Jordan

Zulu Dreams

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

We’re into the third day of recording this wedding present for Grace’s friend and that means the bedroom’s been turned into a makeshift recording studio once again. If that doesn’t raise a few eyebrows, try to picture it: we’ve opened the cupboard and rested the two mattresses against it, draping a duvet over the top as a mock-up boom and shut all the windows and doors. The result is actually pretty decent – as far as mattress-fort recording studios go. Grace is in the cupboard recording hers now so I’m in the next room with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade in my ears, trying to quell my recurring bouts of city angst. Replacing one noise with another can only do so much good, but I think I found a better solution.

Bit by bit I’m building a clearer idea of where I want to make my next adventure, and funnily enough it’s not a remake of Archie’s enviously-exciting Central American backpacking adventure. That ship has sailed. If the chance arises again one day, I’ll take it of course, but somehow I doubt it will. Lightning never strikes twice. As for me, I have my eyes on somewhere else, a place I’ve been orbiting, as it were, for the last seven years: South Africa.

Did that come out of left field? Probably not. The more you know me, the more rational a conclusion it is. For starters, this Cairo to Cape Town jaunt I’m so obsessed with was always going to end there. The only stage I’ve ever really been able to envisage is the last leg, cresting the veld and staring, at last, at the crystal waters of the Indian Ocean after a year or so on the road. I see myself throwing off my rucksack and racing into the water to fall, knees first, in the sand. That would be worth all the mileage, border bullies and nightmarish bureaucrats that’ll plague me along the way. It’s a scene that’s been playing on-and-off in my mind’s eye for years. That’s one reason.

I’d like to say Haggard started this. I’ve been reading one book of his after the other and I’m hooked. But it goes further back than that. My first girlfriend was half-Afrikaner. That’s where it really all began, I guess. Yes, it must have been; I remember talking to her aunt about her time as a game driver and falling in love with the place through words alone. Sure, that didn’t all pan out so well in the end, but like a flower in the ashes, I stumbled upon Bryce Courtenay’s The Power of One (the film) a week after the breakup. No other film has ever affected me so strongly. It could have been the music, it could have been the red-haired heroine, or just as easily the people and the places. More likely than not, a combination of the lot – but especially the music. There’s something otherworldly about it. Amazulu – from the Heavens. How about Ukuthula, the Zulu spiritual that never fails to move me to tears? Or Miriam Makeba’s African Sunset, which is playing in my ears right now? Don’t forget the Circle of Life. I put so much of my heart and soul into the Zulu solo with the Northern Lights that I go weak at the knees whenever I hear that one, too. Fun fact: I was born just four days before The Lion King came out. It’s a sign, baby! At least, I’d like to think so.

I could point the finger at so many other reasons: a family connection to Steve Bloom; the film, Zulu; the Drakensberg; the Zulu language itself. Yeah, by this point I’m pretty damn-near decided. The main question is when and how. I reckon I should have saved up enough after next year’s teaching. If only I were going to Morocco and not Jordan next summer; I could save so much money towards it (quit complaining about Jordan and just deal with it, kid). It also means I can dedicate myself to learning Zulu on the side next year. I’ve always wanted to learn an African language. Arabic is just a means to an end. Zulu – now we’re talking. We’re talking Africa and talking Africa is the surest way to my heart. And it always will be. BB x

Humdrum

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

‘Hope you’re having a lovely time, I know Amman has been less than ideal.’

I tire of city living. I guess having my three-day escape to Egypt pulled out from under my feet threw me off target, but I seem to have sunk back into one of those despondent ‘I could be doing something so much better with my time’ moments. Maybe if I set a few things straight, the affair might make a little more sense.

