AMMAN, JORDAN: LAST DAY, LAST VIEWS, LAST THOUGHTS, AND HOME AT LAST

After spending a few hours on top of one of Amman's seven hills at the Citadel, we drove into the valley and got an up-close look at the spectacular 2nd century AD amphitheater that we had seen from above.  It seats 6,000 and is thoughtfully oriented towards the north to provide minimum sun exposure for patrons:

We had noticed the green, plastic-looking dome of this mosque from the Citadel. We wish we could have gotten closer:

With a population of four million, and with the basic layout of the city centuries old, traffic in Amman is just what you would expect: horrible.

Amman is considered one of the most liberal and westernized cities in the Middle East, and we saw evidence of that, along with some things we would never see in the West, such as the raw meat hanging up in the butcher shop window:

JORDAN: THE CITADEL IN AMMAN

Citadel: a fortress that provides security and protection for a city.

One of Amman's oldest sites is its citadel at the top of the highest hill in the center of the city of Amman, the capital of Jordan.

The citadel is part of some interesting geology that reminded me a lot of an old-fashioned lemon juicer:

The citadel is on top of the center peak. At its base is a narrow valley, and on the other side of the valley are a series of additional steep hills on which the city is built.That means that the 360 degree view from the top of the citadel is of hills that are almost as steep and high as the citadel itself.

In nearly every direction we could see these unimaginative, desert-colored, matchbox-style buildings:

How can a place with so much natural beauty build such ugly neighborhoods?

On a distant hillside we could see the Raghadan Flagpole, which is planted at the compound used as the royal residence by King Abdullah I and King Hussein, although not by the current king. At 416 feet tall, it was the tallest free-standing flagpole in the world when it was erected in 2003. The flag is 200 x 100 feet, or about two-thirds the size of a football field. These days the Raghadan Flagpole is only the 7th tallest flagpole in the world, far behind Saudi Arabia's 558-foot-tall flagpole in Jeddah.

JORDAN: LUMINOUS, BREATH-TAKING, MIND-BOGGLING PETRA

Just the name Petra alone evokes magic, like Xanadu, Shangri-La, or Timbuktu. It's the boutonniere of the Middle East, a shimmering, illusory place, carved out of salmon-colored mountains. 
                                                                      ~Bruce Feiler, Walking the Bible

It's hard to talk about Petra, Jordan's most visited tourist attraction, without indulging in an over-abundance of adjectives and figurative language. It is, quite simply, indescribable, but it is so compelling that we visitors all try to convey our awe anyway.

It starts out like most tourist spots in the area, with the customary gauntlet of tourist shops, but even here the mysterious calm of the place permeates, and no shopkeepers jump out of the recesses to hawk their wares.

It's too bad that our time was so limited. I would have enjoyed a little shopping without someone in my face the whole time.

Our hike into the canyon began with interesting but not unusual scenery that included a shepherd and his grazing sheep:

We could see gaping maws carved into the rock, orifices evoking silent screams, but then we noticed that some of them were rimmed by intricate carving, as the one in the center of the photo below:

Petra was created and inhabited by the Nabateans, a wandering Arabic tribe, beginning as early as the 5th century BC. They became the ancient equivalent of our modern-day millionaires by controlling the transport of frankincense and myrrh (yep, same stuff the wisemen had--dried up sap used in perfumes and incense) from Southern Arabia through "their" desert to Gaza via what is now called the Incense Road. Some scholars say that in the 1st century, the Nabateans were the richest race on earth. It's no wonder that Petra, their capital city, is so ostentatious.

In Walking the Bible, Feiler describes the transition the Nabateans made from nomads to landowners:

First the tribe of shepherds became traders, then they began to see how much money they could make trading, then they began to travel for months at a time across the desert, then they realized the need to protect their trade routes, then they decided they needed a central power to organize their riches. "Sure enough, in a few years the Nabateans had a king," [Feiler's guide Avner] said, "and suddenly a society that was built around equal tribes, with people helping one another, now became a stratified society, with nobles, merchants, administrators, and so on. It became like an urban society. That is the same change that the Israelites went through when they came to the Holy Land."

