Day-trippin' and getting stoned

Weeks and weeks ago now, before the excitement of big-name tourist destinations and transport mini-disasters we made our first day trip out of town.

Salt (or As-Salt, or Al-Salt) is only 25 km from home, a perfect distance for a taxi ride in Jordan. It's a hilly town - so hilly it makes Amman look flat - and was once the most important settlement between the Eastern Desert and the Jordan Valley. It was used as an administrative centre by the Ottomans around the end of the 19th century, and still has many buildings from that time, in distinctive Ottoman style (if you know what you're looking for). The only way to explore most of the old town centre is on foot; no need to designate the alleyways as pedestrian zones as cars simply don't cope well with staircases.

As well as several mosques (including one built on top of an old fortress), there are a couple of old Christian churches in Salt. We were walking past the Dormition of the Virgin Mary Orthodox Church just as the church warden was unlocking it to show a local and her two overseas visitors around, and they very kindly invited us to join them. We were shown around the main part of the church and then taken up a very narrow spiral staircase onto the roof to admire the view.

There wasn't a "please save our church" box, or we'd have gladly donated some money as a thank you. Instead we clambered around Salt some more then had an astonishingly cheap lunch (the look of incomprehension on Mark's face when he saw the bill had me worried for a moment), and taxied home.

We are tougher travellers now, and have learnt to use the local buses. Well, one of them, which runs from downtown Amman along the main road near home and out to Wadi al Seer, a small town just to the west of Amman. So a couple of weekends ago we caught this bus, and then another from there (a local taxi driver generously showed us which bus we needed, which just goes to show that not all taxi drivers in Jordan are terrible people) out to Qasr Al Abd, a ruined palace built in approx 200 BC. It mostly fell down in an earthquake in 362, but parts of it have been restored just enough to give an idea of its scale and style.

After exploring the ruins we walked a couple of km to some burial caves by the side of the road. Next to the path that led up from the road to the caves was an old chap with a walking stick minding his goats, and a few boys who might have been his grandsons or might just have been local kids.

The smallest of the boys attempted to sell us a large bunch of spring onions as we walked past, perhaps not having really thought through what tourists might want to carry around on their walks. When we declined to buy the onions he and his brothers followed us to the top of the path and appared to be suggesting we could just give them money instead.

We weren't enthusiastic.

Then one of the boys tapped Mark quite vigorously on the back of the head so we decided it was time to leave, and set off down the path towards the road. When we were about halfway I felt something bounce off my shoulder: the lovely lads were expressing their disappointment by throwing pebbles at us. Some of the pebbles found their mark, though most missed, and then they moved on to bigger stones. The old chap noticed what was happening and told them to stop, but in such a gentle way that he clearly didn't expect them to take any notice and they were naturally happy to meet his expectations. Luckily none of those larger stones actually hit us, and we made it back to the village to catch our bus unharmed. (The next kids we met that day wanted to take selfies with us, funny-looking foreigners that we are - altogether more civilised!)

The bus to work, and other frightening events

The school has a fleet of buses. They number up to at least 33, although I think that they might only have about 24. This is a view of the back of the school, showing about half of them.

I get picked up each morning in one of the two staff buses. There is an early bus, half an hour after school finishes, and a later one for those doing sport, with meetings etc.

On the plus side it is free and reliable. It's also often quite sociable, because it is a good time to talk to staff from other departments.

On the downside it is slow and uncomfortable. Slow because it weaves across Amman picking up/dropping off other staff, and they are quite scattered. Uncomfortable because the roads are badly maintained and the drivers weave around like crazy. The hilly terrain doesn't help.

All the schools and universities have similar fleets. All the same sort of buses -- much smaller than NZ buses to fit the narrow spaces (the roads are wide enough, but the dodgy parking makes them narrow) -- and all in the same shade of yellow as ours. I see dozens as I wait for mine in the morning ferrying people across town. A lot of businesses have them too if they are sited away from public transport, as cars are expensive here.

I sit quite a long way back, partly because I get on late and partly to give the staff children the better seats at the front. It has the huge advantage that I don't get to see the mayhem going on out front. The school drivers are all the same in that they have got the "following" part of driving pretty much nailed, but apparently think that the "distance" part is intended to be as small as possible. Not every Jordanian drives like that, although it is quite common. The school drivers don't drive particularly fast, fortunately, but they still scare me.

Traffic flow is something to watch. The number of lanes is determined by the width of the road, not how many are marked. Traffic weaves in and out merrily. A particular favourite is turning from a centre lane despite the lane inside you going straight ahead. Pedestrians will wander across at any point -- the traffic in the photo above is not stationary. Vehicles travel from very slow to very fast in accordance with the impatience of the driver.

The give-way laws are a mystery, even to people who drive here. If traffic is going slow then everyone just pushes in however they can. If traffic is fast then it is essentially a game of chicken and it is rare to see a car stop to give way -- they merely slow down a bit and try to both fit. Our bus will not slow down on the entrance to roundabouts just because another car is already going round it, and at the last second one of them will slow slightly to allow the other in front.

Indicators can be used for indicating your intentions -- but only if what you are about to attempt is particularly awful. Putting down your cigarette, coffee or phone to use the indicator is regarded as stupid. That's what your horn is for! A short blast on the horn indicates "Watch out, I'm coming through in a vaguely illegal or stupid manner", "out of the way please, I wish to go faster than you", "the light turned green 50 milliseconds ago and you are still in my way" and "I'm a taxi, do you wish to be picked up?". You could easily hear a dozen blasts of the horn in a minute at an intersection. I've more or less stopped noticing them unless they are close. Oddly, you have to commit a particularly heinous act off cutting off or similar to get a horn blast because you have annoyed them.

I have it on good authority, however, that Jordan is not a patch on Egypt. People who have been there are consistent it is much worse. It almost makes me want to go there!

(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.