the hashemite kingdom of jordan

You know that's the official name of Jordan? That's what it says under the ubiquitous photos of the king: "His Majesty King Abdullah II of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan." That's an awesome title.

(Of course, Bhutan's ruler still wins, hands down.)

But wait wait, I was still diving in Dahab last update. Diving is as addictive and more expensive than drugs, so one last goodbye to the loverly aluminum cyclinders, and let's go.


As soon as you turn around from the blue blue Red Sea waters, you're looking at Sinai's barren red red mountains. They look great. I wanna go see 'em closer up.


That's the view at sunrise from the top of Mt. Sinai. I waited and waited and waited for hours, but no commandment tablets from up high, so Reginald (another disappointedly un-chosen climber) and I made up our own. Free pizza Sundays, no pants Fridays... we hope they catch on.

Actually, if God had to make up a single commandment for everyone who climbed Mt. Sinai, He'd never have time to eat!


Here's a high-school-art-class photo I took.



Alright, I'm doing well on time, let's see Petra. I've heard good things.


--- LEAVING EGYPT (EXODUS?) ---

The problem is that Petra is in Jordan, and while I thought Egypt bordered Jordan, it turns out Israel slices down to the port of Eilat. I did not realize that.


So, to save precious real estate in my passport, I opted for the somewhat expensive (Nuweiba, Egypt) -> (Aqaba, Jordan) ferry. It was a disaster.

After being lied to in Dahab about how the ferry's not running today (the guy wanted me to stay another day at his hotel), by the time I figure out the truth (the ferry doesn't run tomorrow), I've missed the bus. So $30 taxi to the Nuweiba dock, and get there in plenty of time for the 2pm ferry. But where's the ticket guy? Out to pray, back around 2pm. But that's when the ferry is! "Don't worry," I'm reassured. I've heard that a lot on this trip. It's as much an alarm as "good price."

Serendipitously ran into Mini, whom I befriended in Siwa, so the time passes fast enough, but by 6pm she and the Japanese couple we met were taking naps. No word on the ferry. Nobody seems concerned or aggravated. Now in India, I expect this, but Egypt so far has been pretty decent.


Around 9pm, I'm getting hungry. The ferry isn't even in the dock yet (if there even is a ferry), so screw it, I'm leaving this sweaty-hot concrete-box port and getting some food. Here's where things get really sour. The soldiers won't let me leave the port, as officially I've exited Egypt. If I want to get food, I need a re-entry stamp. But it's past 3pm, and the immigration folks have all left. We get in an argument, which ends with an armed guard escorting a fuming me back to the port, hungry and stuck.

Beyond this gate is Egypt, where I'm not allowed.


By about 10pm, folks are getting aggravated, little bubbles beneath the surface, and 4 soldier/guards come over to play sheepdog. People start getting angry and shouting, and the soldiers are barking and make us all sit down crowded together outside. The very few women in the group, Mini and Japanese friends included, are taken on a bus somewhere. (I learned later they were taken to the ferry, which was somehow already pretty full, and left without the men). This whole scene, hundreds of hungry, tired, half-angry half-despondent people sitting cramped together as armed guards seperate the women and put them on buses, while the men wait huddled on dark concrete ground at night lit by a half dozen flood lights, it really makes you think of prison, or war, or something. There were maybe 300 of us cramped together, and I was really hungry and trapped and the whole scene was awful and surreal and I kinda snapped, and stood up and started yelling at the nearest guard.

This group of Egyptians, about my age, try to calm me down, and one of them speaks excellent English. He calmly talks to the guard I was yelling at, and then takes me aside. He tells me that (1) don't worry, he's going to take care of me, (2) the ferry has already left for Jordan, but will be returning for us, though the trip is 2 hours each way, so we have to wait 4-5 hours, and (3) I have to calm down or I'm going to be arrested.