The first structure we came upon, if you can call it a structure because it is not built but rather carved into the rocky hillside, was the 1st century Obelisk Tomb and Bab el-Siq Triclinium:

The Obelisk Tomb on the upper level consists of four elongated pyramids and a cavern where five bodies were once placed for burial. (They are gone now.) What makes the structure especially interesting is the Triclinium, or dining room, on the lower level. Annual celebrations to remember the dead were held in the large, bench-lined room, a custom borrowed from the Romans.  This structure dates to 25-70 AD, or about the time of the crucifixion of Christ.

JORDAN:ON THE ROAD FROM AMMAN TO PETRA, NOTES FROM OUR GUIDES

We spent one day in Jordan with the full tour group of 90 people on a trip to the famed and mysterious city of Petra. We left early because the drive was over 150 miles on narrow roads and would take over three hours. Amman is in northern Jordan and Petra is in south-central Jordan.

Thank you, Google Maps

That's a pretty long drive, especially since we were going to do it twice in a single day. Most people turn a trip to Petra into a two-day venture, but we had no time for that. We were going to do the speed version. No worries. We had an armed Jordanian police officer sitting in the front seat of our bus "keeping us safe."  

Unlike Egypt, the security in Jordan is usually less overt. We were to learn later that they have security cameras all over the place, a Big Brother system of security not that much unlike our own. Overall, we felt very safe traveling in Jordan. 

More helpful than the police escort was the nutritious snack I brought along on the bus: 

I ate it in honor of my mother, whose maiden name was "Frey." It wasn't too much of a sacrifice, let me tell you.

During the long drive we passed through three or four small towns, seeing lots of mosques and minarets and no cathedrals and spires. Jordan is 93% Muslim.

The green stripe on the top of this picture is the tinting on the bus window.

JORDAN: THE ANCIENT CITY OF JERASH, "THE POMPEII OF THE EAST"

Jordan is not a very large country. I got perspective by superimposing it over my home state of Utah. Utah comprises 84,899 square miles to Jordan's 35,637, which means Utah is almost 2 1/2 times bigger than Jordan. Utah is surrounded by friendly neighbor states, but Jordan has Syria to the north, Iraq to the east, Saudi Arabia to the south, and the not-always-friendly Israel to the west. Wow! How does it survive?

Since returning home from our trip to Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, we have been asked many times if we felt safe, and our answer has always been yes. We felt safe even when we drove north from Amman to the ancient city of Jerash, located just 22 miles from the Syrian border. As I was looking for that distance on the internet, I ran across this website about travel safety in Jordan, which primarily focuses on their issues with Syria.

We were actually closer to Syria when we were traveling in Tel Dan National Park in the Golan Heights area.

In any case, Jerash may have been the place where we felt the most loved and wanted on this trip. Part of that was because of the teenage crowd there who treated us like celebrities. (More on them later.) In addition, it was clear that Jordanian merchants were anxious for tourists to come back. Of course, that was true everywhere we went.

The familiar shopping gauntlet. One preceded the entrance to just about every tourist venue we visited.

Jerash was inhabited as early as the Bronze Age (3200-1200 BC). In about the 4th century BC it became part of the Greco-Roman Empire and was later one of the cities of the Decapolis. It changed hands several times and was almost destroyed by earthquakes and war, but in 1806 a German archaeologist began excavation.

Its heyday was the second and third centuries AD, and many of the buildings date to that period. Jerash is called "the Pompeii of the East," not because it was destroyed by a volcano, but because of its excellent preservation.

JORDAN: SLEEPING AND DINING IN AMMAN

Like any large city, Amman has a lot of interesting places to eat, places where Bob would love to wander in and point at tasty menu pictures labeled in Arabic: 

There are also lots of "interesting" places where tourists can sleep, such as the Seven Wonders Hotel.  Hopefully that name doesn't mean they'd be wondering seven times during the night why they were staying there.

Our tour company booked rooms at the Intercontinental Amman, a sister hotel to the Intercontinental we had in Cairo earlier in the trip and in Nairobi last year.

Photo from here

Similar to our other two experiences with Intercontinental, there was plenty of security:

The lobby was beautiful, with live piano music playing much of the time and fresh flowers everywhere (literally--on counters and hanging in vases from the ceiling):

ISRAEL AND JORDAN: BAPTISMAL SITES

After stopping at the Dead Sea, our next destination was another famous body of water, the supposed "baptism of Christ site" on the Jordan side of the Jordan River.

But first, I want to go back to a different baptismal site on the Israel side of the Jordan River, which we had visited earlier in the trip.

The Israel site is called "Yardenit," which means "Little Jordan" in Hebrew.

It was a well-cared for site, really gussied up for tourists:

When we first arrived, there was some major action on the other side of the river--a group of young men catching an enormous fish. I didn't know a fish could grow that big in a river:

Yikes!

Yardenit has twelve separate baptismal pools, and visitors can be baptized there for free--with the rental ($10) or purchase ($25) of baptismal clothes and a towel. Many groups come here on pilgrimage, and I think that seems like a fair exchange. Their pastor or whomever they choose can perform the baptisms.

JORDAN AND ISRAEL: THE DEAD SEA

We had split off from our Fun-for-Less Tour, booking our own earlier flight to Amman and hiring a private guide, so that we could cover more territory in Jordan on our first day there than what was on the schedule for the group. Our plan was to reunite with our tour in the evening at our hotel. However, the one thing the larger group did on our day apart that we didn't was go swimming in the Dead Sea, something I've always wanted to do. 

We had seen the Dead Sea from a distance from Masada and as we drove south through the Negev Desert toward the Red Sea:

View of the Dead Sea from Masada

There is something mysterious, almost eerie about the Dead Sea. Maybe it's the color, or perhaps it's the isolation, or it could be its utter barrenness. 

I grew up around another "dead sea," the Great Salt Lake, and I have gone swimming there. It is well known for its high salinity of 5% to 27% (50 to 270 parts per 1,000, depending on the year), which is 2 to 7 times saltier than the ocean. The Dead Sea, however, is almost constantly at about 35% salinity, or 9.6 times as salty as the ocean. I hear this greater salinity makes the water more bouyant than the Great Salt Lake. I guess I'll never know.

However, as the Dead Sea straddles the Israel/Jordan border, and as Mount Nebo is quite close to the Dead Sea, we were able to convince our guide Isam to take us down to the water for a quick toe-dip.

I may not have gone swimming, but I saw the Dead Sea from two different countries, and I did stick my feet in it. That's not too bad.

The Dead Sea is really dead--no plants or birds, just people. In contrast, the Great Salt Lake has a bird sanctuary, marshes, and brine shrimp. The Dead Sea is also 1,407 feet below sea level and 653 feet deep, compared to the Great Salt Lake at 4,200 feet above sea level and 33 feet deep. Even though the surface area of the Dead Sea is only 230 square miles and the surface area of the Great Salt Lake is 1,700 square miles, the Dead Sea contains 27 cubic miles of water, while the Great Salt Lake contains just 4.5 cubic miles of water.

And there is one other big difference: the Great Salt Lake doesn't usually have a camel in its parking lot:

JORDAN: MOUNT NEBO (THE ORIGINAL)

Mount Nebo, a 11,929-foot massif at the southernmost end of Utah's Wasatch Range, looms over Nephi, Utah, a town thirty miles away from where I grew up.

