Welcome to Nomads’ Land : The Middle East peace process has brought new travelers to Jordan’s ancient sites of Petra, Amman, Jerash and fabled Wadi Rum

The desert canyon is long, sandy and bare. At its edges, stone cliffs of red and orange rise 2,000 feet into the sky. The wind races. Along a lonely two-lane road, a few dozen yellow-shirted bicyclists wheeze past on a ride for charity, modern anomalies crawling through the ancient world at 10 m.p.h. So far, you could be in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico.

But then you see the galloping camels, hear the boys shouting in Arabic, smell the Bedouin tea brewing, notice the old Nabatean temple crumbling by the canyon wall, and feel an invisible weight that might be this place’s incalculable natural history, or its implausible human history.

Nomads have probably wandered in this canyon for 50 centuries, as control of the territory has passed from Arabs to Greeks to Romans to Turks to the English to Arabs again, since 1953 in the hands of Jordan’s King Hussein.

Not quite 80 years ago, in this same canyon, a young British intelligence officer named T.E. Lawrence (‘slim, blond and very untidy,” in the description of historian Peter Mansfield) rested before battle here in his adopted Arab robes, then rose to charge alongside Bedouin warriors in the British-supported Arab revolt against Turkish Turkish rule.

Then 34 years ago came English director David Lean, who shot parts of ‘Lawrence of Arabia” here, giving Peter O’Toole his first leading role. (‘It is my pleasure that you dine with me at Wadi Rum!” thunders Anthony Quinn, playing an Arab chieftain who invites O’Toole to dinner before their successful attack on Aqaba.)

Now, this canyon, about 30 miles northeast of the Red Sea and the Israeli border, is among the handful of sites driving Jordan’s new life as a mainstream tourist destination for Westerners. There’s nothing so grand (or unnatural) as a hotel here, which may be why many tour itineraries still bypass this place. But you can rent a Bedouin-style tent for the night, dinner and breakfast included. You can take a camel ride, at varying rates, or an exploratory drive in a sport-utility vehicle, and follow it with a buffet lunch (overpriced at $10) at the Government Rest House. You can have tea or a water pipe (tobacco only) delivered to you at a low table. Even hot-air balloon rides can be arranged, if you don’t mind spending as much money in an hour--$120 per person--as the average Jordanian makes in a month. .

Here and in Jordan’s two leading tourist destinations--the ancient city of Petra and Amman, the capital--increasing numbers of visitors have arrived since October, 1994, when Jordan opened its borders with Israel.

The border move was a historic gambit for a king whose country has lost land at war against Israel, and whose 4.2 million subjects include hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians. Despite all his overtures to the West, King Hussein allied Jordan with Iraq in the Persian Gulf War of 1991--perhaps, analysts said, because Jordan gets much of its oil by pipeline from Iraq. Then in the last year, as Jordan rebuilt goodwill with the United States and Israel, its relations with Iraq soured considerably, especially when Jordan offered refuge to dissenting relatives of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

So far, the king’s invitation to tourists and the Jordanians’ deserved reputation for hospitality to travelers are paying off big. In the first four months of this year, Jordan recorded 146,232 arrivals from Israel, the Americas and Europe, an 88% increase over the same period last year. And, perhaps most crucially for terrorism-wary North American travelers, Jordan has largely avoided the flare-ups of anti-Western violence that have afflicted other parts of the Arab world.

Still, the Middle East is an uncertain place, and Jordan remains a long way for a North American to go. Beyond that, the place is nearly 90% desert. Thus, even at Petra, the country’s biggest tourist attraction, gatekeepers report fewer than 2,000 visitors on most days. Those who venture to Jordan now can see a nation that seems eager to fall in step with all the world’s other modernized territories, but for the moment marches a pace apart.

The sites I missed on my brief visit would fill an itinerary for someone else--Jordan’s half of the Dead Sea; the hot springs nearby; a string of castles (all more than 1,000 years old) in the desert east of Amman; the 1,400-year-old mosaics southwest of Amman at Madaba, and Mt. Nebo.

