Travels

Breathless in Paradise

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Snorkeling is just about the best idea anybody ever had. The world underwater is singularly enchanting, whether you’re drifting over white sands, coal stacks or the open blue. If it weren’t for my breathing issues, and a nasty little demon called fire coral, I’d rank it right up at the top of my favourite things in life.

With school out for the end of summer – just like last year, I’ve been working all the way through it to the point where it feels like it never came at all – we’ve nothing but time on our hands until our Saturday morning flight. At Eloise’s suggestion, Andrew and I find ourselves back in Aqaba, two weeks after we popped by for a visit on our way back from Wadi Rum. By some curious stroke of luck, our hotel, the Bedouin Garden Village, happened to be the very same place we’d got our snorkeling gear from last time, so the manager, a carefree local who makes his living lounging about on the beach, smoking shisha and leading diving groups out into the reefs, already knew us and was pleased to see us again. It’s still intolerably hot – the midday sun peaks at a regular 42 degrees – but it’s cooler than it was, if you ask the locals. 

 

 The last time I wrote about snorkeling, I gave myself a paragraph. Looking back, that’s more than a little silly. It’s criminal. So this time I’ll put you inside my head, so you can see what I see:

I squeeze my feet into two giant flippers and waddle down to the water like a particularly incapable penguin, adjusting and readjusting my snorkel; there’ll be none of last time’s mistakes, or I’ll just have o March straight back to the hotel and ask – God forbid – for a demonstration. Walking forwards in the water isn’t easy in footwear more than three times the size of your feet, so I turn and start walking backwards, for all the good it will do. And what do you know? It’s a little easier. There’s a neat little life hack for you. Alternatively, you could just belly out and swim. And so I do.

For the first few metres it’s a long stretch of silver sand, dotted here and there with a buried cola bottle or lens cap. The first few fish are tiddlers, with the exception of a familiar school of silvery mullet that gawp their way along the shore. Up ahead, the reef looms. One more kick of the flippers and we’re over.

There’s only a small space between the reef and the surface, hardly enough for a man to swim over untouched, but temptation is a dangerous lady, and I can’t stop myself. Up on the reef it’s a sudden explosion of colour, and the coral has very little to do with that. It’s the fish that light up the place. There are canary yellow butterflyfish in twos and threes, flanked by dusky Arabian angelfish and solitary sergeant majors; the mottled form of a greasy grouper hugging the rocks while a triggerfish, resplendent in robes of blue and green, watches from the sand; dragonfish staring up in a stargazing torpor from the seabed whilst speckled white gobies dig their nests all about; clownfish weaving in and out of the multicoloured anemones they crave. Stranger denizens still, like the angular boxfish, the pipefish-through-photoshop cornetfish and the bizarre unicornfish, with what can only be described as a horn protruding an inch and more between its eyes, haunt the nooks of the reef, like the shady underbelly of this grand fashion show.

I’d like to say those are the thoughts going through my head right now, but it’s actually more of a constant stream of ‘ohh’, ‘wow’ and ‘ohmyGodthisissobeautiful’. Poetic to the last. And this time, my mask isn’t leaking and my snorkel is watertight, and I can enjoy this whole spectacle without hyperventilating. Further out, there’s a shipwreck that’s supposedly crawling with moray eels, and even a sunken tank. I’d love to swim out to see them for myself, but I don’t put much trust by the strength of my reserves. I may be a mean (if explosive) sprinter, but I’m not the strongest of swimmers, having been much too obstinate to ever learn to breathe properly. I’ll leave that adventure to Andrew and Mac. They already have a taste for exploring creepy wrecks from the abandoned hospital off Rainbow Street. I might try again this afternoon, but right now I’d rather continue to explore the reef.

