen was formed by
two independent countries: the Yemen Arab Republic,
in the north, and the South Yemen, with a
communist government. After some civil wars, North and South agreed to unite,
and in 1994 that union was finally achieved. Yemen exports cotton, coffee and
grapes, and in 1980s discovered a new potential source of wealth in the form of
oil. But border disputes resulting from discovery of oil have deterred foreign
investments and postponed economic growth, leaving Yemen one of the poorest of the
Arab countries. Yemen
is one of the world's most ancient countries and played an important part in
Middle Eastern trade, supplying the ancient world with such exotic items as
frankincense, myrrh, spices, condiments and other luxury items.
Sanaa
Our trip from Amman
to Sanaa was quite late in the night. We had to get back from Allepo (northern Syria) crossing the borders and everything to be
on time at the Amman
airport. We left early in the morning from Allepo this being the month of
Ramazan different services along the way would be closed. The flight was
uneventful except for the time when the pilot mentioned to take a look at Mecca glittering brightly for miles on, in the dark Arabian desert. We landed in Yemen around
3:00am dishevelled and haggardly and fitted right in. A Yemeni at first glance
looks quite menacing, his mouth swollen with Qat
and with his jambiya hanging menacingly. Some of them carry rifles. We got our
bags and decided to take a taxi to old Sanaa. At 3:00am
kids hussled to take our bags to the car. The driver decided the price wasn’t
enough, so he decided to wait for another flight for more passengers. In the meantime,
my pant got caught in a exposed upholstery and
completely tore my bottom. He drove us to a hotel (funduq as guesthouses are
called). Till we woke up in the morning and took a look
outside the hotel window. Stayed in a wonderful hotel in Old Sanaa with excellent views of
the old city.
Located at a height of 2360 meters above the sea, Sana'a is
one of the most interesting and extraordinary cities of the world, a true
open-air museum which offers to the visitor the stunning scenery of its fairy
architectures: white mosques and minarets, magnificent palaces which are more
than 400 years old, built of basalt stone and bricks, finely decorated with
whitewash embroideries and intricate friezework, enriched by a skilful play of
piercing, crowned by towers and embattled terraces. The old town transcends every
description. Strolling through the narrow streets you are wrapped in a magical
atmosphere. It's perfectly preserved and, if you don't mind the electric wires
and the cars, everything seems like hundreds of years ago. From the
architectural point of view, there's no trace of modernity and it is a bit like
stepping into one of the tales of Orient. Everywhere you lay your eyes,
enchanting foreshortenings come into sight. The houses merge each other. The
architectural style, while it's uniform, it offers countless variations on the
theme, turning a stroll around Sana'a's streets into a continuous discovery of
motifs, decorations, arabesques, where the dominant colours are the ochre of
the bricks and the white of chalk and plaster. Where the decorators' fantasy has
gone beyond every imagination is the "takhrim", i.e. the complex
stucco decorations of the windows, whose empty spaces are closed with coloured
alabaster (in the older ones) or glass. The tower-houses of Sana'a, with their
richly decorated facades, endure the memory of the artistic skills of sabean
architects. This city has the ambience and the charm of the tales seemingly
straight from the pages of "A Thousand and One Nights" and, at the
same time, it's a lively city, with one of the most charming traditional souk
of the Eastern world. Today Sana'a is a touristic city and it suffers all the
problems of the big cities, including the unfailing plastics and cans along the
streets. The Yemenite society, that once used to reutilize and recycle all the
waste, now it's not prepared to face the non-spoiling scum of modern industry.
Sana'a offers such anthology of inventiveness, skill, sense
of proportions and chromatic taste, of decorative inspiration and structural
solidity, that UNESCO declared it "World Cultural Heritage". Every
now and then, we met some Yemeni people. The men are all dressed in the same
way: a long shirt (usually white or ash), called "futa", upon which
they wear a jacket (usually black or dark coloured). Round the waist, they
always have a velvet damask belt, where they slip their "jiambiya",
the typical Yemeni knife. On their head, or on the shoulders, they wear the
"kefia", the typical Arabic headgear. Usually it is red and white,
but sometimes is black and white or black and yellow, or completely white. Women are covered with black veils and
sometimes carry a basket on their head.
