The Great Outdoors

I have been getting out of the city quite a bit on weekends lately, so thought I would share a few photos and notes about my various travels.  I was also out on my first bike ride in the countryside yesterday - which was amazing.  First time on a bike since February.  What a joy.  But that I will save for another post.

As-Salt

Just to the west of Amman, Salt is an Ottoman era town that thrived in the 19th Century with strong trading links to Nablus in the West Bank. This town has one of the most intact historic downtowns in the Country, built from beautiful, local, honey-coloured limestone.  It is purportedly the home of sultana raisins, and there are lovely terraced olive and grape groves that ring the steep hills surrounding the town.

The old pedestrian souk is still happening with household goods and food and live chickens and tandoor bread ovens and clothing stalls all doing a busy trade.  I walked up to the top of one of the hills ringing the town and found an old Ottoman era Turkish cemetery, still well-tended, and a bright shiny mosque.

I did stick out like a sore thumb in Salt on a saturday morning - not in hijab, unaccompanied by children or a man.  It was the first place I have been actively followed by young kids and teenagers calling out to me, wanting to talk, the insistent "hello, hello where you from" - a weird combination of exceedingly friendly and faintly menacing. 

Three hours and two very steep climbs in high heat saw me happy to get back to Amman and its urbane charms and relative anonymity.  The brightness of the sun gives all my photos from that day a bleached-out look.  Looking at them, I yearn for shade.

Dana Nature Reserve and Kerak Castle

A couple of weekends later, I went on a little overnight camping excursion to the Dana Nature Reserve  about 2 hours south of Amman with a friend and his mother, who was visiting from Mumbai.

Before heading into the campsite, we stopped by the original village of Dana nestled into a rocky hillside, overlooking a deep gorge leading down to the Dead Sea.  There has been some kind of human habitation in the village and gorge below since the iron age - closer to the sea is the oldest discovered copper mining site in the world.

The village itself dates to the Ottoman empire - probably 400 years old - and is hewn from local limestone.  It was abandoned in the 1970s, but is now growing again as part of an eco-tourism initiative run by the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN), which has seen the village become a destination for hiking, bird-watching and wildlife research, at the same time as creating jobs for local residents.  (As an aside, the RSCN is an amazing operation and Ontario could learn a lot from them about how to integrate environmental protection, eco-tourism and local economic development more effectively!)

Our campsite, also run by the RSCN, was about 10 km from the village and perched at the edge of the gorge, as well.  The heat and stillness and white canvas tents surrounded by sand and scrub grass made it feel a little like the high savanna in Africa.  From here, we watched the sun set, sat around in a bedouin tent drinking mint tea, looked out at the amazing night sky and all went to sleep early in our tents.

The next morning at 7am, I went for a hike by myself in the cooler morning air for dramatic views and lots of birds and a couple of brilliant blue lizards.  My friend who was out on a hike much earlier than I was lucky enough, in the dawn light, to see 3 groups of oryx - an antelope native to the region that is threatened with extinction from over-hunting.  A reintroduction program at Dana is seeing populations growing here - a success story. (Not to mention that "oryx" is an excellent scrabble word!).

On the drive back from Dana, we stopped by the Kerak fortress built on a high peak by Christian crusaders in the 12th century.  More fantastic views and gorgeous bleached limestone walls and, unlike our other stops, piles of old stone missiles from catapults of years gone by.  

I cannot get over how easy it is to access amazing natural and historic sites in this country.  Everything is easily within reach and designed to make you feel welcome.  Also something we could learn to do better back in the homeland.

"you made a mistake"

As usual, I was running a bit late this morning.  So instead of walking to my new office location (yes!... another office... this time at City Hall... the third one so far in the time I have been here), I walked out in front of the apartment to hail a cab.  The ride to this new office costs about 75 cents anyway, which makes it hard for other options to compete.  Not that there even are other transportation options.

