Procrastinet

Amman, Jordan - 1/13/05: Lost Highway

filed under: Despatches

A continuing series of periodic Procrastinet Despatches from Amman, Jordan. By Nicholas Seeley.

This is a small country. I mean very. It is a little funny to realize that Jordan is really sort of a three-road town.

Outside Amman, there are maybe five or six towns of any size or development, but for the most part, it’s trackless waste, interrupted by occasional clusters of cinderblock huts with satellite dishes.

The king’s highway runs from Irbid and Jerash in the north, through Amman, and then all the way south through Petra, the port city of Aqaba, and then to the Saudi border. Parallel to that, the Dead Sea highway runs along the Israeli border, making pretty much the same stops. The only difference is it passes near the Dead Sea and through the Jordan valley before it reaches Amman. Another highway runs west from the capital along the country’s panhandle towards Iraq.

And that’s it, really. That’s all there is to Jordan. Away from those roads it’s dry-as-dirt mountains and trackless sand dunes and not much else. It’s a country pieced together out of all the bits no one else could be bothered to annex.

The King’s Highway at least looks sort of like a Nevada interstate, cutting through flat desert with occasional truck stops or tiny towns beside it. Most of it is nearly featureless – a straight, flat black line through endless orange desert, and stumbling hills of baked clay and scrub brush. In the south, as you approach Wadi Rum, the character of the land begins to change, and the sand flats give birth to chains of sullen red mesas that rise up out of the sand like the broken columns of some vast, eldritch temple or mead hall.

I only wrote that sentence because I really wanted to use the world "eldritch."

Jordan is a little bit Lovecraftian, come to think about it: there's something odd about that desert. It's hard to believe that geology was created by wind and water alone. It looks like something made it.

Still further south, the constitution of the earth changes again, and the mesas are replaced with huge hills of orange rock, torn and eroded dappled with scree, and surprisingly reminiscent of the photos of another world sent back by Spirit and Viking. As you approach Aqaba, more and more of the landscape is replaced by phosphorus quarries. It's funny, because it's still broken hillsides and big piles of rock, but it's shocking how different a cliff face shaped by dynamite looks from one shaped by weather.

The hills continue nearly to the sea itself, and the road to the Saudi border runs for several miles between the white beach and the red stone. Dotted on the one side with mines and trucks, and on the other with unfinished resorts and developments, it is one of the ugliest stretches of road I have ever seen, and with the least justification for being so.

Aqaba itself is a strange sort of disaster-in-the-making. The guidebooks all talk it up as a big tourist trap – beautiful red sea beaches, diving and snorkeling drawing crowds of scantily clad western tourists to one of Jordan’s more conservative southern cities. The reality is much stranger.

When I was there, half the city was under construction. Hideous, glistening new hotels and resorts line the shoreline, and more are going up every minute. And they are all completely deserted. There was no one at all in the lobby of the hotel where I stayed. So is the bar. The E! entertainment channel screams from the television sets for the entertainment of no one. The first morning I was there, the perfect time for bathing before the heat gets unbearable, I woke and find there’s not a soul to be seen on the overdeveloped Red Sea beaches. It’s like a nuclear holocaust theme park; at any minute I expect Ava Gardner to show up and vomit on me.

The city itself seems fairly normal – a small, conservative town on the Saudi border. The souks and bakeries are bustling, the inevitable smells of raw meat and rotting fruit and saffron and cinnamon hang over the market. It’s only the resort town that’s cursed: a giant spirit house, built by the superstitious and offered up for the appeasement of a crowd of phantom tourists.

Jordan has a problem with capitalism. They've got it, but they don't really get it. One of the group of people I was in Aqaba with was involved in the reconstruction of one of those waterfront clubs – built on the longest single stretch of private beach in town, it cost a half a million JD (close to a million dollars) to build, and is indescribably hideous, but I'll try: a mess of ugly concrete and cheap plank-and paint structures obliterating the beach, surrounded by brown dirt where the palm trees and bushes have been razed to make way for volleyball courts that were never built. Apparently the investors built the place, and first hired a bunch of high-priced Lebanese club owners to run it, but there were no customers, so it got sold to someone else, who’s trying to get it open without throwing any more money into what is already an expensive mistake.

“The whole problem,” one of the developers lamented to me, “is that they’re counting on a clientele that doesn’t exist.” Who comes to Aqaba when the bustling Israeli resort town of Elat is right across the tip of the Red Sea? Hungarians on package tours for $180 a head. These aren’t premium hotel, nightclub, $10 drink people, he sighed, they’re cheeseburger people.

It's a lot like my (former) magazine: businesses start up, then close down overnight. Lots of them. Nearly everyone who's heard that it closed has said something along the lines of "that happens a lot here." Folks think entrepreneurship and development are great ideas, but they often don't put much thought into what it is they're developing.

But coming back up the Dead Sea highway brings home again the fact that most of the country isn't developed at all. There aren’t even truck stops. In a 350 kilometer drive, there are perhaps two little 10-house villages, and five military checkpoints. For most of the way, the road just drives straight across the baked plain. On the right are the beautiful rugged orange hills of the Jordanian desert. On the right, white mountains and an empty plain dotted with guard towers and gun emplacements pointed east at the border. It is a beautiful drive.

It reminds one how harsh this part of the world really is, how thankless and unforgiving. From the hills of Wadi Rum, you can look out over seemingly endless expanses of red rock and mountain, a desert which in itself is just a small tributary of the ocean of sand that covers the Arabian peninsula. It goes on and on, and nothing in sight grows or flourishes. Even the sea here is empty, unsustaining.

The landscape begs you to ask “who made this,” and why, and the easy answer is the one everyone says and never thinks about. It's holy land: it wasn't made for men.

And then, past the Dead Sea, past Sodom and Gomorrah, the road dips into the Jordan valley, and you find yourself driving between lush fields where ripe crops of grain wait for harvest, and tomatoes, melons, and grapes swell on vines that are greener than anything you ever thought you’d see again. The hills are dotted with olive and lemon trees, and tall palms sway on the banks of the river.

After all that desert, this is the garden to end all gardens. Or maybe it's the other way around, come to think of it. People have been killing each other for this garden about long as there have been people, and before there were people, some apes probably bashed each other's heads in for the fruit on those vines.

Don't eat it. It wasn't made for you.

- Nicholas Seeley, 1/13/05

Posted by rjt at January 13, 2005 03:35 PM