This guy (his name is Mohammed, of course), became my guardian angel. He got me an apple. He found a curb that was more comfortable to sit on. When the ferry finally came, at 3am, everyone's pushing and shoving to get on, because not everyone is going to fit, and I'm one of the people who does NOT get on. Then, I swear to you, just like a guardian angel in a cheesy made-for-TV movie, Mohammed walks from the ferry (he's already on, somehow) directly to me, takes me by the hand, and I don't know what he's saying to these officials, but he's like the Great Gatsby meets the Artful Dodger. I follow him past everyone, through doors, past guards, and up stairs to the ferry's VIP lounge, where he takes my passport and when I wake up, still in my plush VIP seat, I have a Jordanian visa. I don't know what I would have done without Mohammed. I just don't even know.

I arrive in Jordan at 7am, after one of the worst nights of my trip.

You know what's a really viscerally uplifting sight? The rising sun. Seriously, night's over, and something about seeing the sun come up, it just lifts you.

As some sort of cosmic compensation, from 7am on, everything goes as well as it possibly could. There's a taxi driver who takes me the 2.5 hours to Petra for 15 Jordanian dinars, which is like $22, and is about a third the price everyone else was asking. He said he's going to Petra anyway to pick a group up. He got me tea and grapes just to be nice. Met some wonderful folks at the hotel (Cliopetra Hotel, hahaha!), and the avuncular hotel owner gave me a pair of apples and tea, and drove us himself to the entrance of Petra, no charge. I'm groggy and slow and have probably looked fresher, but I'm here. Let's see Petra.


--- PETRA ---

Petra is AWESOME.

This is just the entrance!


Lookit that entrance! And it's not like 50 feet long, or even a football field. No man, the Siq -- that crazy tall canyon thing -- is half a mile long! It just goes forever! And it's really huge. If you zoom on that photo, for scale, there's a tyke running there. He was running for his life. That little man was running with the terror of God in his heart. I half expected a dinosaur to come thundering through in a minute, or a ghost or a cold wind or something.

I kept thinking, even if you took away the great company I had (Pedro, Raquel, Garreth, and Malena were really ideal, fun travel mates), and even if you took away all the carvings, tombs, theatres -- the entire city of Petra: diyanu!

The geological beauty of the area rivals the Southwestern US. It's incredible. I didn't want the Siq to end, but wait, what's that I see peeking through?


There it is, the most famous site in Petra: the Treasury. Welcome.



What is this place, anyway?

According to the visitor's center booklet, "most people, when asked, will tell you that Petra is an ancient city carved into solid rock by the Nabataeans, whose capital it became." Ummm, you way overestimate how much "most people" know about Petra.

In short, the Nabataeans were the semi-nomadic Arabs who ruled the region's trade routes from roughly 500BC to 100AD. Petra was their capital, and since they were nomadic, it's about the only structure they left for posterity. Just about everything in Petra is a tomb. For years, archeaologists thought Petra was just a huge necropolis. The Romans took over the Nabataean empire around 100AD, and they kept using and "updating" and repaving the city for a few hundred years. I'm not sure when it was finally abandoned. The ancient city was lost to the West until the crew of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade stumbled upon the ruins. For this discovery, he's about the only character you'll see more than King Abdullah.



Indiana Jones would give you two false impressions of Petra, though.

First of all, the decadence and grandeur of the facades belie what lies inside. That enormous Treasury? Walk in, and this is the entirety of it:


But man, lookit that stone! Here's another tomb. Eat your heart out, Sisteen Chapel!


The other false impression Indy gives is the size of Petra.

Petra is huge! It's not just a couple carvings; it's a CITY. You can go on exploring forever. The booklet proclaims that only 8-10% of Petra has been found. (I assume they mean "excavated," as I have no idea how you'd quantify what you haven't yet found.) This main road goes on and on and on, with structures everywhere.



Near the entrance, especially in front of the Treasury, there are a million tourists. Good place for photos of people taking photos.


But you can explore your way to solitude if you like. And we liked.

Go up some ancient steps. (Ahh! I don't know why the computer rotated this photo a quarter turn clockwise; now it looks so Escher-esque and confusing.)


Vistas of sections of Petra.


