Wow! So October's come and gone, and while it feels like it's barely been any time since we got back from Amman, it also simultaneously feels weirdly faraway. I've definitely had things I've desperately wanted to put down. Sat in front of one or the other laptop but never typed a word. Why is that? Not sure. Maybe I just needed a little bit of space to let things settle.
Either way, here we are, and I've a bunch of stuff to share! So we went to Jordan for a week, on holiday! Also to see some friends who'd moved there and we hadn't seen in years. We were flying through Istanbul, and despite the rather hair-raising aborted landing attempt, arriving in Amman was like stepping back into summer. In a good way :).
Having arrived very early in the morning and not had any sleep for most of the night, I accepted the offer of a bed extremely gratefully and woke up to find mangoes :). It wasn't magic, exactly, involved walking around the corner to the fruit and veg shop, but they were Egyptian mangoes and extremely yummy :).
In between catching up, spending time together with our friends and getting fed amazing food, we managed to explore some little bits of the city. I'd never known that Amman is spread out over a bunch of hills. The number is supposedly seven, but feels like there must be a lot more than that :). The visit to the Citadel gave us a pretty spectacular view of this! Exploring the ruins was also immensely fun, especially with three 3-7 year olds :).
We also got to explore the busy heart of the city with its colourful, bustling streets, noisy shops and myriad of heady smells. At some point found ourselves in a rather excellent restaurant off Rainbow Street sampling rather excessive amounts of amazing food :). We even had the full experience of being a tourist in a taxi with an enthusiastic and opportunistic driver :|. But that was on the way to the Royal Automobile Museum, so all was well in the end :).
For someone that loves cars, and motorized vehicles in general, it is quite the experience! For one thing, the sheer number and spread of vehicles on display is frankly amazing! There's an old Rolls Royce converted to a desert military vehicle from the '50s, there's a Star Wars hover bike from one of the newer films, there's a Ferrari F40, an Aston Martin DB2... And accompanying each car, bike or odd bubble submarine there is a story of the particular royal that vehicle had held the fancy of. In the end we had to rush to get through it all!
We had to rush because we were picking up the rental car. Not from one of the usual multi-national agencies where you book stuff online, but a genuinely authentic experience with a "friend" of our friend. First time I've ever paid cash for a rental car :D. It did serve us well though, for the next three days. Our friend did have to spend a whole day afterwards trying to figure out the peculiar mechanics of how to return the car :P.
The key part of our plan for this road-trip was basically to spend a couple of days at Petra. And hopefully get a good look at the Dead Sea. We started off for Mount Nebo and spent quite a fun hour or two in the memorial church of Moses and looking out over the Jordan valley. I'd not really clocked how sharply the landscape rises up on the west side from the Dead Sea!
We decided to drive down the meandering thread of tarmac to the sea and then drove along practically the whole length of it. The Dead Sea is disappearing. Year by year the level of water drops as more evaporates while less comes in down the river. The serrated edges that make up parts of the coastline told a story of the marching progress of time...
In the midst of the spectacular but altogether rather desolate surroundings we came across some green fields and a restaurant serving lunch. The food was entirely sourced from the surrounding fields, and you got served what was available that day. It was quite liberating actually. No menus, no making tricky choices. Just show up, sit down, and lunch will be served. With some black tea with mint, of course :).
The plan for that first day had originally been to drive all the way down to Aqaba, have a look at the dagger's tip :). But we had to get to our hotel just south of Wadi Musa before it got too late, so we ditched the plan and looked for other interesting, but shorter, routes to At-Tabyeh. The one we picked was the King's Highway, a rather narrow thread of a road, winding its way through the mountains that march down between the valley to the west and the desert to the east.
And what a spectacular trip it was! It's not like I've travelled a crazy amount, but I have clocked a fair number of Earth miles across a few different continents, and honestly the landscape was nothing like I've ever seen! The folds of land morphing from valley to gorge to mountain and then unfolding into plains, then up again into sheer cliffs. No wonder whenever people want to film scenes on Mars, or alien planets, they come to Jordan!
A particular highlight on the way was Kerak and its castle! Thought to be the site of the ancient capital of the Biblical kingdom of Moab, this town is also spread across a few different hill tops. The crown of the central hill is adorned with a castle draped down one side. As far as places to explore go, this was amazing!
As a site built, rebuilt and expanded by successive powers over a thousand years, it's a sprawling complex. And most excitingly, a lot of it has been excavated and made accessible to your average tourist. It's helpful if you've acquired the Jordan Pass in advance of course, because that means entry is free :). I think we spent the best part of the afternoon exploring a variety of levels and eventually decided there was just not enough time to see everything after a few hours :).
It was pretty much dark by the time we got to our hotel, perched on the edge of a hill overlooking what looked like a moonscape in the moonlight :). We were pretty knackered after a long day so took the offer of dinner gratefully. Turned out the place was family run and the guy at reception called his mother to ask how long before dinner would be ready :). It wasn't long before we were demolishing a massive plate of mansaf. Or trying to at least :).
The next morning we woke up early to see the sunrise slowly play across the spectacular landscape outside our window! Breakfast was another fun experience, but the excitement was building for our visit to Petra! To be honest, I hadn't known all that much about the history of the site, so a little bit of brushing up on my Nabatean history was useful. By the time we'd made our way past the horses and to the entrance of the Siq however, I didn't really have that much headspace for anything beyond the spectacular views!