Oh bummer, some seawater got into my snorkel. I have to surface to spit it out, but in the action a great wave pushes me under and I get an eyeful of Red Sea salt. By the time I’ve got my mask back on, it’s steamed up and I have to take it off again to clear it up. The vicious waves are making this little task impossible. I make a beeline for the buoy line that marks the edge of the reef and try holding on to that, but of course, it goes under the water, and it’s prickly to the touch from all the little reef creatures growing on it. So I make for a stack of brain coral and haul myself as gently as I can to sit on it and readjust my mask in peace. The wind’s really picking up; you can see the sand blowing across the beach back on the shore. The waves are equally relentless, but I’m holding my own here. I can see Andrew and Mac a fair way out. They’ve gone beyond the buoy that marks where the sunken tank is supposed to be, but they’ve drifted quite a way off course. If we’re not careful we’ll have a fair walk on our hands when we get back to the beach – or a harder swim, flippers or no.

Fwoosh! The giant wave comes out of nowhere and throws me back against the coral. No, not the coral, against the rock, and a stack of fire coral, which isn’t really coral at all, but a jellyfish-like creature with a nasty sting. I don’t have much time to think about that, because I’m back underwater without my mask. Pulling myself angrily back onto the brain coral and securing my mask back onto my head, I examine my arm. There’s an ugly red weal running up the length of it, scored with white. It could just as easily be leprosy. Not only that, there’s also a similarly nasty scar on my lower back and cut across my right hand from where I grabbed the reef as the wave took me under. Oh yeah, and the covered in salt water, too. Time, I think, to beat a hasty retreat.

  
The beach is no friend of mine today. Two seconds on my front in the sand and there’s a stinging sensation all along my right-hand side. It’s not even my reef scars; it’s the sand, whipped up by the wind to scour my skin. Talk about a full-body workout! We’re going to have to retreat further than just the shore. I’m heading back to the pool. I don’t think I’ve ever been more grateful for such a thing.

  

All the same, I don’t regret it for a second, even though the fire coral rash along my arm continues to pester me, some three days later. For another hour with the colorful denizens of the Red Sea, I’d do it all again. Tell me, though; is diving supposed to be such an ordeal every time, or is Butterfingers over here just as naive as ever? BB x

From Burning Desert to Sapphire Sea

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

One minute I’m standing on a high rock, staring into a lunar desert whilst desperately trying to even up my tan lines; two hours later I’m staring down at a school of damselfish drifting over a coral reef. I’m still struggling to get my head around it.

Sunrise feels far longer ago than this morning. After putting the finishing touches to last night’s report, I left the others sleeping in the campground and set off alone into the desert once again, this time to see the sunrise. I made it to the other side of the valley in time to catch the first rays of sunlight bursting over the cliffs. The sand was full of tracks: the footprints of beetles, snakes, camels and four-wheel drives crisscrossed the valley floor. There was even a lone skink trail halfway across, both satisfying and amusing on a more personal level (for the record, it’s an old family joke about lesser-spotted three-toed eagle-eyed skinks that gets wheeled out whenever yours truly gets boorishly specific about animals). The others were mostly up and about by the time I returned, and in perfect time for half an hour’s meditation before breakfast. The hefty futur Ahmad and his brother Khaled prepared for us was a kingly feast: fresh bread, helwa, jam, hummus, falafel and hard-boiled eggs (there’s no escaping them!), and that’s without mentioning four glasses of that lovely sage and cinnamon-infused Bedouin tea. Dee-lish. God help my teeth over the coming year, because Spain and the Arab world most certainly won’t.

The jeep tour of Wadi Rum was a pretty standard exploration of the main sights, as you might expect: the early Nabatean rock art, Lawrence’s house and the rock arches. I needn’t elaborate much; such sights, stunning though they may be, are better detailed in guidebooks. Besides, Langelsby’s got it covered. I highly recommend you go for a tour if you’re in the area, though. On a more personal note, I found it profoundly ironic that I finally found a haven for wildlife, in what must be outwardly one of the most inhospitable landscapes on the planet. Desert larks, white-crowned wheatears, rock martins and rosefinches followed us from rock to rock whilst the ever present grackles, the tricksters of Wadi Mujib, whistled noisily overhead. No sign of the nocturnal denizens of the desert, but a welcome change from scabby cats and pigeons. The naturalist in me will never be suppressed. So says the lesser-spotted three-toed skink, at any rate.