Oooh, it's just like the Treasury, but a long hike means fewer tourists!


We went way off the beaten path, and found the world's most beautiful (and kinda dangerous) cliff vista, where we took lunch.





I'm tired, too, donkey!


But I could look at this rock forever! Is that the most beautiful natural rock you've ever seen, or is that the most beautiful natural rock you've ever seen?


We ended up exploring Petra for 16 hours over two days. It's like a national park in America's southwest, with an ancient capital carved in to boot. I liked that place. But my plane's in Luxor, and while Egypt left a very sour taste in my mouth that last day, I'm still excited to head back.


--- BACK TO EGYPT ---

Even though two other folks at the hostel used the ferry with no problems, I didn't want to support them. And Pedro and Raquel were going to Egypt overland anyway, so let's all go together through Israel, precious passport real estate notwithstanding.



A potent portent of times to come. There was this comedy of errors as Pedro, Raquel and I were bounced around in those no-man's-lands. But they were good company, and the emergency cabs to embassies and ATMs were split three ways. But I lost a day to this fiasco, and my poor passport: I exited Jordan, entered Egypt with two visas (one was subsequently canceled), and entered and exited Israel twice on the same day! What do you do if you run out of pages?


Once in Egypt, the shared minivan to Cairo gets held up at the very first checkpoint. Lots of forms, collect passports, etc. What's the problem? You have an American on board; you need a military escort. Apparently, I, personally, need an armed escort. Why? The guy writes down, on a sheet of paper: "you important." Good answer.

So after maybe 40 minutes, a suit with two guns and a radio gets in the front seat, CIA-style. He's coming with us to Cairo. His name is Mohammed.


The minivan was 6 Danish missionaries (Christian), a Palestinian peace activist slash preacher (Christian), Mohammed the CIA escort guy (take a guess), and Me the important American (secular Jew).

Warning about this next sentence: it involves a traffic accident. I don't want to be graphic, but we passed a horrific crash and there were several bodies still on the road. It was... I don't know how to describe it. Horrible. Everybody in the minivan except me starts praying, and the van is silent for a few minutes. Mohammed the CIA guy says something to the Palestinian, who speaks both Arabic and English, and the Palestinian turns to me, translating: "Mohammed wants to know why you didn't pray." Here goes.

"I'm an atheist."

I swear, I said it as politically as possible. It was purely informative, like "I'm eating this clown cone because I like ice cream, thank you for asking."

Translation pause.

"Mohammed says even a blind man can see God. He says your life is very, um... dark and empty."

What I should've said here is nothing, but instead we played escalatio for a bit until Mohammed called me a godless infidel and I called him a hypocrite with a belt of guns, and then this poor multilingual peace activist refused to translate further.

A few hours later, Mohammed and I apologized and we shared some snacks. The peace activist slash translator was mighty proud. And the endless stretching road-to-the-horizon background made it a very cheesy moment.


And now I'm in Cairo, wasting a day online (I don't like cities) before catching an overnight bus to Luxor.

It's July 15th already! Man, I'll be home in a blink (so excited, but that was fast!), and more important, it's Mommy's birthday in two days! She's turning 44 ;)

I'll try to call from Luxor, but in case I can't:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!!

under da sea

I'm in Dahab, on the Sinai coast. Beachfront dinners are awesome, and isn't that the best-looking plate of grilled vegetables? It, with appetizer and dessert, was $10.


But let's get to business. Dahab is a diving spot. I'm a diver.

Is there any hobby as expensive as diving? Faberge egg collecting?

But the Red Sea is a diving mecca, and I am, er, was well under budget. So in the past week I've logged over 20 hours underwater... and spent well over a thousand dollars. Yikes. But,

I

LOVE

DIVING!!!!

Let's start with a live-aboard. This is an eat-sleep-dive kinda adventure, where you spend X number of days on a boat with a bunch of other dive-nuts (X = 3 in this case), and you dive before breakfast, after breakfast, after lunch, and a night dive after sunset and before dinner. It's intense. It's awesome.

