Aljun, Jerash and a sad story about a Syrian visa
Amman,
Jordan
Saturday, March 4, 2006
"Jerash," says the taxi driver, pointing vaguely towards some buses.
"Ok. Shoecran," I reply, handing him 6/10s of dinar for the fare.
I walk over to near a bus and ask around.
"Jerash?"
"No Jerash."
[I point to a nearly full bus, approximately where the driver pointed]
"No Jerash?" I ask.
"No Jerash. Ajun."
"Aljun?" I try to verify. It's a town that my guidebook says is worth seeing if a traveller has the chance, and it's not so far from Jerash.
"Ajun." Ajun sounds close enough to Aljun. Could there be an Aljun and an Ajun? My guess is probably not.
"Next bus to Jerash?" I ask.
"One hour." Hmm. I've heard that one before. Perhaps not yet in Jordan, but too often the phrase means sometime later today. It's just too convienient (for it to leave exactly one hour from when I ask). I decided not to find out, and hopped on the bus for Ajun.
We drove over hilly terrain. I had naively expected Jordan to be mostly arid and desert-like. Perhaps that is the case in the south, but between North East of Amman, the landscape is fairly lush. I was glad to be able to focus on the scenery. It was a nice distraction from being squeezed in the bus with my bag crammed on my lap. But few buses run on Fridays, I was told, so they run full.
Jordan is possibly the most devout of the Islamic countries I have been to. As fra as I could tell, this devoutness generally means that Fridays are like Sundays used to be in Alberta, thirty years ago, where most shops are closed and buses run less frequently. It also means that sermons are played on the PA systems in public transport.
I didn't really get the gist of the sermon, but I did catch a few words which told me the program wasn't on food preparation: Ad din (faith), Islam (it's the same word in English!), Muslim, and the like. No "dirka dirka mohammed jihad" though. Imagine if they played Billy Graham sermons on Greyhound buses. It sounded pretty much like that.
I was happy to discover that Ajun and Aljun are one and the same. My book says that the nearby castle worth a visit, Qala'at Ar-Rabad, except it's at the top of a hill and Aljun is at the bottom of a valley. It would be a tiring walk up (it was about 22 degrees).
I decided to put some ad din in a Jordanian taxi driver named Faysal. He is also an English teacher at the local high school, but he drives his taxi on the weekend. He also has a five year old son, and he is very proud of him. He drove me to the castle for a very reasonable one dollar and sixty cents.
At the top of the road, I bought my entry ticket to the castle. Jordan has a special pricing system for tourists, but it doesn't play games about it. It has four prices posted very prominently (five if I were to count small children). I know that have been bitching about dual pricing systems for nearly two months now. But when the prices are posted as assertively as that, it's hard to get angry about paying a different price than a local. The tourist price wasn't extortionate either.
Inside its gates, I opened up my guidebook to learn that Qala'at ar-Rabad was built on Saladin's orders (I saw his tomb in Damascus), by his nephew 'Izz Ad din Usama bin Munquidh (yes, I had to look up his name to get it right). The qala'at was designed to act as a defensive outpost, mirroring a crusader castle a few kilometers away (now in Israel) in the crusader's lines of defence.
I was really surprised to see how similar (if not nearly identical) its style of construction was, in comparison to the crusader castles I've seen. Ar-Rabad was built entirely by Muslims. Now I know that all of the crusader castles were eventually taken by Muslims, but they didn't rebuild all of them from the ground up. Perhaps the only difference was that no Roman or Greek building materials were incorporated into it (but then again it is far from any ancient site, atop its hill).
The Panorama from the towers was something else. It was like I had climbed my very own Mt. Nebo and I was looking out over the promised land. Being built on one of the taller hills in the area, from Ar-Rabad I could actually see about sixty miles into the distance. Directly to the East, only three hills away, was the border with the West Bank. To the far North, I could see the snowy peak of Mt. Hermon in Lebanon. I checked my map and it is about 100 km away from Aljun! Between Mt. Hermon and I, even if I couldn't see them, was the Golan Hights.
Being able to see these places felt so significant, and yet I was struck by how small the territory is. It's one thing to consider them compared to my size: it would take a couple of days to walk the distance of the panorama atop the castle. But I have started to develop a pretty good idea of how big the world is, and it is amazing to think that these areas of controversy are to the globe perhaps what one cobblestone is to a street.