So I am standing there in the bright morning sunshine, and a yellow car with a triangular light thing on the roof is coming down the hill towards me, so I hail it.  And the driver stops.  He is about 50 years old, grizzled, overweight, a smoker.  In short a typical cabbie.  "Where to" he calls out the window (in arabic).  I name the destination:  City Hall.   He says "get in."  I do.

The typical conversation ensues:  "Where you from?"  "Canada".  "Canada Very Nice.  You work at the embassy?" he asks.  "No, at City Hall."  Our topics are exhausted and we lapse into silence.

About 3 minutes later, half way to the destination, he tells me:  "You made a mistake."

Me:  "What mistake?"

Him:  "I am not a cab driver.  I am a driving instructor.  This is a learn-to-drive car.  Not a taxi. Different colour yellow."

Sure enough, I check the dashboard and there's no meter there.  And this is not a cab. And this nice man, seeing my waving on the side of the road, just decided to drive me to my destination because I am a hopeless foreigner in need of assistance.

So I am profusely apologetic and very grateful for the fact that he is going out of his way and thank him very, very much for his trouble.

And in his grizzled, smoking, driver guy way, he shrugs it off without anything approximating a smile and just says, "No problem....  Go in peace."

Something like this happens to me approximately 3 times a week.  Like Blanche Dubois in a Streetcar Named Desire it appears that I do, indeed, depend on the kindness of strangers.

world cup fever

 On my way home:

The check out boys, who are my pals, in the Haboob grocery store,  are split on who will win - one says Argentina, another is Italy all the way.  The young Iraqi guy who bags the groceries - maybe 14 years old, a refugee here - feels for me.  He says:  "You Canada.  Me Iraq.  We both bad."  He smiles in solidarity.

Closer to home, a server comes rushing out of a coffee shop,  kissing the mexican flag.  "Ana Mexico" (I am Mexico) he calls to me.  I reply: "Ana Espania".  He's happy for me.

There are flags everywhere along Rainbow Street, leading to my building.  They fly from the coffee shop patios, are taped to lamp posts, and stick out of car windows.  So far, I have noticed Italy quite a bit, and, most of all, Brazil.  Jordan didn't make the cut, of course, but that doesn't seem to matter.

Fun.

Aqaba

Tales of feral cats are going to have to wait another week while I report on my weekend trip to Aqaba.

A four-hour bus trip through a desert bathed in late afternoon sun delivered me there last Thursday.  Aqaba is one of those places that has been on my   "to see" list since I got here.  There's a great sequence in the film Lawrence of Arabia where the Arab Legion takes the city from the Ottomans in a daring attack from the mountains.  The name has always stuck in my head as an exotic destination where heroes and brigands collide.  And it was now or never to go.  I couldn't wait any longer:  once July hits, that part of the country starts hitting temperatures in the 40s (I guess that would be 100s for you Fahrenheit readers), and as it was, June is getting late.  Stepping off the air-conditioned bus from Amman was like walking into a Russian steam bath in a fur coat.

Of course, as these things go, the town is nothing like the picture in my mind.  And as it turns out, David Lean filmed the whole "Lawrence of Arabia" sequence in Spain, because the real place didn't capture his imagination.  But it was nonetheless interesting.  This is true bedouin country, a real desert town, very conservative like its near neighbour Saudi Arabia and quite different in feel from the urban north.   Camels were tethered to trees or being led around town by people in from the desert.   The streets on Friday, the holy day, were utterly deserted.  The radiant heat of the sun was bone-shattering - no one was out walking or sitting outside for leisure - certainly no unaccompanied women.  It felt like whatever local life happens there, is confined to families, behind closed gates, in covered interior courtyards probably with lovely fountains and shady vines.  As a tourist you have no access to that.

And overlaid on top of this conservative desert town is a burgeoning tourism industry taking advantage of the stunningly beautiful Red Sea.  This involves many high-end European hotels, where bikinis are worn and alcoholic drinks are enjoyed (including by yours truly) and few people leave the confines of the private beach and pool.   On top of that there is a smattering of local desert excursion companies and boat and diving tours that make their living off the visitors who venture out of the hotels or are looking for an entirely different experience.