First, head to diver central and find your boat.


Check-ins, all sorts of formalities, let's get to our first dive site already. Ooh, what an inviting shade of blue!


(Or sometimes an eery thick black, just after sunset, and then out with the flashlights and glowsticks for the always kinda creepy night dive. That's scary water:)


Pre-dive briefing.


Suit up.


An unflattering shot of your humble narrator, in decidedly heavy and awkward attire for land.


The last thing you see before splashdown. Hello fishies!!


Like everyone, when I was little I wanted to be an astronaut. But at some point I learned astronauts are glorified engineers, and while I'm hardly knocking it, it's not really what I meant. I wanted H.G. Wells-style planet discovery! I wanted to explore alien worlds, see life suited to different physics, different constraints and limitations, different wonders! I wanted to be an aquanaut!

Here's just a teeny, tiny sampling of the inhabitants of a totally different planet that share Earth with us.

Stonefish (must've been two dozen I passed for every one I spotted: it's even hard to find in the photo below! And they're kinda scary: can-be-fatal-ly poisonous dorsal spines and they don't move out of the way, so you can touch them).


Regal angels.


Blue-spotted boxfish (hahaha, you're so cute!).


Lionfish (pretty poisonous, but slow as rocks, and there was probably one for every one I saw; they're tough to miss).


The brilliantly-named Pajama nudie.


Garden eels (lawns of 'em).


Sea moths (cute little guys, very rarely seen).


Titan triggers (huge and territorial - appreciate from a distance).


Blue-spotted rays.


Lettuce corals (they look JUST like lettuce!).


I could go on and on and on. And, AND, they have the coolest behaviors. Schools of tiny anthias hang around a brambly coral head, and if you go near, they all disappear into the tiniest coral nooks and crannies. Hundreds of juvenile triggers hang in a puff like drops of vapor in a cloud. Sergeant majors display their fins as irridescent cleaner-wrasse give them a run-down. The tiniest little damselfish bonk into your mask, defending their territory from any intruder, regardless of size. Huge Napoleon fish lazily cruise by and curiously keep an eye on you. All this while you're 80 feet below the surface, flying weightless over the most magnificent palette of corals. There's nothing like being under water.


The Red Sea is home to a wild variety of biota, but it's also filled with shipwrecks. Every other page on the Sinai Red Sea dive guide booklet looked like this:


Most wrecks aren't actually that neat to see: the ship's wood has long deteriorated and the cargo of lentils or cotton or whatever is no longer there. Usually, though, the wreck is a bonus. These ships sunk because they struck the reef, so you dive the reef, and hey, whaddya know, there's a ship down here. Sometimes they're extra neat: the Yolanda itself has rolled into deep water, but its cargo still sits conspiciously among the corals.


But the shipwreck that deserves very special mention -- it was the main feature/destination of the liveaboard, and is consistently rated in the world's top 10 dive sites -- is the wreck of the Thistlegorm.

The Thistlegorm left England in 1941 with a cargo of military supplies bound for Egypt. The Mediterranean was controlled by Germany, so the vessel went all the way around Africa and up the Red Sea. While waiting for the go-ahead to enter the Suez Canal, the Thistlegorm was targetted by German planes, who unloaded their excess munitions on the ship while returning from a mission. On October 5th, 1941, a direct hit on hold four sunk the 419 foot Thistlegorm. Jacques Cousteau discovered the wreck in the fifties, but kept the location secret. In the 1990's, it was rediscovered, and has since become one of the world's most famous dive sites.

The Thistlegorm isn't the easiest dive -- you're penetrating an enormous wreck 80-feet deep, and the resident stonefish make me a little nervous -- but woah! It's like swimming around a WWII museum. Anti-aircraft guns, motorcycles with sidecars (how WWII are sidecars!), machine guns, tanks (yes, two entire tanks!), trucks, boots, airplane wings, and a million other military odds and ends, all coral-encrusted and guarded by schools of silent squirrelfish and patroling sergeant majors. But it's not just a dive, and it's not just a museum; it's very real. It's quiet, and it commands respect. It's a war memorial. People died.