On the knowledge that wrangling a bus from Wadi Musa to Amman might be beyond us, we arranged with Ahmad, our kohl-eyed Bedouin guide, to take us as far as Aqaba instead, where buses to Amman would be easier to achieve. Aqaba may be your run-of-the-mill beach resort these days, but it has a notch on everything I’ve seen before: the Red Sea. Sapphire would be a better name by far. I’d heard stories and seen pictures, but I’d never really believed quite how deep a blue the Red Sea was. Quite by accident, and with no small meddling from my heart, I found myself physically incapable of passing up the chance to go snorkeling.

Water sports and I don’t have an easy history, let’s say. Ask the population of Whitstable, who watched me capsize a kayak twice and have to be towed ashore (yeah, that still smarts). Swimming’s just about my favorite sport, being both an important skill and the only sport I’ve ever enjoyed, but I have breathing issues – something to do with my nose – which makes most other water sports more problematic than entertaining. Snorkeling has always been a dream of mine, though. Not as technical as scuba and easily doable for somebody with breathing issues. I say that, at least. It’s easy in retrospect.

The first forty minutes were tortuous – not because very salty water kept leaking into my mask, or because I was panicking over the oddity of breathing through a tube, but because the scenes opening up below me were nothing short of some of the most breathtaking sights I’ve ever seen (ouch, that was a bad pun). Stacks of frilled and fringed coral giving way to deep, sandy gardens shimmering in the crystal sunlight. Black sea urchins stretching their tapering spines out of crevices. Angelfish, surgeonfish, triggerfish, even clownfish, frolicking just inches in front of me. It was like living a wildlife documentary in the flesh. By the time I’d finally worked out how to breathe properly – ironically, the key to it was simply calming down and having faith in the tube – we only had five minutes left in the water. But those last five minutes were magical, even more so than the stars over Wadi Rum. Who could possibly feel lonely, or even give loneliness a second’s thought, with scores of brightly colored fish teeming about so close to? Those were my brightest moments.

Christ, but I feel like a tourist right now. I’ve just tackled three of Jordan’s biggest attractions in two days flat: Petra, Wadi Rum and the Red Sea. I didn’t really give Petra much clearance, did I? Mm, I’ll leave that one to the girls over at Langlesby Travels (https://langlesbytravels.wordpress.com/).

It’s been a busy weekend and a half. It feels unreal, somehow. But I don’t regret it for a second – and for once, l don’t even feel ashamed. I am a tourist. Jordan thrives on tourism. I guess I’m finally beginning to accept that. And about time too! Travel is no more and no less than the best thing you can do with your life, and it’s such a shame to have it spoiled by something you could never change, even if you wanted to. BB x

Earthgrazer

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

We caught the Perseid comet shower alright. I counted thirty-odd shooting stars in the first hour, and I can’t have seen them all. What do you think of when you see a shooting star? I figure it means something is about to happen. That’s what I think.

The night sky in Wadi Rum is really something special. Guide books say that about a lot of things, especially Petra, but I figure you get far more bang for your buck out here under the stars in Wadi Rum. Sure, I’m having to write this at half one in the morning in the stifling heat of my hooded sleeping bag after Andrew complained about the light keeping him up – through he’s still foghorning away away as I write – but I figure this is one of those nights where you have to tell it in the moment, before it’s gone. Gah, but this is unbearable. I’m taking the iPad out. I need a break of fresh air.

My apologies. I fell asleep. Let’s start this again, some four hours later, this time from a cliff a short distance from the camp. Now it’s the starlings making the racket.

By some queer streak of coincidence,some of the most decisive moments of my life to date have been marked by comet showers. I can kind of understand how people used to see them as harbingers of doom. There was a particularly memorable one the night I was chosen to go to Uganda to represent my school, and another the following year on the night before my very last and very best gig with my old Funk Band. I didn’t keep an eye out the last time the Perseid came around – if I remember correctly, I was on bedtime duty – but I remember that the last time I saw a comet shower I had my heart broken. Coincidence? Of course. But I like to believe. There’s that little bit of childish fantasy in all of us. As I reasoned in an earlier post, it’s good for the heart to let go of reason every once in a while and to trust in faith, in whichever form it may take.