Yemen
seems to proceed with binary systems indeed: up/down, wild
environment/elaborate architecture, North/South, water/desert,
man/woman. The last one is striking and subtle at the same time. It's based on
the man's ostentation and the woman's concealment. The manifest masculinity and
the hidden femininity are carried to the extremes. Just to begin, men have a
knife, the jiambiya, slipped at their waist, as soon as they reach the age to
be considered a man. This knife has a richly decorated sheath, often made with
silver, point upwards (maybe to hold it at the belt, but the phallic reference
is evident). Not to mention the handle, which comes out in a
scheeky way, well up towards the chest. The fact that
the male's hand and the force of gravity place the jiambiya with an angle-shot
of 30 from the body make the exhibition definitive. The jiambiya is a
precious object: it's socially invaluable, in that it qualifies the owner's
social standing. As if the knife wasn't enough, the Yemeni males show off all
kinds of fire-arms, from the revolvers to the most modern machine-guns. Among all these weapons stands out the Kalashnikov, a myth. As the men's nature is eruptive, as the women's life is obscure and
imploded. Women wear long black dresses, black stocking and a veil from
which sometimes the eyes appear. Women are protected by their houses; here and
there, on the high mud walls, you can see a little window jutting out, covered
with a tangle of arabesqued gratings. From there women look at the street, the
public space. Their home, the private, the dark, are
their reign.
Shihara/Shibam/Manakha
Located at a height of 2360 meters above the sea, Sana'a is
one of the most interesting and extraordinary cities of the world, a true
open-air museum which offers to the visitor the scenery of its fairy
architectures: white mosques and minarets, magnificent palaces which are more
than 400 years old, built of basalt stone and bricks, finely decorated with
whitewash embroideries and intricate friezework, enriched by a skilful play of
piercing, crowned by towers and terraces. The old town transcends every
description. It is one of the oldest Arab Medinas intact with its original
architecture. What is interesting is that until about 10 years ago you could
walk 1km from the center and not see any modern architecture. Strolling through
the narrow streets you are wrapped in a magical atmosphere. It's perfectly
preserved and, if you don't mind the electric wires and the cars, everything
seems like hundreds of years ago. From the architectural point of view, there's
no trace of modernity. Everywhere you lay your eyes the houses merge each
other. The architectural style, while it's uniform, it offers countless
variations on the theme, turning a stroll around Sana'a's streets into a
continuous discovery of motifs, decorations, arabesques, where the dominant
colors are the ochre of the bricks and the white of chalk and plaster. Where
the interior decorators' fantasy has gone beyond every imagination is the
"takhrim",
i.e. the complex stucco decorations of the windows, whose empty spaces are
closed with colored alabaster (in the older ones) or glass. The tower-houses of
Sana'a, with their richly decorated facades, endure the memory of the artistic
skills of sabean architects. This city has the ambience and the charm of the
tales seemingly straight from the pages of "A Thousand and One
Nights" and, at the same time, it's a lively city, with one of the most
charming traditional souk of the Eastern world. Today Sana'a is a touristic
city and it suffers all the problems of the big cities, including the unfailing
plastics and cans along the streets. The Yemenite society, that once used to
reutilize and recycle all the waste, now it's not prepared to face the
non-spoiling scum of modern industry.
North
Yemen was a kingdom in the second millennium
BC, later successively coming under Egyptian and Ethiopian rule. It adopted
Islam in AD628, formed part of the Ottoman empire from
1538 to 1630 and was occupied by Turkey in the 19th century. In the
1960s Yemen was formed by
two independent countries: the Yemen Arab Republic,
in the north, and the South Yemen, with a
communist government. After some civil wars, North and South agreed to unite,
and in 1994 that union was finally achieved.
Every now and then, we met some Yemeni people. The men are
all dressed in the same way: a long shirt (usually white or ash), called
"futa", upon which they wear a jacket (usually black or dark
coloured). Round the waist, they always have a velvet damask belt, where they
slip their "jiambiya", the typical Yemeni knife. On their head, or on
the shoulders, they wear the "kefia", the typical Arabic headgear.
Usually it is red and white, but sometimes is black and white or black and
yellow, or completely white.
Independent travel in Yemen
has been curbed since 1998. You need to have a registered guide and hire two
security personnel (about $5 for two people per day) if you want to go within
certain regions of Yemen
(specifically Marib and Shihara). Bedouins displaced by privatization of oil
fields in villages with no government help, kidnap tourists to demand
infrastructure such as schools, hospitals. By and large captives had been
treated well for couple of days/weeks and then released when their demands were
met, until 1998 when a few tourists were killed and led to extra regulations on
independent travel. We visited Marib a city about 200km from Sanaa, famous for
ruins from the Queen of Sheba times. The desert dams and the
old Balkis palace. Cities which grew rich by levying
taxes on passing caravans. Subsequent days we visited
Wadi Dhar a very elegant rock palace, Thila, Shibam and Kokabam. Each of
these cities a mountain village, ferociously independent until about 40 years
ago even under independent Yemen
till they were brought under unified control by aerial firepower. Again each
city has its own Jewish quarters/Turkish quarters signified by either a six
star (star of David) or a eight star (turkish). Guns
are very prevalent in regions outside Sanaa. The number of firearms in Yemen is about 2-3x population of Yemen. People
like to be photographed and almost except folks who sold live firearms refused
to be photographed (I didnt want to be the one to "shoot first and ask
questions later" :). The next day we visited Shihara another mountain
village very remote (about 4 hrs on dirt road)famous
for its 17th century mountain bridge joining the villages across a gorge. Since
Shihara is under a different tribal control, we were asked to leave our vehicle
and be accompanied by their own guide and security
personnel.
The final few days we spent in a wonderful mountain villages
of Manakha/Al-Hajjara again with their own unique architecture and brilliant
use of local building materials. Al-Hajjara has no road which can take a
vehicle and the whole village is a museum. Finally we visited Al-Hutayb a site
very famous among the Bohras and Ismailis (whose religious origin in Yemen) a
Masoleum of Syedna Hatim and the wonderful mosque at the top of the hill. The
mountains around Manakkha are wonderful for hiking and the scenery comparable
to the Inca trail. In Yemen
we got a chance to stay in funduqs (guest houses of Yemenis) (at Shibam and in
Manakkha) and got to enjoy their home made food and in Manakkha a singing and
dance party (a tourist trap :)
An almost 35hr tiring flight back to SFO with Amal was another endurance
finale.
Yemen
was very rewarding. The people are wonderful and you can carry out an informed
discussion with anyone on the street. Yemenis chew Qat
leaves, a mild narcotic, spending about half to 3/4ths of their income on
this-- apparently chewing this for couple of hours gets you high and is Islam
compliant. Qat bears heavy on the local economy competes with other food
growing. Yemeni coffee is also very popular. Although
Ethopians discovered it, Yemenis made it popular and Mocha coffee gets its name
from Al-Makha where it was originally grown.
And the most interesting part of the trip was that on the Amman-Sanaa-Amman
night flights the pilot pointed out to us the cities of Medina
and Mecca in Saudi Arabia below and in the flood
of lights, we could see the dark patch signifying the Kaaba, an awesome and
revering sight even for a kafir like me. With a billion
people pointing their compass bearings to this place. And how do you
understand a faith of so many people by simply analyzing its scriptures,
without understanding the rugged desert geography or its tribal history or its
people?
Jordan
This run matter is finally done and we can get on doing
other things. Today we went to a dive site 15km from here in Aqaba, close to
the Saudi border (Apparently the best in the region). Reena managed to get one
dive, tomorrow is my turn.
Petra
was very exciting. Lots of stuff and horse, donkey and camel rides for Amal.
Went to Dier Monastery and getting back a kid asked "You want donkey like
her?" at which I couldnt figure if he was referring to Reena or the donkey
:) Anyways we took the donkey and Reena and Amal had interesting time coming
down.
Syria - Axis of Evil Jr.
We took the early morning bus to Damascus
from Amman, I'd
been counting on clearing customs with a tourist visa and a smile but the
border guard asked us to detail our money, why we were there. When our first
bus left, Reena used her assertive voice to get at the bottom of the issue and
turns out there was no issue at all – enforcing my usual operandi, when in
bureaucratic hassle let your wife handle it. We boarded the next bus to Damascus.