And this was the second reason I was in Aqaba:  to go snorkeling along the beautiful, unspoiled, incredibly intricate coral reefs that edge the coast south of town and all along Saudi coast.

Friends from Amman set me up with a local diving company - which was terrific.  The boat trip was a fantastic day-long adventure, with two stops for swimming, snorkeling or diving.  The water was teeming with sea life.  It was my first time snorkeling in such a rich marine environment (I think the last time was when I was 10 years old  in the Ottawa River where I saw mostly clams and mud).   Huge, long electric blue pipefish, a couple of small blue marlin with the distinctive pointy bills, bright orange jewelfish, lots of yellow and black "finding nemo" fish.  Intoxicating. At one point, I almost floated away into the endless blue drifting along behind a huge school of flashing silver sea bream.

On board the boat was another adventure altogether.  There was a large group that had come from Beirut, all members together of a diving club there.  It was their first time at the Red Sea, and their first time in Jordan.  They were terrifically good looking to a person - men and women alike - charming, warm, outgoing, and with a gracious social ease tinged with a sense of superiority. This, I am told, is a hallmark of wealthy Maronite Christian Beirutis.   It was interesting chatting with them - on the one hand, as native arabic speakers, they have direct access to the whole arab world - the Gulf, Egypt, wherever - but in some ways this conservative, bedouin Aqaba where the ladies on the public beach go swimming in full black hijab, was as foreign to them as it was to me - even more so.

From the boat we could see all the neighbouring countries - Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and, at the head of the channel, one of Israel's most strategic ports, Eilat.  

And this was the other big observation sitting there on the hotel beach:  while local folks lead their lives and bring their camels into town, and tourists sunbathe and frolic on this sunshine coast, the big tankers also move up and down the Gulf of Aqaba moving goods from Asia into the Middle East.  Big commerce continues among these uneasy neighbours and the world goes on.

deeply disappointing

From the beginning,  I told myself that this blog would be about day to day life and sometimes work and I would steer away from the big geo-politics in this fraught region.  But rules are made to be broken, so this week I am going to venture into the political realm to express my dissatisfaction with the Canadian government regarding its position on the Israeli military offensive (in international waters!) against the flotilla traveling to Gaza.

I compare this:

"Canada stood alone before a United Nations human rights council yesterday, the only one among 47 nations to oppose a motion condemning the Israeli military offensive in Gaza." (The Toronto Star)...

to this:

"U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the violence. The European Union's foreign affairs chief, Catherine Ashton, said the bloc was deeply concerned and she called on Israel to carry out an inquiry. British Foreign Secretary William Hague deplored the killings and called for an end to the Gaza blockade. Greece, Egypt, Sweden, Spain and Denmark summoned Israel's ambassadors demanding explanations for the violence, with Spain and France condemning what they called the disproportionate use of force. Greece suspended a military exercise with Israel and postponed a visit by Israel's air force chief. Germany called for an immediate investigation but was careful not to directly place blame, and said it was seeking information on six German citizens believed to have been aboard the ships.
(Associated Press)... 

...and I am dismayed. The EU cannot be called radical. The UN Secretary General is not an off-the-cuff individual. Countries like Sweden, France, Denmark, the United Kingdom are all credible. And all of these (and many more!) have expressed measured, critical responses to this event.

So, I wonder: Why not Canada? When did we lose all proportion on this issue? How did we find ourselves in this situation? It is just plain bad... not to mention embarrassing!

So ... there you go. Unfortunately, this international incident means you will have to wait until next week for the post I am going to write about the wee, partially blind, feral (but very tame) cat who has moved out of the mean streets of Jebel Amman and into my apartment. And the excellent team at "The Humane Center for Animal Welfare" - a lovely group of people working here in Amman - who have treated all her ailments.

In the meantime, here's a picture of Smudgie aka Habibti aka The Smudge to pique your interest: