The Suez Canal, November 26, Tuesday
Arrival at
the Suez Canal is billed as fascinating, even exciting, but our vessel managed
to present itself at the entrance shortly before 4 a.m., and I slept through
the whole business. Ships must stop to
pick up a pilot and then wait to pass through the Canal in a convoy. Dare was awakened by loud banging and
scraping, not to mention the vocalizing by the local dock workers, who must
have large lungs of leather. I have yet
to be in an Arab environment where male workers are allowed to communicate in a
volume less noisy than a manly shout. By
the time I was up at seven all that could be seen from the ship were low sandy
shores on either side, with an occasional maintenance building and worker
housing. There are new towns on the
Canal, and Ismailia, which had once been a village, is now a sizable city. Without a lot to see, the passengers and
yours truly turned to reading, writing, bingo, golf putting, embroidery or
whatever the good stewards of our passenger entertainment had provided for that
day.
At sea, November 27, Wednesday
I had long
since rid myself of the horror of the vacuum of a day without a sight or a
port. The rest was most welcome. But one’s appetite for the sumptuous
desserts foisted by scheming pastry chefs on the naïve and unsuspecting such as
me, namely key lime pie and crème brulee’, not to mention those caloric toxins,
Bombay martinis and mai tai’s, alas does not diminish.
We headed
south through the Gulf of Suez, rounded the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula
and headed north through the narrow Gulf of Aqaba.
Aqaba/Petra, November 28, 2013, Thursday
Aqaba is at
the very bottom of Jordan and at the top of the Red Sea. It abuts
Eilat, which is a continuation to the west of white high-rise buildings
along the shoreline, and, thanks to overwhelmingly greater investment, is now a
top of the line resort catering to an international clientele. Aqaba has recently received a customs-free
zone designation, and foreign investment is already starting to develop its
beachfront. Several first class hotels
are already there.
The Nautica had put in at 8 a.m., and we disembarked about 8:30 to
find our local travel agent, Bilal al Saadi, head of operations, Aqaba branch
of Karma House Travel - DMC, a dapper young man clad in a suit and narrow tie
who spoke very good English and was the correspondent of our Istanbul agent,
Kaz, and our driver for the day, husky and compact Mahmoud. He was driving a comfortable Nissan sedan with
plush back seats. We drove through town
a bit to leave off Bilal and then drove north on the four lane road that runs
all the way to Amman, the capital, some 300 kilometers away. About an hour north of Aqaba we turned to
the west on the renowned Royal Road. The
terrain became mountainous, with the peaks separated in the manner of mesas of
the American Southwest. We gradually
climbed to about 3,000 feet and began to pass through resort towns, which
boasted clean hot weather in the winter and a proximity to Petra. Mahmoud proudly pointed out that Nicholas Sarkozy
and a lady that he presumed was Carla Bruni recently had vacationed in one of the
hotels.
Details of
the history of Petra are readily available on Wikipedia. Petra was principally a large caravan serai
at the crossroads of the most important trade routes of the first millennium
B.C. It was founded by the Nabateans,
classified as Arabs, who migrated north from Yemen about 1,000 B.C. and became
important traders, bringing local frankincense and other goods from Petra down
to Arabia, up to Jerusalem and east to the Silk Road. At its height, at the beginning of the Roman
era, the center had about 30,000 inhabitants, traders, innkeepers and
caretakers of the camels and horses.
The site was chosen because of plentiful water from springs and geological
features that translated into an impregnable defense situation. The locals will tell you that the springs
resulted from Moses’s striking of the rock with a rod way back when, but we
orthodox Exodus literalists don’t pay that no mind. The center could be entered only by
traversing a narrow defile anywhere from fifty to twenty feet wide that
extended for almost two miles. The
sheer, vertical cliffs on each side are about thirty feet high at the entrance
of the canyon and are more than 100 feet high as the canyon widens into the
center. The center extends into a
rock-floored open valley area, which I presume is defensible on the other side.
When we drove
into the Petra tourist staging area, we were dismayed for ten or so minutes by
the large number of visitors, buses, vendors and the proliferation of open-air
souvenir shops. Mahmoud took us to the
official entrance, procured our pre-paid tickets and introduced us to the young
man who was to be our guide. Jordanian
law prohibits visits to Petra unaccompanied by a guide. I have an antipathy to guides of any sort,
and so I can’t remember this young man’s name, but he was an Arab, about 5 foot
nine, and had very flat abs and short sleeves on a tight tee shirt that
displayed the better part of oversized triceps and biceps. He spoke English with an East London accent. He knew a few facts well and repeated them
for the next ninety minutes. We were
paying the same price as the ship’s tour, but instead of a bus ride and a guide
for 40, we had Mahmoud and Mr. Biceps.
We did better, but barely. Before
we started, Mr. Biceps introduced us to another handsome young man who must
also have been a guide, a Bedouin named Will.
In 1984 Petra was named a world heritage site, and the Bedouin settlers,
who had already largely abandoned their nomadic lifestyle, had to be moved out
of the canyon and valley. A comfortable
village was built for them on a plateau above the center, and now they have
joined the ranks of the lower bourgeoisie.
If Will is any indication, the sons of the Bedouin desert are as cool and
smart as anyone anywhere.
We began the
trek to the canyon entrance, about three-quarters of a mile. We were walking throughout that distance and
later through the canyon itself on flat limestone and a floor of large
cobblestones, some of it dating back to Roman construction. In the halcyon days of June, 1955, Dare
toured Petra courtesy of the officers of the British Queen’s Bays Regiment,
then stationed in Ma’an, then merely a village to the north of Petra, and
Aqaba. How this came about is too exotic
and improbable to be explained here. She
was driven to the canyon entrance in her own Landrover by her personal
chauffer, a sergeant of the Regiment.
This time we walked that stretch.
Happily it was downhill, and the tourists blessedly began to thin
out.
We entered the canyon and walked
another mile and a half until the opening in the rocks that I had been waiting
to see since I had first became aware of Petra in Richard Halliburton’s “First
Book of Marvels,” that I read in the third grade. Halliburton came from Indianapolis, and I
worshipped him all the way through high school.
His book for adults, “Seven League Boots,” has remained my inspiration
for a lifetime. Not to be outdone, Dare
lives in spirit with Freya Stark. Halliburton
flew across the Sahara in a single engine plane in 1930 and surreptitiously
swam in the pool before the Taj Majal, among other adventures.
A typical horse and buggy used by
out-of-shape people to get in and out of the canyon:
The mis-named “Treasury” is
pictured below. Over the decades,
however, a lot of marauding Arabs wasted a lot of ammunition trying to shoot
open the urn at the top of the façade, believing a superstition that the
Nabateans had stored gold coins there.
More likely the urn contained the ashes of Nabatean royalty.
We walked another two miles through
the adjacent valley of tombs and back, while I was taking pictures as fast as I
could.
Two young souvenir vendors:
More tombs:
Back at the Treasury, it was
already about one thirty, and there would be no lunch for a while. I weakened, Dare grudgingly acceded to my weakening,
and we hired a horse and buggy to take us up to the staging area where Mahmoud
would be waiting. The driver charged 40
euros, but I didn’t want to walk uphill for two and a half miles at that
point. The ride was swift, but the small
cab must have had wheels of steel because the bouncing and jostling killed my
back. I could hardly breathe for the
ten-minute ride. We finally located
Mahmoud, who drove is a short distance to the local, Swiss-owned Moevenpick
Hotel just outside the staging area. We
enjoyed a good buffet lunch, got into the car, and were driven quickly and
without incident back to the ship.
Once on the ship I rode a
stationary bike for thirty minutes, just to prove that the buggy ride had not
destroyed me completely, and topped that off with ten minutes of a steam
bath. Dinner on the Nautica was, as
usual, good and civilized. It was
Thanksgiving Day somewhere in a far off land, so we ordered a presentable
turkey dinner with enough of the trimmings to make it plausible. Alas, with the luck of the draw we were
seated with two very nice Canadian couples, who explained that they had enjoyed
their Thanksgiving holiday a month before.
