(Not) leaving on a JETT bus

From Aqaba we headed to Petra (by taxi, as it turned out ... but not Akhmed's taxi), and all was well.

I must have taken over a hundred photos during our two days exploring Petra, so I'm sure people will be dying to invite me round for a slide show. Here's a semi random selection before we get back to the serious matter of things going wrong.

(That was as close as we got to camels. Nasty things, camels.)

After two days walking around Petra, with a bad-weather day in between where we visited the ruined castle at Shobak ...

... it was time to head home to Amman.

For the trip from Amman to Aqaba we'd taken the JETT VIP bus, a very nearly luxurious bus with leather seats and breakfast on board. I hadn't booked a return bus from Petra, as we weren't quite sure which day we'd be going back, and that (surprisingly) turned out to be a mistake.

Although Petra is Jordan's number one tourist destination, with a million visitors a year, and JETT is the number one tourist bus company in Jordan, there is exactly one JETT bus a day from Petra to Amman. (There are "public" buses - smaller buses that leave when they're full rather than running to a timetable - but it appears tourists are really expected to take package tours or hire rental cars with drivers.) There's no JETT ticket office in Petra; instead travellers are advised to phone to reserve seats and be at the bus station half an hour before the bus goes.

The day before we were planning to leave, I'd managed to persuade the chap on the desk at our hotel to phone the JETT number for me, and listened while he had a conversation that certainly seemed to involve booking two people with versions of our names onto a bus to Amman. So we headed to the JETT stop after our semi-marathon day walking around Petra with reasonable hopes of getting onto the bus. When the ticket-seller arrived he couldn't find our names on his handwritten reservation list, and told us the hotel must have phoned the wrong JETT office. He then bolted onto the bus without offering to add our names to the list, telling us to wait outside until he knew whether there was room for us. We weren't too worried - his list looked short, and there were only a few other people waitig to board the bus. As departure time got closer, though, more and more people turned up. Lots of them had actual tickets, presumably purchased in Amman before the trip down, and it was entirely reasonable that they should be allowed onto the bus. Other people, mostly locals, were arriving without tickets though, and many of them were pushing their way onto the bus to talk to the ticket guy then coming back to stand outside with the rest of us hopefuls. Every few minutes the ticket guy would come to the door and call out a name or two from his reservation list, which mysteriously seemed to have more and more names on it as the minutes went by. In the end there was room for exactly one passenger whose name wasn't on his list ... and the bus pulled away leaving six somewhat disgruntled foreign tourists behind. No other bus at all till the next day - and since the ticket seller had left on the bus there was no guarantee the next day wouldn't turn out exactly the same.

We were rescued by a pair of enterprising taxi drivers (quelle surprise). As a group we weren't in a very good negotiating position, as the taxi drivers were well aware we'd been ditched by the bus and the public buses for the day were also finished. But they actually seemed like decent chaps, and offered a price that seemed not entirely unreasonable for the 234-km drive to Amman, especially given that they would then have to turn around and drive back to Petra without being allowed to pick up passengers in Amman because it wasn't their patch. (And to put it in a home context, it would probably cost more to get a taxi to The Base and back home again in Hamilton than Mark and I paid for our share ...).

We divvied the passengers and luggage between the two cars and headed off in mini convoy. Our driver drove like a man who'd left dinner cooking on the stove at home, reaching 130 km/hr on good stretches of road, but was mercifully unchatty and quite good at staying in his lane. The only thing we missed out on (other than having a bit more cash left at the end of the trip) was the satisfaction of overtaking the bus.

A series of (mildly) unfortunate events

It would be easy for me to let the world think all our days go smoothly and that we are both competent and lucky travellers. Indeed, that's how things mostly are, give or take a bit of bumbling around. But some days ...

On our recent trip to the south of Jordan, we spent a few days in the seaside city of Aqaba, where we stayed in one of the ugliest hotels I have ever seen (this is not even one of the unfortunate events, but just like the TV news you are getting this part of the story because I have a picture).

The hotel did have its charms - well, one charm, which was a balcony with this view. 

That's Israel in the background, and maybe a touch of Egypt on the far left. One of the cool things to do in Aqaba is to take a boat trip to Pharaoh Island, an Egyptian island with a ruined castle and generally dramatic scenery. Unfortunately it turns out to be a cool thing to do in summer and decidedly not on offer in the off-season, so there went my plans for one of our days in Aqaba.

After we'd seen Aqaba's historical sights and had a morning in Wadi Rum, we decided to take a walk through a couple of new waterfront residential developments. On the map they looked a bit like the waterways at Pauanui or Whitianga, so we thought it would be interesting to see where the local rich people live. Unfortunately, guards with semi-automatic guns said no, that wasn't an option, and since it generally seems to be a good idea to believe people holding weapons we had to trudge back to the hotel without getting to see anything more than a long stretch of 5-metre-high wall.