Anatomy of the wreck:


Anatomy with some photos you can zoom in on:


It's really an amazing piece of history.


The diving was phenomenal. Unfortunately for the above-water part of the trip, the boat was 9 Danes and myself. I don't speak a lick of Danish; that made for some long meals. I spent a lot of time watching the stars (I slept on the deck all three nights), and inspecting the boat for all things interesting. What's wrong with this hours-of-sunlight graph?


The cab back to Dahab winds through some beautiful Sinai interior. At one point I saw a bush that looked just like a camel, but then I realized it was a camel. I don't know why I thought it was a bush.

More diving in Dahab. One trip was to a reef in Ras Abu Gallum, a park so protected, so out of the way, that it's inaccessible by car. But we had an idea...


Load your dive gear onto a camel, and let's play Moses and wander through the Sinai.


Wait, how far? Okay, let's load my dive gear and myself onto the camel.


(These photos are both of me just 'cause I was on the Formula One camel, so if I wanted a photo of the I-can't-believe-this-is-happening caravan, I had to shoot behind me.)

Before we even get to the site, I love this trip! Is that beautiful or is that beautiful?


And you just keep thinking: I can't believe I'm taking a camel to a dive site. I love my life. And that reef? SO PRISTINE! Corals like heaven, blues and greens and yellows and whites! It was like skittles and science class and The Little Mermaid and The Discovery Channel and a box of crayons. It was the best.

But, alas, today's my last day of diving -- it's a very expensive addiction and I need to cut myself off. I'm in Dahab, and the Blue Hole is a very famous... er, infamous site, so I thought I'd go see it. The blue circle is 300 feet deep. Just left in the photo, outside the reef, the ocean bottom is 1000' down.


While not at all intrinsically dangerous, Blue Hole is sometimes known as Diver's Cemetary*. The dive instructor at my place says the Blue Hole's claimed well over 100 lives. It's a morbid scene at the entrance:


-----
* - If you're curious why, basically, it's the temptation of trying The Arch. The Arch is an 80'-long tunnel though the reef, connecting the 300'-deep hole to the open ocean outside the hole. Here's the rub: The Arch is 200-feet deep. If you really want to go into why that depth is dangerous, look up nitrogen narcosis, oxygen toxification, and air consumption at depth -- but for reference, without advanced certifications, divers are allowed to go to 60'. A deep dive is 100', and 120' is very deep. As long as we're going tangential, freedivers (breath-hold diving) replace all the problems of breathing compressed gases by, well, holding their breath. You want to see an amazing video? (The divers filming are tec divers, with several cylinders filled with air, nitrox, trimix, hydreliox, or other exotic gases.) And you can see, as William descends, the ambient pressure compresses his body enough that he becomes negatively bouyant, and he just sinks the second hundred feet down to The Arch. Of course, then he has to swim back up!
-----

I thought about not writing this into the blog, because it's really bothersome, but I'm going to anyway. The dive was fine, but when we surfaced, there was a crowd gathered on the shore just feet from the water's edge, and in the middle, three men were performing CPR on an unresponsive diver. I don't know what happened, but it's really... I don't know, it just makes your stomach churn. They're pumping resolutely and have him hooked up to oxygen and people are ogling and some are crying, and the diver is just totally limp and his big belly's so lifeless, and sometimes water comes out of his mouth when they pump, and it's just awful. I don't know what happened.

So I'm really sorry to end on such an awful note. I'm sorry my dive vacation-within-a-trip ended like that, too. But it's a morbid reminder, perhaps, not to get too complacent underwater. Even if everything, everything goes right, it's still dangerous. And it always makes me a little nervous to see someone get a 2-day certification in Cancun or Ko Samui, and plunge in too headstrong to admit he's underwater and on life support. So I know this sounds really patronizing and campy, but I'm in a kinda blue mood after seeing that today: If you're a diver, please stay within your limits. Be safe.