Yet my agenda was full. I began with a border crossing from Eilat, Israel, to Aqaba, Jordan’s only port. From there I roamed to Wadi Rum, then about 50 miles north to Petra; from there, I traveled about 160 miles northwest to Amman, then to the old Roman city of Jerash.

Aqaba

Aqaba is Jordan’s toehold on the Red Sea, a scant 15 or so miles of coastline. Its position as the country’s only port makes it a town more dedicated to shipping than to tourism, a place of boxy, beige buildings and the occasional mosque minaret. For anyone arriving from tourism-soaked Eilat, that’s a pleasant change. Aqaba sustains a few hotels, a small downtown area, an aquarium and a handful of dive centers. Scuba divers and snorkelers can sample the spellbinding variety of underwater life in the Red Sea, one of the world’s foremost underwater destinations because of its clear visibility and variety of marine life.

In the next few years, Aqaba is almost certain to follow the examples set by Israelis in Eilat and Egyptians along the Sinai, who lure thousands of travelers with scores of hotels and dive centers. And this could happen on a grand scale: In early November at an international economic conference in Amman, Israeli and Jordanian officials agreed to explore various cooperative tourism ideas, including a binational airport serving Eilat and Aqaba.

Like the vast majority of travelers, I passed through Aqaba quickly, already thinking of Wadi Rum and Petra up the road. My Jordanian guide, Jalil Shami, was clearly thinking the same way.

“There is a castle and an aquarium. That’s it. Nothing special,” he said, wheeling the car through a quick city tour, then pulling onto the road out of town.

At the edge of Aqaba, the city gave way to bare desert, we passed a massive dirt-lot truck-stop area full of shipping containers, snack bars of dubious hygiene, and idling trucks and truckers. This, Jalil explained cheerfully, was the staging area for food and other supplies shipped to Iraq during the Gulf War.

Petra

It was about an hour to Wadi Rum, and another 90 minutes or so to Petra, where a tourism-driven city burgeons on the hillsides. Four- and five-star hotels are rising rapidly, and a global wonder lies concealed among the boulders below.

Petra is an entire city carved from red rock, larger than Machu Picchu, accessible by walking or riding (horse, camel, donkey or carriage) half a mile through a narrow, winding passage known as the siq . The city was built by the Nabateans, who ruled the trans-Jordan area about the time of Christ. But the site was largely forgotten by the West until 1812, when Swiss adventurer and Arabist J.L. Burckhardt disguised himself as a Muslim scholar, persuaded some Bedouins to guide him into the ancient city so that he could leave a sacrifice at a holy site within. Historians say he was probably the first Westerner to lay eyes on the place in six centuries.

Millions of contemporary Americans, conversely, have already seen Petra without knowing it. Director Steven Spielberg used the ruins’ most striking building, the 130-foot-high, rose-hued Treasury, as a backdrop in his 1989 film, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”

For its detail, its variation, its scale and the play of the sunlight in its meandering corridors, Petra is astounding and absorbing--worth an overnight stay, even for those (like me) whose attention spans for ruins are usually short.

One day, I lay on a rock for the last few minutes before the park’s closing about 5:30 p.m., watching the canyon walls fall dark and the walkways empty, feeling the temperature plummet. Suddenly, a donkey screeched, possibly the world’s ugliest sound resonating through one of the world’s most beautiful ancient places.

Beneath the natural and man-made rock formations, Bedouin merchants peddle tea and snacks, sweaters, carpets, goblets and little bottles filled with decoratively colored sand--all of which seems at first like a crass commercialization of the site. But it’s more complicated than that.

There are about 300 Bedouins doing business in the park; most are from families that used to reside, with their animals, in the site’s hundreds of caves. When the Jordanian government moved the cave-dwellers out to a nearby settlement, it gave them concession rights to the ruins.