I never really wanted to go to Jordan. I didn’t have much of a say in the matter – you can blame international politics for my limited options – so I just went along with it as a necessary next step in my language degree. I had my eyes on Syria way back when I started my course, before al-Assad, the civil war and the chaos that ensued. I then turned my attentions onto Egypt, and then there was all that palava was Morsi and the army shooting people on the street. One more magical destination to be crossed off the list. I guess I fell in love with Morocco shortly after that, it being the only other feasible North African destination; doubly so after two weeks’ travelling in the kingdom over the Easter Holidays. So when I was told I had no option but to spend four months in Amman, bookending my assistantship with the British Council, it was a bit of a bombshell. In my department’s defence I didn’t put up much of a fight – what could would it have done? There’s not a lot I can do to solve the political cat-fight of the Arab world, if just so that I could spend a couple of months in a country of my choice. Whatever the weather, that’s all I have: two months apiece. So it’s not so terrible a loss.

The primary concern is the apathy that this place instils me with. Had I been able to go to Damascus, Cairo or Fes, places I’d hungered after for years, I might have been able to overcome my city angst – maybe. The trouble with Amman is that I just find myself wanting to be somewhere else all the time, and that does no wonders for my Arabic. I can’t even say it’s a general problem either, since it doesn’t seem to be affecting Andrew, Kate, Katie or Eloise in the slightest. Maybe they’re just hardier human beings than I. But I’m seriously feeling the absence of a green space. Andrew asked an hour ago whether I knew if there was anywhere outside we could go and sit to read/study in peace. The truth is, there isn’t. The cars are always blaring. Music’s always playing. People are always shouting. The peace I’m looking for is to be found far out of town, and at this time of year, that comes at the price of dry, dusty emptiness. That’s the biggest problem of all; the countryside around Amman isn’t even worth escaping to because it’s a dust bowl.

Whinge whinge whinge. Andrew’s right, I’m not exactly in the best of moods today. I want to be in Spain already, settling into my job in a location that’s not more than a stone’s throw from open country and mountains – mountains. Rivers. Life. None of this city nonsense. Town mouse, field mouse, remember? One of the main reasons I set myself to the study of languages was to challenge myself to overcome one of my greatest fears, and that’s talking to people. In retrospect, that was a very costly challenge. I could have done an all-essay subject and come off the better – perhaps. Similarly, I tried to console myself before coming out here that maybe a couple of months of city living might cure me of my disdain for that kind of environment. In truth it’s only consolidated my belief that, whatever happens to me in life, I will never be living in a place like Amman – by choice or by force. Somewhere that can sap me of even my desire to travel can be doing me no favours.

On the plus side, I’ve discovered that if I sit on the end of my bed with the window open, I can access the WiFi from the school across the road, so I won’t need to pay to go to a cafe to send emails anymore. That’s a plus.

Chin up Ben, life’s not so bad. I just find myself wishing, as ever, that for something as important as the year abroad, which is supposed to be a life-changing chance to throw yourself into the culture of a different part of the world, I’d had a hand in the throwing part, rather than being sent out here.

But there’s a silver lining to every cloud. All of this has convinced me (along with all the reading I’ve been doing of late) that I want nothing more from life than to be a writer, and I’m arming myself at long last with the reading to better my craft. Per ardua ad astra, and all that jazz. BB x

White Man Problems

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

‘Americans no. Only Arabs for this bus. No Americans.’ The man behind the JETT bus service desk looks peeved enough as it is to be stuck with an afternoon shift on Eid, so I guess a disheveled tourist with a ludicrously hopeful grin asking for the Tuesday bus to Cairo came at a bit of a bad time. Pointing out that I’m British probably wouldn’t help either.

When I first saw that there was a bus that ran from Amman to Cairo a couple of weeks ago I suggested jokily to Andrew that we pop down to Egypt for a few days after Ramadan. It was just a flight of fancy – but as so often happens with me and flights of fancy, it got all too tempting and I shamelessly threw myself at the idea. I mean, who wouldn’t go now, with almost all foreigners out of the country, to see the pyramids, the Sphinx and the Cairene citadel without the hordes of camera-touting tourists? There’s a clue in there that I missed somehow, but I was blinded by desire, I guess. Andrew was never fully behind the idea, thinking it (rationally) a little too radical a move, so it came as something of a relief to him when we were told that the Cairo bus was an Arabs-only bus. It makes sense, I suppose, but it’s a bit galling. By hook or by crook I’ll get there somehow, but I guess the pyramids will just have to wait for the time being. Heck, they’ve lasted a good two thousand years, they can wait another two or three years more. Damned white people problems. Now more than ever do I wish I could have a vaguely Arab countenance, if just to blend in and disappear in this busy, busy world.