Damascus
Fifteen minutes, total, and Damascus came into sight. That was all it
took to see the enemy capital in the distance. Fifteen minutes and you were
further into the mystery of Syria
than the United Nations was at the time. Just 15 minutes and you were closer
than Saint Paul
was when he was knocked off his horse. Fifteen minutes and you were as close as
Muhammad supposedly ever came. Arriving with his armies in a.d. 630, he
compared the first sight of Damascus
to a glimpse of paradise, but he only saw the city from afar, at night, and
never entered its gates. Another 15 minutes across a dust bowl and we roared
into the city and screeched into the central taxi yard so hot you'd think an Israeli
tank column was on our tail. We learned three things in Damascus: The enemy has terrible taste in
music. The Syrians probably invented food. And Muhammad had a point: At night,
the grit disappears and the hillsides glitter with amber lights. Heaven, even here. In automobiles and other ways, Damascus, like Havana,
can look like the city the world forgot. It is arguably the oldest living
settlement in the world, inhabited for almost 10,000 years, yet now best known
as a capital of tyranny, headquarters of a military regime isolated by
international opprobrium and feared by its own people. Syria is your friendly neighborhood thug, its
government a milder variant of the same Baath Party (secular, socialist, and
sadistic) that held Saddam’s Iraq
in its grip. Syria
has taken over the role of rogue state. Axis of evil, junior
division. But if Syria’s
government has been cast as the black hat in international affairs, the Syrians
themselves make the sweetest of villains. Things began to look up when Assad
the younger took over dictator Hafez al-Assad died. Cell phones were made
legal, then satellite dishes, which now crowd the
skyline of the capital, challenging the monopoly on information. Tourism has
grown 5 percent a year, with Europeans and even American Christians drawn to a
breathtaking stockpile of Greco-Roman–Byzantine–Crusader ruins, religious
shrines, and social graces drawn from the golden age of Islamic civilization.
But the pleasures of Syria (uncountable historical
treasures, sympathetic people, sublime food) come with
drawbacks (blistering deserts, Mad Max roads, a murderous police state). Only
the smart bombs know the coordinates of the future. The one sure thing is that,
squeezed between Iraq and a
hard place, Syria
is in for a bumpy ride. Like Cuba
in 1957, this twilight shall not come again. And so, to the tune of the saber
rattling, we went to sing the praises of the enemy one last time.
Everything in Damascus
is fabulously, incomprehensibly filthy, coated in
talcum-fine desert grit. It is a city of more than a million, with an outermost
layer of cement plants and car dealerships, the dry skin shed by a snake.
Inside that husk is a noir new city,
a wilderness of empty architectural gestures, never-finished towers of rebar,
and abstract avenues that lead to theoretical traffic
circles. Orwell designed this Damascus:
The Ministry of Information prevents anyone from having information, the
Ministry of Economy and Trade strangles the economy, and the Ministry of the
Interior meddles in other country’s affairs. Every car, shop, and house carries
a painting, photo, or decal of President al-Assad—Hafez or Bashar, take your
pick.
At dusk, this new
city drops its shutters, leaving scattered pockets of
seedy nightlife—“superclubs” that open at midnight, stocked with expensive
liquor and Ukrainian dancers. But in the mornings the Old City still girded
with an oval of Roman walls pierced with nine gates, this ancient Damascus is
packed with sweet shops, antique dealers, minarets, and, at its heart, the eighth-century
Umayyad Mosque, where the relics of many religions are placed side by side.
On the way back through the Muslim quarter, we were lost in
a maze of alleys.
Transition is a Syrian euphemism. A transition to something
unspecified, a world after. After Bashar? After a cruise-missile strike? A civil
war?
In 1909, before he was "of Arabia" and when Syria was still part of the Ottoman Empire,
21-year-old T.E. Lawrence had set out in similar circumstances—instability,
banditry, and halting Arabic—to write his Oxford
thesis on the Crusader castles scattered along Syria's coast. For two months he
mapped the dozens of visually linked keeps and signal towers built by the
European invaders in the 11th and 12th centuries, sleeping in Arab houses and
walking huge swaths of the Nusayriyah
Mountains with a
sketchbook, a pistol, and a Boy Scout shirt tailored by his mother with extra
pockets. Reaching the first and greatest of these castles, Krak des Chevaliers,
was a three-hour drive on good roads and the edge of death. I'd quickly learned
to pick older, feebler taxis, but the rounded Renault was still squeezed from
both sides by trucks going 70 as grinning motorcyclists and panicked donkeys
wove crosswise through the mix. Occasional interlopers shot at us headlong,
down the wrong side of the divided highway. The bleak landscape was interrupted
only by giant statues of the late dictator, Hafez al-Assad, and a road sign
that read thank you for visiting hama. Hama is where dear old Hafez used tanks to
kill at least 10,000 of his citizens while crushing a 1982 rebellion.
Tucked up inside a pass, controlling the high ground, was
Krak des Chevaliers, Castle of the Knights, a staggering work of medieval
ambition with exquisitely preserved double-curtain walls, towers, battlements,
and, yes, a spot for dumping boiling oil on the enemy. Lawrence
said it was better than any castle in Europe.
From the top of a tower once occupied by Richard the Lionheart, we could see, a
dozen miles to the northwest, a small fortress clearly visible against the sky,
the next link in the Christian war machine that held much of this coast for
close to two centuries.