After my last comet experience, I wanted a cure. Something to smile about this time. Wadi Rum provided the perfect antidote. I went wandering into the desert a couple of hours after nightfall, not exactly asking myself any deep and meaningful questions as such, but thinking overly hard as I tend to do when I’m alone. I don’t know why I didn’t remember this from visiting the desert castles in the Badia last month, but when you’re alone out in the desert, any emotion you’re feeling gets multiplied fivefold. I was feeling pretty lonely and it got almost unbearable after an hour or so under the stars, beautiful though they might be. It was a bit unnerving, too; dark shapes that became stands of grass in the darkness, and others that didn’t; the blink of a distant flashlight; the patter of feet from somewhere nearby. I think I crossed paths with a fox last night. His footprints were there in the morning, at least.

I found my way back to the sandbank at the edge of the camp to watch the peak of the shower with Daniel and the girls. At six minutes past midnight a single comet blazed brilliant white across the sky to the south, leaving a tail behind it so long and bright that it hung in the sky for a few seconds. One of those ones called earthgrazers, so I’m told, on account of their burning deep into the atmosphere. That was the one worth waiting for. The shining light in the darkness. Yadda yadda, lonely lonely. It was a star worth wishing on though, and I wished with all my heart, that’s for sure.

Standing alone to watch the stars over the desert was intense, and though it wasn’t the most memorable night sky I’ve ever seen (shock, horror, but that award goes to the stars over Bwindi with the red glow of a volcano to the southwest) it is definitely going down as one of my favorite experiences to date. Only next time I go stargazing, perhaps I’ll do myself a favor and won’t go it alone. Highly unlikely, of course, but a man can only hope. BB x

Sunstroke

/ Benjamin Barnabas / 1 Comment

I’ve never felt so spent. More than once today I felt myself on the edge of what I could stand. Dana almost defeated us all, but it was the Sun that dealt the coup de grace.

I find myself collapsed in the shade of a fir tree halfway up the mountain on the winding path back to Dana. Andrew’s gone on ahead to get water. He’s been a real hero, egging me on up the mountainside, but I’ve slowed to such a dreadful crawl that to keep him waiting would be nothing short of torture, what with the Sun enacting merciless fury upon us all. I can only hope he doesn’t think too little of me for my lack of staying power. Working out may be a new thing for me, and true to form I’ve been none too quiet about it in my usual late-to-the-party mode, but this is something else. I can’t even see where the others have got to; MacKenzie shouldn’t be all that far behind – he was trailing us by just one bend a little while back – but there’s no sign of Kate and Andreas. I do hope they’re alright.

My heartbeat has slowed to a beat every half-second; it was pulsing like a war drum when I crumpled under the tree about ten minutes ago. Before that I’d been desperately seeking shade like some kind of wretched insect, curling up head-down behind woefully inadequate slabs of sandstone to dip my head beneath a foot or less of cool shadow. Frodo’s climb of Erebor might not have been too dissimilar; in my dehydrated insanity I even considered crawling some of the distance, when my legs felt like they might give way and my head started spinning. It’s not even the sweat that’s the problem, I’ve gone beyond that. Even here in the shade, it’s the lack of water that’s choking me. I’m drowning in hot air. Every breath feels like sandpaper in my throat. You can’t see it, but the air is full of dust, thrown up from the desert rolling out to the horizon at the foot of this canyon, some six or seven kilometers to the southeast. The mountains take their own prisoners, but desert mountains are in an especially villainous league of their own.

McKenzie just passed by. He’s still soldiering on, despite having free-climbed the cliff wall with Andreas just over an hour ago. How he has the strength for this I’ll never know. Christ, I’m out of shape. And to think that the original plan was to strike out for Petra from here. It beggars belief. I suspect we’d need a lot more than just two bottles of water to keep the five of us going. Ugh, water. It doesn’t bear thinking about. My mind can only picture two things at the moment: intense heat or gushing cold water. Both, as you can imagine, are tortuous in the extreme.