The next day we took a taxi along to Aqaba's South Beach, a stretch of coast between Aqaba's industrial port and the Saudi border which has been prettied up with sun shelters and paths. There's good snorkelling and diving just off the coast, and we had hopes of taking a semi-submersible boat trip to admire the coral and pretty fish without getting wet. But because it was the off-season, the beach was largely deserted, with no sign of any boat trips, just a few independent snorkellers and some stray dogs. Yes, we went to Aqaba and it was closed.

While we were standing by the entrance to a public resort (a part of the beach with flash facilities that anyone can use if they want to pay the NZD 20 entry fee) discussing what we could do instead of admiring fish or giving in and taking one of the small boat rides from the main beach, a taxi materialised out of the busy traffic and pulled in next to us. Out popped Akhmed with his bushy grey beard and crocheted skullcap, a very cheerful chap who was tremendously keen to drive us back to town, so in we hopped.

The way he'd miraculously appeared next to us should have warned us. He drove slowly but erratically, hunched over the steering wheel, and turning around to talk to us constantly. It was almost okay when he was talking to Mark in the front seat, but when he turned to talk to me the car drifted across the road and other cars were lucky to avoid him. Even when he faced forward he struggled to keep the car in its lane. The only consolation was that because he was driving so slowly any collision would probably have been quite low impact.

Akhmed was very keen to take us back to the centre of Aqaba. When we said we'd rather go to the bird observatory he claimed never to have heard of it. We showed him on a map - look, it's there next to the border crossing - and he spluttered. "Eilat? Isra-el?? You want to go to Isra-el?! I take you to information centre. No border crossing. You need passport."

"No," we explained. "It's near the border crossing, but still in Aqaba. And anyway, we have our passports."

For a couple of minutes that seemed to have sunk in, and then he was off again. "Isra-el??? Border??" Eilat?!" It was a long drive to the bird observatory, and seemed even longer with a taxi driver with the attention span of a goldfish.

Then things got worse. The bird observatory is indeed still in Aqaba, but it's between the Jordanian police checkpoint and the Israeli customs crossing. Akhmed talked very animatedly to the Jordanian police, and then told us we would have to leave our passports with them and collect them on the way back. (Even if we had wanted to cross the border, it's not actually illegal - regardless of what the Jordanians and Israelis think of each other, people cross the border all the time, and they had no reason to think we were fleeing Jordan for criminal reasons.) To make things worser again, Akhmed told us we would have to pay for him to wait for us while we went to the bird observatory; walking along that road was not allowed, and neither would we be allowed to catch a different taxi back. Most of this struck us as total garbage, but the police were nodding (and holding onto our passports), and with ten or so words of Arabic between us we were hardly in a position to argue.

Then of course we had to negotiate a price .... which turned out to be somewhere between daylight robbery and limb amputation, but left Akhmed happily chuntering on about what good people New Zealanders are and calling us "friend".

The bird observatory itself was underwhelming. It's a nice idea - a re-established wetland to encourage migrating birds to rest for a while - but the wetland is largely watered by the sewage treatment ponds next door, and the smell was pervasive. Maybe the smell had scared the birds away, or maybe, armed as we were with a pamphlet of bird photos but no map, we were just looking in the wrong places, but we saw very few birds (to liven things up, we did see dung beetles and huge ants, and butterflies and dragonflies), and what I had assumed was a bird-watching tower turned out to be a military observation post complete with soldiers.

On the drive back to the hotel Akhmed asked where we were off to next. At the mention of Petra he became hugely excited, telling us not to take the bus because it is dangerous and that he would drive us to Petra and then back to Aqaba. "Oh," we said, "we're not coming back. We might head to Karak, and then we're going back to Amman." No problem for our new friend - he was available to drive us all over Jordan at a very special price.

Mark wanted to take a photo of Akhmed when we got back to the hotel so we could remember him forever. But I had visions of finding Akhmed waiting for us in front of the hotel when we wanted to leave the next day, so didn't want him knowing where we were staying. (We had told him, but I figured it probably wouldn't have sunk in.) So we persuaded him to let us out at busy traffic lights instead, and scarpered without the photo op. It was worth it to be free.

You're in Jordan, you'll want that in Arabic!

One of the minor annoyances is the tendency of apps to think that, because you are in Jordan you want everything in Arabic.

This greeted me on my attempt to put up the last post:

(Note how everything is aligned right to left, with the "close" button moved to the right. All the toolbars switched sides too.)