Leaving the castle, a guide approached me and after a short conversation he proposed a giving me a ride to Jerash, which I accepted considering the Friday bus situation. Mohammed is a former police captain who loves to show Jordan to its visitors. In the last few centuries, the Qala'at Ar-Rabad was inhabited by ordinary people, and those people were his ancestors.
He pointed out certain facts about the terrain as we drove along. On the way to Jerash, he pointed out a Palestinian refugee camp of 100,000 people. There was a small conglomeration of houses in the distance. "What, that?" I wondered. It didn't look big enough to house even 10,000 people.
Our conversation drifed onto the high quality of the highway we were driving on, and Mohammed told me that it was new, and built because of those Palestinians. The old highway ran next to the camp, and every so often the Palestianians would demonstrate, and block up the road to prove a point. It irked the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan just a bit too much, so they closed that highway and built another one a few kilometers from the town.
Jerash has some great ruins. There are lots of columns that stand up. There is an unusual oval shaped agora (marketplace: most of them are square). The temple of Artemis has a few tunnels beneath it which I stumbled through (my flashlight battery burnt out). There is also a house (actually some three foot walls, broken columns and a floor) and its floor is covered with gemometric mosaics. The site is nearly as extensive as Ephesus.
While in Jerash, I discovered that my interest for these ancient sites has waned. I believe it. It's pretty clear that the histories of the Romans and Greeks happened. I have seen the best of what's left of their cities. But I am beginning to see these bits of stone which we call ruins just as bits of stone.
It is a good feeling to realise that I have seen so much. I did have a revelation about the Roman empire. In fact, what led me to think that these pieces of stone were no longer anything special was the realisation that the Romans carved everything the same way all throughout their empire. The style in France or Italy or Spain was the same style in Greece or Turkey or Jordan. They built everything to look just like home. That's colonization for you.
While I was in Jerash, Mohammed waited in the shade, because he had offered to drive me to Amman. I got a pretty good price, but his kindness was not entirely out of the goodness of his heart - although one could argue that it was - because he had two French guests yesterday, and one of them forgot her designer sunglasses in his car. He showed them to me. They were an Italian make, whose retail value could sustain a traveller two months in Syria.
Mohammed dropped me off by the Zahran hotel in Amman. It had been recommended to me, but I had read that the muzzin could be problematic. Seeing it, I understood why. The muzzin is the call to prayer, of course, and Zahran was pearched on the second storey of a building. It is right next to first storey mosque, whose minaret's loudspeaker was only a few feet above the hotel. I X-nay'd that idea and found another place, Cliff's, also recommended. Twice the price of Zahran, but assuredly a better snooze.
My day had almost ended when I met a Londonian named Alexander at an internet cafe. He was waiting for a flight to Istanbul which would leave at 4 am. Yesterday, he had tried to get into Syria. But he had a spot of bad luck. Apparently the visa which he had obtained from the Syrian embassy in London had not been processed according to proper procedures. He pulled it out and showed it to me. It had the base stamp, like most everyone else's, but it was missing a second rubber stamp and an official signature.
At the Syrian frontier, he spent more than an hour attempting to enter the country. The Syrian officials would not let him in. They didn't like his visa. He had taken a shared taxi from Amman, and the others in the taxi tried to help him out, but the officials would not relent. They would not give him a new visa either.
So he found himself entirely out of luck. Night had fallen and he had to get somewhere, so it was back to Amman. Like myself, he found a ride with a smuggler. But his man was even more hardcore than mine: this guy stuffed duty free cigarettes into every crevice of the taxi, and then strapped packs of cigarettes to his legs!
Fifty quid is what the visa cost Alexander, and that $ is down the drain. Add the price of a flight bypassing Syria on his way to Turkey, and missing the Syrian experience. It was one of the brightest highlights of my trip. His Syrian experience will probably be the lousiest moment in his.
Funny how the Syrians are with their visas. Other travellers and I had been wondering how serious the Syrians were about their visa procedures. Prairie in Beirut told me that from time to time when Syrians have diplomatic conflicts with America, they refuse entry to Americans. Yet, Alex from Helvetica, just showed up to the Syrian border and had no problems getting in. But the Syrians have no embassy in Switzerland. Some of us travellers had heard rumours that anyone could just show up to the border because the Syrians were inconsistent. But I suppose this instance may as well clear things up. Perhaps they are inconsistent sometimes. But when they are so harsh (Alexander would have had to go back to London to sort it out), it is better to get things done right than hope for a lax border officer. So remember: Your Syrian visa should have a base document, a rubber stamp, and a signature. Don't leave home without it.