But this heat, though… It must be pushing forty. What could drive a man to seek adventure in this merciless heat? It’s dizzying enough without the climb, and there’s precious little cover, what with the Sun bearing down with unfettered ferocity on this face; just a couple of boulders and trees on the way up are tall enough to offer fleeting sanctuary. I’ve never been so exhausted, spent in every way, from my toes to my eyes. If I could put a name to it – other than a very bad idea from the outset – I’d call it sunstroke. Thick wooly walking socks and a swollen toe from this morning’s roof-jumping escapades didn’t help matters. If it weren’t for Andrew’s breathing exercises, I’d have just about given out, I reckon. Again, the man is a hero.

I hear footsteps in the distance, running. Ah – here comes MacKenzie again, bottle of water in hand. Salvation! The five thousand weren’t more grateful for all that fish and bread than I am at this sight. Enough, cruel Sun, I concede defeat; I’d quite like to return to Dana alive, if just to put an end to this despondent surrender. Over and out. BB x

Multiple Personalities

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

My stomach hurts from laughing so hard. The view of the night sky from the roof of the Dana Tower Hotel is really something special, Milky Way, shooting stars and all – and yet I’ve spent the last two hours face-down on my mattress choking on laughter. And all because of the wonderful invention that is Psychiatrist.

Today has been, without a shadow a doubt, the most ridiculous series of adventures yet. I’m all fired out from the mind games we’ve been playing, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg – the last of a long sequence of madcap antics since waking up at Nancy’s this morning. The family rustled up a wonderful breakfast for us in much the same line as the night before: energy food galore. Andrew and I crept away to write the family a thank you letter and packed our bags into a corner of the room to go. The family came in and served tea, and there we were, in what can only be described as a hospitable but highly awkward state of siege. We wanted to get on our way, but at the same time we kept being denied the opportunity; on our second attempt, just as we’d reached a decision, we were invited to join them for mansaf, which we couldn’t really deny, seeing as they’d already started. Then followed several rounds of ‘the Moon is in the Spoon’, which only the father of the family could get his head around, and he didn’t even play a single round with us. Another hour and a half later it was pushing three o’clock and they looked to be after a second night, which had to be postponed if we should ever get to see Dana at all. We had four oranges we could have given them as gratitude but it seemed more awkward a gift than none at all, paltry as it was. So having got them out, we packed them back into the bag and made our broken farewells before finally crossing the threshold and striking out for the road, though not before receiving another invite should we ever be in Tafileh again.

The next half hour was a world away. From the almost entirely female household of Nancy’s world we moved on to a minibus carrying half a platoon of Jordanian soldiers on their way to a wedding party, though it could just as easily have been a stag night, for all I know. It certainly sounded as much. The ringleader tried to press cigarettes on us all in turn whilst a guy in the row in front of me kept slapping his chest and yelling “sniper, sniper – best in Jordan”. Climbing aboard was a bit of a rogue move, since we didn’t really know where it was going, but it ended up to be heading our way, and it was totally worth it for the experience. When we were finally dropped off in Ar-Rashādiyya, we were well and truly worn out. The following minibus ride to Dana was notable only in that I lost any and all feeling in my legs; the driver loaded the five of us plus one of the grunts into his ride, kitted out with a very inconveniently placed sub-woofer, so that I had to endure a twenty minute drive sat sideways with my legs crushed between the dashboard, my bag and the grunt’s physique, with the driver ramming the gear stick into the small of my back every few minutes. By the time we got to Dana I felt like I’d been amputated.

Dana is beautiful, though. Maybe it’s because we’re here in the lowest of low season, but it was almost deserted. Not a modern construction in sight and plenty of scrambling opportunities; almost stone for stone the way I wanted it to be. We scrambled up the mountainside for a killer sunset over the canyon before dinner, which was well worth the extra dinars, though being stuffed to the gills with Nancy’s mansaf we were hard-pressed to do the chef justice. So to kill time (and an unusually full stomach) I introduced the team to Psychiatrist. Chaos ensued, as it invariably does with that madcap thinking game, but at least I saw it played properly for the first time. The lack of alcohol really does help.

Sounds like everyone’s kipped out. Andrew and Andreas stopped talking a few minutes ago. I guess I’d better follow suit. Early start tomorrow. My walking boots are so ready for this. 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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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