On my first afternoon in the corridors, I passed one of their tea tables, each of its seats occupied by a man draped in the Arab headgear known as a kaffiyeh. I imagined they were deep in an Arabic discussion of camel afflictions or tent-staking technique, until I overheard a remark by the burly, bearded one.

“How do you guys turn your heads with these things on?” he was asking. ‘They weigh a ton!”

This was not a wonderfully ancient scene but a wonderfully modern scene. The speaker was Steven Chotin, a mortgage banker from Colorado and a high-level supporter of the United Jewish Appeal. He and others in the organization were on a trip through the Middle East. Having laid out $20 for a souvenir kaffiyeh, Chotin was doing his own small part in advancing Jewish-Jordanian friendliness. As he delivered quips and his Jewish-American friends gathered around, Chotin and his new friend, a genuine Arab named Mahmoud, mugged for the cameras. (Four days later, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish right-wing extremist.)

Two more things about Petra. It is among the world’s costliest national parks, but not among its best-protected. Last year, authorities raised rates for foreigners from about $8 to about $32 for a one-day pass, about $40 for two days. Yet one morning I watched two guards do nothing as half a dozen foreigners clambered up onto an ancient ledge of the Treasury building to have their pictures taken.

Apparently, a UNESCO evaluation team that visited Petra recently saw similar things. In the group’s 300-page management proposal for the site, it proposed banning horses and limiting visitors to 2,000-2,500 per day. (Jordanian officials estimate daily attendance now at about 1,500.)

Amman and Jerash

The road to Amman is daunting, all empty desert, scrub hills, truck stops and stray sheep and goats. Think of an untouristed Greek island, then subtract the ocean and add a muffler shop every 20 miles.

Amman, the nation’s capital and home to about half the nation’s population, at first looks like Aqaba writ large. Instead of boxy beige buildings climbing one hillside, it has more than a dozen hills, all covered with the same simple architecture--a cityscape more modern, and not as appealingly random, as the ancient streets of Jerusalem or Cairo.

That’s at first glance. At second glance, Amman is a city of, ah, shrunken Eiffel Towers. In the ritzier neighborhoods on the south side, home to many breadwinners who work in oil-rich Arab states and send home hefty checks, immaculate homes of limestone and marble are topped by stylized television antennas, many of them twisted into Eiffel form.

Around these buildings races Amman’s considerable traffic, including a striking number of taxis and trucks that have been custom-decorated by their owners. The designs are multicolored and geometrical--very clearly cousins to the intricate geometrical patterns that are built into the grillwork, floor and ceilings of many mosques and much Islamic art.

In fact, the decorated taxis and trucks are a hint of Amman’s deeper character. In the heart of town lies a large, busy mosque, whose towers issue tinny recorded calls to prayer five times daily. Nearby lie the stones of the original city, Philadelphia, whose ruins include a fully restored Roman amphitheater.

On a hill above, with panoramic views of the lesser hills, stand more ruins and the modest but absorbing Jordan Archeological Museum. One of its first displays is a plaster statue of a man, found in 1983 and dated to the Neolithic period, between 8,000 and 6,000 years BC. This three-and-a-half-foot-high fellow with bulging eyes was described by the museum’s note card as “the earliest statue ever done throughout human civilization” that represents the human form.

Yes, I was highly suspicious of the claim, but this was an ancient place, after all, and even if this curator was being a little optimistic, the sculpture was intriguing. (One of the museum curators told me that the two-room building would eventually house the world-famous Dead Sea Scrolls, but for now they remain in France for restoration.)

The Jordanian merchants and others on the street were genial and welcoming, and haggling with them, I didn’t feel as exploited as I had in the marketplaces of Cairo a week before. Like all of Jordan, Amman can be quite affordable. Taxis are cheap--a few dollars gets you just about anywhere--and some of the nicest restaurants (outside of hotels) will feed you dinner for less than $10. Beyond that, downtown is full of budget hotels, places with shared bathrooms and tariffs under $20 a night. (For those who prefer more luxuries, Amman also has the usual run of business-type luxury hotels, with higher rates and international standards, including Inter-Continental, Marriott and the place where I stayed, the Regency Palace.)

The greatest draw of greater Amman, however, is Jerash, a sprawling ruined Roman city that lies about 30 miles north of the modern capital. In many countries, this site would be celebrated far and wide, and probably engraved on currency. But Jordan has Petra, and Jerash is doomed to an eternity as Ruin No. 2.

Some historians say that human settlements at the site date back as far as 8,000 years, but it was the Romans who built most of what remains. They gave Jerash more than 1,000 imposing stone columns--about 300 are standing now, and more will rise as restoration continues. They fashioned an oval piazza that sets newcomers to thinking about the Piazza San Pietro in Rome. They built an amphitheater that still fills for an arts festival every July, and used the roads so heavily that even now, 20 centuries later, a visitor can kneel and see ancient chariot ruts in the stones of the old road. Then there are the old floor mosaics that resemble half-done jigsaw puzzles.

After my morning in Jerash, I spent an afternoon wandering downtown Amman where the streets were jammed with slow-moving vehicles, fast-moving pedestrians and sellers of just about everything--a suq (market area) for produce, another for shoes, another for suits, which featured polyester ties at $1 each. Then there was the luggage bearing this stitched slogan: “CAUTION: CREATION OF BAGS’--inspired, I’m guessing, by a sign in the manufacturing plant.

Soon I saw a storefront bearing all the classic signs of an Arab coffeehouse: grizzled men, great clouds of smoke, bubbling water pipes, battered old chairs and tables. I ducked inside, endured a few stares and took a seat.

In corners, the men (no women, as per the Muslim custom of segregation by gender) hunched over newspapers and squabbled over obscure card games. But most were gazing at the television over the door. What was it that captured their attention? It was wrestling, of the Hulk Hogan variety, with hollering men in clinging trunks of many colors. The Jordanians watched and sipped, and watched and sipped, then, when the tape ran out, turned back to their more traditional amusements.

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GUIDEBOOK: Jordanian Journey

Getting there: American Airlines offers five weekly connecting flights from LAX to Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport, switching from American to Royal Jordanian airlines at New York’s Kennedy airport (also stopping in Amsterdam), with restricted coach fares beginning at $1,740.

Other carriers offering connecting flights with slightly higher fares: KLM, British Airways and Lufthansa.. Travelers can also fly into Tel Aviv, Israel, and cross into Jordan by land.

Required visas can be purchased in advance or at point of entry; those entering Jordan via Israel can simplify the border passage by getting their entry in advance by mail.

How to go: Many Americans choose the ease and security of tour groups for trips to the Middle East, and many tour operators have added Jordan or Israel-Jordan to their offerings in the last year. Among the large operators that go to Jordan: African Travel Inc. (telephone 800-421-8907), Brendan Tours (800-421-8446), Butterfield & Robinson (800-678-1147), Gate 1 Ltd. (800-682-3333), Overseas Adventure Travel (800-221-0814), and Wilderness Travel (800-368-2794).

Where to stay: In Aqaba, the Aqaba Gulf Hotel (tel. 011-962-3-316-636, fax 011-962-3-318-246)offers double rooms at $90 nightly. In Petra, the Petra Forum Hotel (tel. 011-962-3-336-266, fax 011-962-3-336-977), with best location and possibly the best western-style restaurant in town, offers doubles for about $120. In Amman, the Amman Regency Palace Hotel (tel. 011-962-6-607-000, fax 011-962-6-660-013) offers large-chain-hotel-like amenities for about $155 per double. Among the many no-frills, budget accommodations, the Cliff Hotel downtown (tel. 011-962-6-624-273) offers double rooms (shared bathroom) for $12.

For more information: The Jordan Information Bureau, 2319 Wyoming Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20008, (202) 265-1606; fax (202) 667-0777.