Superficial rant over. In a similar vein, we took a trip to Wadi Mujib this morning. It’s a nature reserve of sorts – the fan-tailed ravens, Tristram’s starlings and blue-cheeked bee-eaters weren’t exactly making themselves scarce – but it’s more of an adventure park, and everything that entails. Don’t get me wrong, it was serious fun, clambering through rushing torrents and grazing my arms over a sharp gravel riverbed whilst floating on my back downstream to the Dead Sea. It just wasn’t what I was expecting, is all. If you’ve been to Petra before (I haven’t – yet) and took the Siq trail to the treasury, imagine that but flooded. With rapids. I even ticked off a bucket list number by finally getting the chance to meditate under a waterfall, of all things. I can’t recommend it for peace of mind – it feels like a hundred fists raining down on your head and shoulders at once and you can’t open your eyes for a second – but with all the roaring and crashing water overhead it’s an unparalleled way to shut out the world completely. Focus, man. You should try it sometime.

Craziest of all was having my camera and several other electronics in a bag around my waist throughout. If it wasn’t waterproof they’d have all been wrecked. Focus sure helped me to forget about that. That, and the horde of nigh-on thirty Vietnamese tourists that came charging into the canyon after us, iPhones in plastic sleeves around their necks. No selfie sticks, though. Even in Jordan, there’s no escaping the stereotype.

So yeah. A very white start to the weekend. As for what the rest of this week entails, well, now Cairo’s off the cards, who knows? I’ll keep the rest of the deck close to my chest for the time being. Until the next time, ma’ as-salaama! BB x

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Deliverance

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

My heart’s soaring. Not least of all because I’ve got my Africa playlist on full blast, but that’s not the real reason. Eights months and x days after submitting my paperwork to the Year Abroad office at Elvet Riverside, I finally have a destination. Next year has a name at last and it’s VILLAFRANCA DE LOS BARROS.

I’d love to dive right into an entire evening’s worth of trawling, if just to get a real feel for the place and its environs, but that’s easier said than done with a murderous-looking Arabic comprehension in for tomorrow. Even without that, Ali Baba shuts at six o’clock, at which point Andrew and I go necessarily radio silent until ten o’clock the following morning. (It’s a liberating existence, being completely out of contact for half a day, every day – I highly recommend it). So no aimless surfing tonight. But according to Wikipedia Vilafranca de Los Barros is known as the City of Music, which means the wizards at the British Council know what they’re doing. I owe them that much. It’s also in a very decent spot indeed, in a town large enough to have most convenient amenities, a lively atmosphere and possibly a good range of accommodation options. It might not be as small a town as I wanted, but that might not be such a bad thing. At least it’s smaller than Amman. At any rate, it’s close enough to a serious mountain range to keep me satisfied. As expected, Google Images isn’t swimming with material, even in a town of some 14,000 inhabitants, so Villafranca de Los Barros gets to keep a little mystery from me for the time being. And that’s no bad thing either.

Andrew zoned out a couple of minutes ago. He’s still waiting for the Versailles branch of the BC to get back to him with similar details. Trust Spain to jump the gun for once and beat France to it! We’ve been working flat out as usual (and working out flat to boot, every morning – my limbs are getting mutinous) so he’s taking a well-earned nap. The air con’s on and it’s going to stay that way for a little while longer. As for me, I’m going to spend the next hour or so finishing King Solomon’s Mines and then learning as many animals and birds in Arabic as possible after finding myself at a loss in this morning’s Arabic Alphabet game. Sure, osprey might not exactly be a word you use everyday, but who wouldn’t want to drop iqāb nisārī (essentially, Judgement Hawk) into a conversation? They might not have been very inventive at naming the swan, the cormorant or the manatee, but the Arabs sure knew how to put a name to a bird of prey. BB x

Thick as Mince

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

The beginning of another week in Amman. I’m sitting in my usual spot by the window, watching the cars racing by and recovering from four straight hours of Arabic before this afternoon’s language assistant session. My guy’s a professional photographer, which means we have at least one common interest, but he’s also a race car whiz – in his own words, the smell of diesel and the sounds of screeching brakes are two of the most beautiful things in the world – so in reality we’re sitting on opposite sides of the fence. But he’s keen, so I’ll give him that. I just might not be chomping at the bit to go drifting at the city racecourse anytime soon, much to Andrew’s chagrin (though I’ve told him he’s more than welcome to go in my stead).

Compared to last week’s whistlestop tour of northern Jordan, this weekend was more of a sequence of minor misadventures. We got to the citadel at last, timing our arrival with the middle of the day (not my idea). The agamas were loving it, sunning themselves in their droves atop the crumbling ruins of the Temple of Hercules and the Umayyad Palace, but the heat was a little too intense for us. I found a relatively quiet spot in the heart of the ruined palace to sit still and meditate for a bit, but if I could find a nearer spot that doesn’t have an entry fee, that’d be grand. We also ended up in a five-star hotel in downtown Amman which was a strange experience indeed, and one that I don’t think I’ll be repeating anytime soon. There’s something about luxury that I’ve never been all that comfortable with. Oh wait, here comes Adnan. I’ll be back in an hour, folks.

Taxi rides are getting a lot more entertaining than usual, the clearer ‘Amia becomes. Most of the drivers are Palestinian, and if you can get by their thick accents, you’re in for more than one ride. On the way into town in search of reasonably-priced vegetables, we get talking about the difficulties of travel in Jordan and beyond, and because I’m in the car, talk turns to finding a way into Syria. The driver takes his hands off the steering wheel mid-speed and wields an invisible machine gun at Andrew. ‘Takka-tak tak. You die. You go Syria, you die.’ That puts an end to that matter. For now. I’m not giving up on Damascus that easily.

As for the vegetables, we found ’em. Two dinar for the lot: carrots, aubergines, tomatoes, onions, garlic, courgettes, ginger, pepper… You name it. Health in a bag and doesn’t it feel amazing! Time to rustle up something decent that doesn’t contain eggs, and none too soon neither. I wonder why everything’s five times the price in our neck of the woods?

Also, Arab DVD shops. I’d plum forgotten just how jammy they are. Seven films for a couple of quid. If we’re still uncomfortable with the idea of video piracy in the West, the Arabs got over their scruples long ago. The result? A monstrosity of a Nicholas Cage film, so indecipherable that it was actually really quite entertaining – in a watching-Inception-whilst-drunk kind of way. Still, it’s about time we had a mascot. If Dolly Parton was our Ugandan celebrity, why not tout Nicholas Cage for Jordan? (I should really get out more often…) BB x

  

Man Cannot Live on Bread and Hummus Alone

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Day-to-day life in Jordan rumbles steadily on. The haywire that was this weekend’s travel spree is over and we’ve been back to the five-hours-of-Arabic-a-day slog since Sunday. Sometimes I forget to breathe.

Here’s a snapshot of my daily routine. Woken up by the pneumatic drill outside at about half seven, if the sunlight doesn’t get me first. Breakfast of one of a variety of egg-based dishes that would make the creative minds behind Durham’s potato team sweat; fried, scrambled, thyme-infused green, veggie-packed omelette etc. Eggs, eggs, eggs. I thought I’d go full veggie out here, but at this rate I’m in danger of becoming a qualified ovivore. The fact of the matter is, eggs are the cheapest thing around. Fruit and vegetables, much as I’d like more of them, are frustratingly pricey in our neck of the woods. If you want variety in your breakfast, you have to go downtown. That’s like going shopping for your groceries in Central London. Barmy. Especially so when we’re paying $500 a month each for a two-room apartment in this ‘convenient’ district…

Class starts at eleven, but more often than not Andrew and I are in Ali Baba an hour in advance, if just to make use of the internet – a little slice of home. I’d use the excuse ‘I need to check my British Council’, but I’m not alone – we all do. The waiting game continues, almost eight months since application began. That’s usually a good time to review last night’s homework, too. Then it’s a two hour slog in Arabic until break at one, which lasts for twenty minutes – just enough time to rush home for a mug of tea and/or some sneaky hummus – and then back to work until three, with about two hours’ worth of homework on the books. We’d make a start on that immediately, of course, whilst we’re still in the zone, but at 3 on the dot we have our language assistant sessions, which means Arabic conversation for about an hour and a half. Once that’s over, we can finally get started on the homework… so by the time we’re done with the day’s work, it’s about six o’clock and the Ali Baba staff shut up for the night, at which point we split up and head home to collapse into bed for a well-earned two hour sleep – because by that stage of the day, we’ve little energy for anything else.

Wake up again at around eight thirty and read some Henry Rider Haggard. I’m into King Solomon’s Mines at the moment and I’m planning to bomb my way through his entire collection whilst I’m out here. Anything about Africa would do just fine for the time being; I’m still missing Morocco something awful, let alone Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole. (If anybody knows any great fiction set in Africa, let me know – I’m on a reading streak like I haven’t known since I was twelve!) One or all of the girls might join us at around nine thirty, at which point we head to one of two locations: Doors Cafe, a shisha joint on the neighbouring street, or Downtown, where all the action is. It being Ramadan, nothing really gets going until about ten o’clock anyway. Even so, we’re not usually out that late, and like as not we’re in a taxi bound for home by midnight.

And so it goes, day to day. Amman’s not the easiest place to knock yourself out, so to speak, unless we’re talking in the literal sense, in which case it’s a simple matter of trying to cross the road; any one of the local drivers will do that for you. I didn’t expect much in the way of entertainment, it being a capital city – fun is what you make of it – but what this place lacks more than everything else is somewhere quiet and green. I’m glad I’m not alone in that regard; Eloise, also a country girl, is feeling the absence of it. After a costly bit of road-tripping last weekend, we’re going to take it easy this time around. If there were a decent park nearby, this’d be the time. In the absence of that, I think I’ll blow the dust off the novel and flex my writing muscles for a bit. I’m no athlete, so I guess I ought to be flexing a muscle of some description. BB x

  

In the Shadow of the Golan Heights

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

There’s a Palestine sunbird flitting about amongst the branches below, a dusky little thing with an emerald sheen on each shoulder. What difference does it make to her that there’s a tall iron fence all the way along the length of the cliff on the opposite bank? One little flutter of her tiny wings and she’s over. It seems a little ridiculous that a bird no bigger than my thumb can do things a human can’t.

I’ve found a shaded spot for myself in a makeshift bathhouse on the south side of the River Jordan, just a few miles to the north of Umm Qays, and closer still to Israel itself. The Golan Heights tower high above me, shining a brilliant gold in the midday sun. Down below is an offshoot of the Jordan, rushing westwards to its mother before the Sea of Galilee. A night heron flapped lazily past a little while back, and there’s a couple of geese paddling about downstream. The bulbuls aren’t exactly making themselves inconspicuous and all the while the hardy little sunbird is keeping herself busy hurrying to and from a crevice in the cliff. I guess she has a nest in there somewhere.

The others are frolicking about in one of the swimming pools under the lazy eye of the locals. I just had to get away. It’s so quiet here. Who’d have thought that I’m looking at a former war zone, just a few decades back? Legend tells that this is supposedly the place where Jesus drove the Gadarene swine into the river, but the landscape looks decidedly more Ethiopian than one of those colour drawings of Israel from an illustrated Bible. There’s even a laughing dove calling from a fig tree down in the valley. Ho-woo-hoo-hoo. A little slice of Africa in the Middle East. This is my idea of money well spent. If only there were places this idyllic nearer Amman.