They tried their best to help us celebrate, but our celebration fell a
bit short. All the while, however, no
Thanksgiving revelers anywhere were more thankful of their good fortune than
the two of us survivors of the Petra canyon.
Aqaba/Wadi Rum, November 29, 2013, Friday
Why pay for
a car and driver to drive for nearly an hour and a half through the desert just
for a tour of more desert in a valley called Wadi Rum? Because “Lawrence of Arabia” was filmed
there, that’s why. It’s a gorgeous place
for desert lovers (Palm Springs before 1975), movie buffs and geologists.
Mahmoud
picked us up at 8:30 as planned. He
drove us through older, colorful residential sections of Aqaba, but even there
the locals had already moved into three or four unit apartments long ago. We headed out of the same freeway to Amman,
but after 35 minutes he turned east this time.
Twenty minutes later we were at the tourist entrance of Wadi Rum. We found a modest souvenir shop and other
non-descript structures, but what attracted us were two antique rail cars from
the Ottoman period, which is to say the cars from the era of the Hejaz Railway
built by Kaiser Wilhelm for the Turkish Sultan that ran from Istanbul to Medina
both to facilitate hegiras and to consolidate Ottoman control over the Arab
lands. See photo below.
Mahmoud
handed is over to our local Bedouin driver, another handsome devil, who piled
us on to open rear seats of a four-wheel Toyota, and off we went, all in all
with stops for photo ops for about an hour.
The sky was a bit hazy, but splendid colors shown from the mesa-like
rock formations. There were other
vehicles and tourists scattered about the extensive dry river bed (for all you
non-Arabists, that’s what a wadi is), but we felt we had the place mostly to
ourselves.
There was a wide and long flat area where Lawrence’s cavalry
no doubt charged the huddling and fearful Turkish lines. The denouement came at an enormous vertical
cliff. There, a squeaky-narrow defile by
an ancient, sparsely leafy tree, opened into the multi-hued brown and gold cliff,
which soared at least 150 feet straight up.
I refused to be
swallowed up into the opening because, as the baseball players say, “no doubt”
a fall might endanger my expensive camera equipment.
Billy Goat
Dare, however, popped right up a few not inconsiderable boulders and began a
two or three hundred yard walk (it was so narrow and dark she can’t remember
how long it was) along a rounded shelf several feet above a trickling
stream. For Dare, it’s always 1977
hiking from the bottom of the Grand Canyon, notwithstanding what a decrepit old
woman she now is. She returned safely
after about 25 minutes, and we began the return drive to the staging area.
There we
found another village that had been built to house the local Bedouin
population. It seemed substantial and
comfortable enough, provided you would like living in Baker, California.
I was as
usual panicking about how late in the morning it was getting, so Mahmoud drove
fast and left us off in the port alongside the Nautica and lunch.
After lunch
we climbed aboard a Nautica shuttle bus that traversed shady streets lined with
hotels and apartments to the center of the Aqaba downtown area. The center is mostly humdrum, but it is not
a tourist area. Locals shop there and
take their tea and sweets in the various shops and cafes. Dare observed that most of the women were
covered. It all seemed quite
stress-free. I bought a great t-shirt at
a nice, clean shop with well-tended shelves called Alawneh Exchange. Interestingly, the shops that were the most
crowded mostly with women shoppers sold large assortments of nuts. The modern mosque with its gardens dominated
the downtown area. The luxury tourist
hotels are some distance away. All in
all the people seemed within the normal range of contentment, and our exercise
in mingling was very satisfying.
In the
following photos, you will see more portraits of the finest and loyal subjects
of his Majesty, the King of Jordan, as well a glimpse of the latest food
storage and vending techniques:
We took the
shuttle back to Nautica, which sailed about 8 p.m. for four consecutive days at
sea, given that the Egypt excursions to Luxor had been canceled some time ago,
and we would not be on land again until we reached Oman.
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