Walking through the Siq itself is one of my favourite memories now. We did it four times over two days (ignoring many who insisted that we made our way to Little Petra and then onwards on the back way to the Monastery to save ourselves some time), at various different times of day. Each time, the colours were different, glowing pinks, blazing golds, swirling yellows, reds, dark browns... As we walked along the ever changing surfaces alongside and above, it was as if the very curves of the rock faces were dancing around us. Now closing in to embrace one another, now moving apart.
I did know what to expect at the Treasury to some extent, and still it was almost overwhelming! The squeeze of the canyon just before the walls open out to reveal the fantastic, gigantic, surreal and altogether mesmerizing facade, accompanied by a wave of noise! You could argue that the crowd of tourists detracts from the splendour of the site, but honestly, the bustling, lively, almost festive experience transported us to an imagined past in the midst of a funeral feast perhaps, or an annual communal gathering.
One of the things that fascinates me is how little people actually know about Petra. Yes, it was a central site for the Nabateans for hundreds of years. Yes, most of the structures and facades one finds are tombs or otherwise of a funereal persuasion. But did people actually live there? How? Where? Why? No one can say for certain. For me, the questions just add to the beauty of it all.
We decided the best thing to do at the start would be to walk through all they way to the Monastery somewhat briskly. In doing so, we soon left the crowds behind and had more space to enjoy our surroundings. I have to say, so far as the facades were concerned, my favourite is the Monastery!
It may be that the suddenness with which one comes upon it (You climb a long way up with barely any indication of what it is you are heading towards, and then you turn a corner and there it is! In all its majestic glory, silhouetted against a brilliantly blue sky!) just added a thrill that's hard to beat. Or it could be the fact that being high up near the top of the hill, the more open surroundings give it a grander feel.
Either way, I was totally on a high as we made our way more slowly back down to the basin. Lunch was excellent, and we proceeded to spend a much more leisurely afternoon exploring the ruins of temples, churches and some smaller tombs all the way back to the Street of Facades :). By this time the area in front of the Treasury had transformed into a more relaxed, almost sleepy state. We took our time walking back to the visitor center.
We were pretty beat by the time we got back to our hotel, in time to watch the sun go down. A different but equally beautiful experience as the sunrise which felt like an eon ago.
The second day we'd decided, would be a day of tombs! We managed to explore most of the larger tombs rather thoroughly, particularly the four Royal Tombs. But the previous days' exertions were catching up with us and by the time we'd returned from the Sextius Florentinus tomb, it was more or less a case of ambling down to the basin for some lunch and then slowly making our way back. I think after a day and a half of such an intense assault on my senses, my mind could genuinely take no more :).
We did make a detour to drive the back way on our way out, with spectacular views over the basin. It felt appropriate to drive back to Amman via the desert highway as we marveled at a rather different sort of landscape as the wide open vistas gradually turned to city lights and traffic...
The remainder of the trip was somewhat affected by digestive anomalies, but it was good to relax with our friends for a couple of days before heading back to the real world of nine-to-fives.
Since then of course that part of the world has descended into something approaching hell. I wonder how many of the friendly faces we met have been personally affected, one way or another. There is a very large Palestinian population in Jordan. As they say, in war everyone loses.
--
It feels remiss to not mention the books. I did take my massive copy of The Lord of the Rings to Jordan, even read some of it, but it was after we came back that I finished it. And was left with a distinct feeling of awe. It felt different from the end of The Silmarillion, or Unfinished Tales. It felt a lot more present and immediate. Yet it had a sense of detached grandeur, unlike shall we say the familiarity of The Hobbit.
Unlike the Jordan trip, which I feel has crystallized in my mind with the passage of time, my feelings and thoughts at the end of The Return of the King feel elusive and ephemeral. I do remember that the Appendices felt like a welcome soft landing. A slow careful descent from heady heights.
It was after this that I picked up a book I'd been looking forward to for months! It's not often you read a book written by someone you've personally known! At least I don't :). So it was with great excitement that I plunged into Minor Disturbances at Grand Life Apartments. And what a treat it was!
Again, I feel like I've left it for too long before trying to put my thoughts down. What can I say, life happens, and some moments do not suffer themselves to be looked at too closely in the immediate aftermath.
I'm left with memories of sunshine filtering through curtains and a guava tree. The feeling of a deep sense of longing, sometimes for ungettable things, sometimes finding happiness, sometimes just a sense of regaining one's balance amidst uncertainty. Often finding peace. It was a happy read for me :).
I realize that you have to probably have a certain view of the world and maybe a particular set of experiences for this story to speak to you personally. Yet, it captures such a wide slice of life. And yes, all the threads aren't tied neatly in a bow, but isn't that what life's like?
While waiting for the next book club book to arrive at the library, I decided to revisit Marvel 1602 and was comforted by the familiar genius of Gaiman :). As always, there were previously unseen depths, more layers, more food for thought.
And then when I did get my hands on Midaq Alley, I wasn't sure what to think. Discussion's next week. Am I looking forward to it? Not sure. It's been a long while since I've had such a negative impression of a supposedly amazing book.
--
Hmm. Anyway. Cycling season, methinks, has finally come to an end. Ended up cycling over three times further this summer than I drove my car :D. I find that that makes me ridiculously happy :). But yes, this last week the temperature's been flirting with zero and finally yesterday we woke up to a white world!
There's actually over a foot of snow in the garden right now, and it's supposed to snow more tomorrow. Unfortunately, this is probably too early for it to stick around. I mean, it's still October! November will supposedly bring with it rain. But who knows, the weather at the moment is anybody's guess really. Either way, given that the switch to winter tires has happened already, I'm hoping for more of the good stuff :D.