And the entire Blogger site was in Arabic from that point on. Alison help fix it for me, because oddly hers didn't change over, but when I go to the preview function it still gives portions of it in Arabic.

Google search reverts every now and again to Arabic, again right adjusted, but seems to go back after a few searches in English.

I also get very helpful messages from my phone provider in Arabic. Fortunately on-line translation works really well for them, once I learned how to cut and paste the text.

The school itself

So this is the school.

Built outside of town about 10 years ago, so everything is quite new and fresh. All in one rambling multi-story building going up the side of a quite steep hill (most of Amman is hilly).

Like all the schools here, and particularly the private ones, it has a bit of a tendency to look like a prison.

They all have steel barriers surrounding them on top of the surrounding high stone walls. Because students can’t go off site, pretty much for any reason, they have huge barriers to prevent balls being kicked out, which you can see on the left of my first photo. (In some of the schools the wire extends over the top of the play area too, so the children are effectively in a giant cage.)

And here is the entrance (with my bus to the right ready to take me home).

The main gates are closed all the time (presumably they are only for deliveries of bulk material). There are guards on all the time, and everyone has to go past them. Staff have ID cards, which we have to wear all the time, and visitors are checked out thoroughly and then given visitor cards. The only other entrance is at the back, where the buses go deliver the students, and it is also guarded. Staff and students stay on site for the whole day, unless it is an organized trip out.

Apparently at least one of the guards is armed.

All the private schools are like this, except  the American Community School, which is high security. That has armed guards outside all the time, and it has unmarked buses.

This is the playing and lunch area at myschool. By local standards it is extremely large and well provided – the advantage of having a new site out of town.

By comparison, this is the football area at one of the primary schools in Salt, a nearby town.

The photo makes it look bigger than it is, which is smaller than a tennis court. The only other space at that school is a similar space, fully paved, just with a huge shade-cloth over it for the summer sun. No schools have grass areas.

It's all quite different from the space and greenness of NZ.

Country spotting

The blogger's curse - either there's nothing happening, in which case I have plenty of time to write about it, or we're busy, in which case there's plenty to write about but no time to do it.

Last weekend we added to our collection of countries that we have looked at across a body of water but not actually set foot in. (Countries seen from planes don't count.)

We took a day tour organised by university students up to the north of Jordan, to visit Yarmouk, where in 636 the massively outnumbered Arab Muslim troops defeated the Byzantine Empire army, and then the ruins of Gadara (one of the cities of the Decapolis, as everybody knows) at Umm Qais. It was a small but diverse tour group - us, a few Canadians, an English guy, his Spanish wife, a group of Philippino women, a Chinese student and a few local-ish students. The trip was a little light on actual explanation of what we were seeing, and not all the explanations were totally correct, but it was a great day out and a chance to see part of Jordan that we otherwise might not have got to.  We also got to sample and buy some delicious local food produced by the tour guide’s extended family at quite reasonable prices (we were totally free to say no, but the labneh and pomegranate molasses were actually very tasty and we were happy to buy some).

It’s much greener up north than around Amman, and indeed this is the part of Jordan where most of the horticulture happens.

Young people would rather work in the city than on the farms though, so there are less crops being grown here than there used to be. The only crop that hasn't suffered is olives, as it only takes a few days a year to harvest them, and people take a few days' holiday and come home to help out.

From the Jordanian part of the Yarmouk site you can see Syria across the valley, and also Israel. You can see both of them without even glancing from side to side, because this is the Golan Heights, part of Syria occupied by Israel since 1981. We could see a set of buildings that our guide claimed was a methane gas plant in the distance, but its white dome looked remarkably like the Waihopai satellite communications station. There was also a very clear fence line, though I wasn’t sure whether it was keeping people out or in. (It does seem that if you want to make money in Israel, selling fence-building supplies would be a grand business to be in.)

It was the first weekend of sunshine for a few weeks, and the locals were making the most of it at both Yarmouk and Umm Qais and all points in between. Any spot of open land seemed to be fair game for lighting up the barbecue and shisha pipe (slightly fuzzy photo taken from the bus window as we were moving).

Did you know that Christians use the fish symbol because Jesus ate fish from the Jordan River on Fridays? That’s the local story, anyway. Less contentious was the guide’s claim that over the centuries local people recycled stone from the older parts of Umm Qais to make houses around the edges of the site, where they continued to live until the mid-1980s when the Ministry of Antiquities took over the site and rehoused the villagers down the road in town. 

From Umm Qais, as well as all the ruins and an impromptu dance by a group of lads ...

 ... there’s a view of Lake Tiberias, aka the Sea of Galilee ...

... and of course the sunset.

  Next instalment: Mark's take on teaching so far, and then our assault on As-Salt.