Crac
de Chavelier
Above the city, the last green juniper forests of Syria concealed
another incomprehensible, absurdly grand castle, Qalat Saladin.
It was Syria
that put the "Orient" in Murder on the Orient Express, and Aleppo, the great
highland city of the north, where her sleuth, Belgian detective Hercule Poirot,
waited for his train. Christie was writing what she knew: Married to an
archaeologist, she spent much of the 1930s living in a mud-brick house at a
remote dig site outside Aleppo,
typing furiously. Despite the murals, Aleppo
has changed at a glacial pace over the past 6,000 years. Recent big events have
included a sacking by the Tartars, in 1260.
Basra
We wandered Aleppo's
enormous Armenian quarter, packed with ancient churches and vendors of delicate
sweets. (They also have the head of John the Baptist's father, in case you
didn't get your fill in Damascus.)
There were miraculous and medieval sights around every corner—soccer-playing
imams in one place and, down the next alley, cheery children hammering metal
inside a Dickensian workshop. Like any police state, Syria has little crime, so the only
danger I faced in the souk, the huge covered marketplace, was being run down by
a donkey messenger. Crumbling but alive, too poor to be ruined by progress,
decorated with old cars and European tourists, Aleppo is a desert flower that persists only
in the adverse conditions of geopolitical hostility and a moribund
dictatorship.
Outside the great Umayyad Mosque, black cars disgorged
"regime elements": colonels, generals, and secret policemen in
tracksuits and dark glasses. Shiites and Sunnis pushed up against each other,
crowded by Christians and Kurds. Even a congenital atheist could be swept up in
the riptide of faith.
Palymra
A once prosperous stop on the Silk Road, Palmyra
may possess the greatest array of antiquities in all of the Middle
East, which is really saying something. Colonnaded avenues led for
three miles through temples, courts, senates, and bathhouses, ending finally,
fittingly, in mortuary towers that ran into the far desert. The futility of
empire, the dusty brevity of human ambition, came crashing home, punctuated by
the roar of Syrian MiGs passing overhead on their evening patrol. Iraq was about
80 miles away. Like the past, the future is now.
For an hour we paralleled the invisible border, nothing but
dust between here and the war. A traffic sign with a huge arrow pointed left: baghdad,
it read. We went right.
As we raced for Damascus,
straight as an arrow, a huge chocolate-brown hawk dropped into formation beside
the car. The bird coasted above the roadside ditch at 60 miles an hour, barely
moving a feather, grazing the top of the weeds, head down, hunting.
Jordan
Petra
Aqaba was nice to dive. A guided dive introduced us to
several endemic corals and fishes and taken some nice photos. Returned back to Amman via the Dead Sea
road and stayed there for about 5 days. The Madaba church housing the famous
middle-east mosaic, Mt. Nebo the site of Moses death, Jerash to a Roman city
north of Amman, some magnificient Ummayad desert
castles in the sandy plateau along the Amman-Iraq border and mud-bath on the Dead sea. As usual Amal drives
our pace along the road. We are now experts on backpacking the middle east with a baby during Ramadan. Shops close around
4pm and services are highly erratic. However the times we have tried
we have always found a good soul to
haul us back. We then setup base for couple of days in Allepo and city just
below Turkey and Euphrates river. The caravan
stopped here in khans or resthouses as we checked into a Russian/Armenian
hotel. The Allepo souqs and citadel are magnficient and kababs are great. The
city caters to lots of Russians who come here with their goods exchange them
and return back with goods to sell there. Visited Hama an old city famous for its water wheels
and also infamous for Assads genocide of 20,000 shias
in the 80's. Yesterday we visited on St. Simeons
basillica and well preserved church and the biggest one in the middle east.
Hitched a ride back to Allepo on back of a pickup truck and took a night bus
back to Damascus.
Desert
Castles
We drive by bus to the "desert castles" which were
built for the caliphs in the 8th century as places of residence and hunting lodges
through meager landscapes. The Qasr Al Hallabat which was built of bright
sandstone and basalt is only a ruin. The Qasr Al Azraq served legendary
"Lawrence of Arabia" as accommodation. From here he organized the
resistance and the battle of Akaba. We
see impressive frescos and mural paintings in the Qusayr Amra (little castle).
It was presumably built of the caliph Al-Walid. It was used as a relaxation and
entertainment place. Qasr
Al Kharana rises on a ledge. It is still controversial, whether this castle was
set up for the defense because the narrow embrasures are laid out quite
exceptionally anyway. Jerash is our aim
the next day. One also calls it Gerasa. This ancient town belongs to the
biggest and the best and complete received Roman provincial towns of the world.
