Day dawned to give us our first daylight impression of the Jordanian capital.
Sandy-hewed buildings, a lazy, hazy sky and lots of apparently abandoned building sites. Breakfast had nothing to differentiate it from a 5-star breakfast anywhere else in the world other than the complementary newspaper “The Jordan Times”, in English, which I found very interesting… the King, Abdullah and Queen Rania on the front page but for different stories (political/social respectively) plus lots of Middle East and international news, United Nations stories and ex-pat type info… Nothing equivalent in English in Geneva.
Around midday, we ventured out onto the streets of Amman. We left our hire car in the Intercontinental garage and let a local taxi driver negotiate the chaos for us. He left us at the Citadel, the most central and highest point in the city. By now, the morning haze had cleared and the sky was a cloudless blue. December 12th is not high-season anywhere in the world, so we had the citadel virtually to ourselves and were able to discover the ruins and traces left by the different civilizations including Ammonite, Nabatean and Roman known to have lived on or around this site since 8500 B.C. The city was known as Philadelphia in the Roman era and was under the authority of King Herod in 30 B.C., the very one who would later order the extermination of all male babies to avoid the venue of the Messiah, as announced by the Magi.
The Jordanian History Museum concluded our visit to this site and the key exhibit for me were some Nabatean sculptures dating from 6500 BC (apparently the earliest sculptures ever) that looked remarkably similar to the sort of thing you can see in “it” galleries today.
From the Citadel, we fended off an Armada of taxis (they even kerb-crawled us) to walk down to the “souk”, which was absolutely wonderful, full of noise, smells and colour, but devoid of any aggression. They have absolutely wonderful vegetables – the radishes were enormous and already topped and tailed – but absolutely nothing that I even remotely wanted to buy as a tourist. Yet the streets were packed with all kinds of people, presumably buying what was available for sale.
First impressions of Jordanians were at this point beginning to take shape – but only of the men I’m afraid: there is no physical stereotype as such, but light eyes (green, blue) with dark hair and skin are common and they vary in stature. They are invariably friendly “Welcome, where are you from?” but, in this context, nothing deeper. And as for the women, they are totally transparent. They were also present shopping in the market (but not selling on the stands), veiled and “low profile” – no real identity of their own.
We returned to our hotel by taxi and after a real mint tea (difficult to obtain – they wanted us to give us mint tea in teabag form) we departed from Amman on our own steam for the Dead Sea – less than an hour away. The journey was uneventful compared to that of the previous evening – but a horse on the motorway in a pick up, green-lit mosque minarets along the way and a check point close to the Israeli border with machine-gun primed Hummers made a change from the habitual evening commute.
On arrival at the Movenpick spa and resort we were served (without asking) the same delicious lemonade that T.E. Lawrence demanded after taking Aqaba and were driven in a golf cart to comfortable but low-key room in a complex to which our first reaction was “this is a Disneyland for adults”. Tired as we were, we had no difficulty settling into it though! That very first evening, we walked through the resort down to its private beach on the Dead Sea (400m below sea level, the lowest land on planet Earth) and it being a bit too late, dark and cold to take a dip, we tasted the water instead. It is almost 10 times saltier than the Mediterranean and absolutely vile – it didn’t cut our appetite though! Uninspired by the choice of restaurants (Italian, Asian or a grill) we ended up at the beach bar with another bottle of Jordanian wine with assorted mezze as blotting paper as an Italian singer tried (but failed) to create an ambience for the thin low season crowd present. We were very happy though – delighted at the prospect of 2 nights ahead in the same place, far from frenetic Amman.