Its imposing presence is reflected in the number of things named after it: the Nebo Scenic Byway, the Mount Nebo Wilderness, the Nebo Credit Union, and even Nebo School District, source of my excellent education. Utah's main north-south freeway runs right past Mount Nebo, and I've driven that stretch hundreds of times. My husband and one of our sons have climbed Mount Nebo and deemed it a pretty rigorous hike.

Understandably, I was more than ready to meet the archetypal Mount Nebo, a somewhat more stooped 2,680 feet-above-sea-level hump.

Just like many of the Biblical sites in Israel, this one is being cared for by the Franciscans. As I think about it now that I am back home, I wonder how the Jews and Muslims feel about Christian control of this site. Mount Nebo was Moses's last stop on his exceedingly long journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, a series of events that is a significant part of Jewish and Muslim tradition as well as Christian tradition. Some (but not all) members of all three traditions also believe Moses is buried somewhere on this mountain. It is not just a "Christian Holy Place."

However, until the Franciscans came in 1933, there was nothing at this site. Our guide told us that the Franciscans asked King Abdullah for the mountain, and he bought it and gave it to the them. They are responsible for all the work here, so I guess that gives them some rights. 

Pope John Paul II chose Mount Nebo as the place to kick off his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in March 2000. Maybe he was trying to symbolically continue the journey that, for Moses, halted here almost 3300 years ago. Like Moses, he got a pretty good look at the Promised Land from Mount Nebo's summit, but unlike Moses, he got to continue on.

Photo of photo at site

 During his visit, he planted an olive tree as a symbol of peace:

There is also a wonderful statue of Moses that was installed in 2000 and dedicated to Pope John Paul II:

The Latin inscription on the side reads, "One god, father of all, over all."

 This looks like Moses to me:

Seen head-on, the sculpture looks like a book, each strand of Moses's hair and beard a page:

An up-close look at the lower portion shows smaller books, as if on a shelf:

JORDAN: MADABA

The third country in our Middle Eastern Adventure Triumvirate was Jordan, a country with an ancient history but only recognized as a state under British supervision in 1922 by the League of Nations (and known as Transjordan until 1949). It was given independent status by the United Nations in 1946. For a good timeline of subsequent events in Jordan's history, go here.  

We arrived at the Queen Alia International Airport several hours ahead of our tour group. Although the airport has been around since 1983, this beautiful terminal is just two years old.

Jordan is slightly smaller in area than the state of Indiana and has a similar population. I'm always shocked by the relatively tiny size of these countries that seem to play such a critical part in world affairs.  It was a little scary to visit a country that borders Syria and Iraq, not the most docile places in the world right now. In fact, while we were there--March 2015--Jordan was participating with their neighbor Saudi Arabia in airstrikes on Yemen. However, Jordan itself seemed very peaceful. One thing that helped us feel comfortable was that Bob had hired a local private guide named Isam who took good care of us.

Our first destination was the town of Madaba (population 60,000), located about 20 miles south of the capital city of Amman. It was definitely a tourist town:

Jordan is about 92% Sunni Muslim, so it was interesting to see this partially dismantled Christmas tree in the town center. Note also the name of the Hotel: "Moab Land." No, not Utah's Moab. The Biblical land of Moab--the original Moab--was located in Jordan.

A few interesting things Isam told us about Muslims in Jordan:
- Almost all Muslims in Jordan are Sunnis, and almost all Muslims in Iraq are Shi'a. "Shi-ites are not Muslim," he said. The Kurds are Sunni.
- Assad, the leader of Syria, is Shi'a.
- Sunnis are liberal, so covering the face is against the law. Someone with a covered face, for example, is not allowed to enter a bank.
- They have no imam. They follow God. "Islam" means "surrender self to God" (not to man or a leader).
- Their practice of wearing head coverings comes from Christianity.

As we were walking through town, Isam (far left and wearing a white shirt in the photo below) stopped to buy us a cup of freshly squeezed pomegranate juice. Note the store in the background: Frankfurter (Wir sprechen Deutsch--"We speak English"). There are lots of German tourists in Jordan.