It is called the Pompeji of the Middle East
and the town of the one thousand columns.
Madaba
The next day leads us to Madaba. We look at a map of Palestine laid out as a floor mosaic which
served the pilgrims as a guide in the Greek orthodox church.
We reach the mountain Nebo across bendy streets in 800 m of height. According
to the Bible this is the mountain of which the praised country saw from Moses.
He also shall be buried here. The look goes far over the Jordan valley up to the dead
sea and to Israel.
Inside, the cloister admires lovely mosaic work. On the continuation of the
journey we suddenly stand in front of a deep valley. The Wadi Mujib or grand
Cannon of Jordan separated the people of the Ammoniter and the Moabiter from
each other in earlier time. We drive on to the crusader fortress Kerak over the
king street. This was built by crusaders and taken by the arabs
and further improved later in the 12th century.
We approach the highlight of our journey now. Petra, the "red
town" of the Nabatäer, is a town fascinating, chiseled from the new red
sandstone. After a restful night in Petra
we go to the Siq, the entrance to the rock town, in the morning. We wander
through a narrow, deep ravine which could be defended excellently. After an
inflection we see unexpectedly the "treasure house", Petra's most famous
monument. In front of itself, it is
already very impressive to see the 40 meters high and 28 meters wide façade
which was hit completely from the rock and looks always very well. On the right
of the treasure house the ravine then gets broader again and a natural arena
opens. We passes by the theater across the
"street of the façades" which offers 3000 visitors place. We hike further across a street surfaced
well. The ascent to the Deir (cloister) is arduous. One is compensated by a
lovely landscape through which one has to stride. The Deir is presumably a
temple which was dedicated to the King Obodas and is hit to the rock face. A
gigantic room has been hammered out with an outstanding acoustics inside.
Aqaba is Jordan's
only port, located by the red sea directly besides the Israeli Eilat. Dealers
offer their goods for sale in the bazaar streets. The red sea invites us with
its warm, clear water for bathing and snorkeling.
The last section of our tour is a stay at the dead sea. The water which is strongly salt and containing
mineral is successful remedy particularly for skin diseases. The salt lake is
400 meters under the sea-level. By the high salt content the impetus is so high
in the water that you can not go down while taking a bath.
After three days relaxation we return to Amman
for our flight home from this fascinating part of the Orient.
Summary: It is not
personal, and truth be told, Arabs are lousy drivers. And since the friend of
my enemy's enemy is the enemy of my friend's friend, we did find it quite
universal to be driven like crazy, with no regards for their (and our) lives or
personal property. Squeezed between Iraq
and a hard place (the US),
the Middle East (and their roads) are sure in
for a bumpy ride. In busses when people started to smoke, I would immediately
open all the windows drawing in freezing draft. In minutes, people would
apologize and snuff out their cigarettes. Heck if they wanted to smoke in front
of Amal, they better bear the cold. For Arabs, hospitality is among the most
highly admired of virtues and lies at the heart of who they are. How well one
treats his guests is a direct measurement of what kind of person he or she is.
It is common practice whilst preparing food to allow for an extra portion in
order to cater for the unexpected guest. When a meal is over, there should
always be a good portion of food left over otherwise one might think that
a guest had not been fully satisfied. We found ourselves being offered the
choicest portions of the drug Qat, Amal was offered the choicest portions of
chicken as he wandered around old souks. We played a little
mongrels with our cultural, religious, national or ethnic identities. If
they insisted on being nosy, I would tell them about our stay in Israel – and
out of respect or just confusion not one would say a word. Reena sometimes
would suddenly decide to assume her strong Hindu identity with her bindu and
kumkum (maybe she was experimenting with parts of her Berkeley thesis) immediately turning herself
into some Bollywood exotica alluring more than her usual share of roadside
Romeos. Some would sing to the tunes of Raj Kapoor. In Yemen, knowing fully
well that the news suggested that bin Laden was hiding somewhere in his
ancestral town of Northern Yemen, I would ask my driver if he thought what we
heard in the news was true – and he would reply – that we were soon going meet
him. It did freak us out initially, with the Iraq war looming in the background
and the constant back of the head reminder that we were being tracked by the
FBI, the CIA and the Al Qaeda alike. In most of our trip, I always had that
feeling that the smart bombs being assembled in the Gulf knew our coordinates
to greater accuracy than we did ourselves. Here is some of the potraits
of the
people we saw.