And I’m now even more hungry for Israel; I’ve spent two days looking at its green hills and cool lakes from the dry Jordanian side. It’s enough to drive a man mad. Now more than ever I begin to understand why this place has seen so much conflict. Who would not fight to hold on to a home in a land like this, Arab or Hebrew? If there is a heaven-born hand guiding us all, let it lead me to Israel, just once, VIATOR or no VIATOR. I feel a strange pull to the place like never before, as though I have wanted nothing more my whole life. This, surely, is the stuff that wars are born from. Wars and jaded dreams.

The wind’s picking up a little. I expect we’ll be leaving for Jerash soon. Another sunset in an idyllic setting, and still holding true to a promise I made three years ago. I’ll paint this valley onto the backs of my eyes to keep me going over the next five days.

A flash of brilliant purple and the sunbird’s back. It’s the male this time. He clings to a vine hanging over the roof and looks my way before flitting off in the direction of the nest. If there are moments like this to wait for at the end of every week, I have strength enough to last out here. BB x

Sunset over the Promised Land

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Ten minutes in the Dead Sea and I’m more alive than I’ve been in days. If that’s not a most bizarre oxymoron, I don’t know what is. It is a hackneyed one, though, so I’ll be as original as I can.
After yesterday’s city-induced nervous breakdown, I was a little apprehensive about my ability to face a whole day of sightseeing in high spirits. A seven o’clock start, mid-thirty degree heat, one car and twelve people with very different attitudes toward travel adds up for a pretty hectic road trip. But you must know my mind half as well as I do now; travel, especially the stressful kind, is deeply cathartic. Adventure is all about facing your fears, being more than a little reckless and having bucketloads of good and bad luck in equal measure. It beats case-marking and paperwork any day. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

Mon dieu, but it was good to hear silence again. And a very new silence at that. Of course, traveling with twelve meant that it was never truly silent, but perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing. Silence in the desert is otherworldly. It’s not just an absence of sound, it’s an absence of life. It’s oppressive. I guess I went into it in the mindset of ‘one of those desert-loving English’, but Alec Guiness’ Faisal has a point: there’s nothing in the desert. Stand with me atop the crumbling remains of one of the desert castles east of Amman and tell me otherwise. It’s just mile upon sun-scorched mile of hard, grey earth, dusty and pockmarked with black in all directions. A silence that smothers. After the endless bustle of Amman it felt almost wrong to be surrounded by such emptiness; like I’d stepped off the edge of the world into the void. I’m told this place was once lush and green, filled with game, and not too long before our time. Perhaps as recently as thirty years ago. Looking at it now, it’s almost impossible to believe, like the first dinosaur bones. Each castle had its own sad tale of grandeur, decline and the ravages of a world running out of time. And all of that for just one dinar. Moroccans, for all their smiles, have a lot to learn from the Jordanians about fair pricing.

After gazing longingly across the ten kilometre distance to the Syrian border, we returned to Amman to make a brief pit-stop before setting out once again, this time for the Dead Sea, to capitalize on our hired twelve-seater car whilst we had the chance. Getting down to the shore itself was a little fiddly; our first venue tried to charge us twenty dinars each for entry. We fought our way out of that to find another option fifty metres down the shoreline at just five dinar a head. Whether it would have been wiser to give ourselves more time is doubtful. All I can say is we timed our arrival perfectly; as everybody raced for the water, the sun was just beginning to set over the mountains on the other side of the sea, over Israel. I volunteered to stand guard over the bags whilst everyone else went for a float. Being in the water for sundown must have been pretty neat, but I reckon I had the killer view from further up the beach, watching the oddly slow waves slush against the shore in golden ripples. I guess I felt like Moses for a moment – not least of all because I was wearing a Turkish bathrobe that might have come from the set of Exodus itself – watching the sun set on the Promised Land. I’ve never been particularly keen on visiting Israel – the visa complications and Africa have always stopped me before – but looking at it then in the dying light I was transfixed. It was beautiful, like no land I’d ever seen before. Is it any wonder it’s caused so much trouble, like the similarly captivating forested mountains of the Congo? It might well have been the magic of the moment, but it’s definitely going down as one of the most memorable sunsets I’ve witnessed. Period.

I’m not done with you yet, Israel. Not even close. BB x