Petra Part I

Our planned trip to Petra was our first taste of Jordanian corruption. The wheeling and dealing and sleight of hand that goes on here pushed our trip back from a fresh 6:30 am to a disgruntled 9:30/9:45.

The first of several stops along what was for us close to a four hour journey, was a bedraggled petrol station just out of town. The driver jumped out, immediately lit a cigarette and stood chatting casually with the attendant who was filling our tank. As we on the bus choked on a collective, eye-popping intake of breath, laced with petrol fumes and tobacco smoke, our driver flicked ash around smiling, both he and the attendant frighteningly unperturbed.

As we continued to emerge from the metropolis, the land flattened out, leaving behind its burrows of huddled buildings. Constructions became increasingly sparse. There was the odd, very humble, roadside farm, consisting of a clutch of chickens, some goats and a few camels. The goats grazed enthusiastically on hillsides of questionable fertility, to which discarded plastic bags clung, more ubiquitous than the billboards of the smiling king that flashed by.

As we continued, what could be termed “desert” became apparent, then relentless, and I returned to my novel, resting my head against the window. Occasionally I creaked open a weary eye, finding the outlook no more uplifting than before, and in fact now punctuated by the bodies of dead goats by the road.

The way I ended up coping in this dead emptiness, among mostly sleeping bus-mates, was to launch into a burst of creativity. I am later to discover that it is with similar spirit that the locals cope- they simply make stuff grow in this place.
A three hour drive sounded not too bad, but there was nothing to see, nothing to see, nothing to see…not even dead things...

I finally closed the curtain and decided to pretend to be elsewhere. The indecipherable Arabic radio chatter was peppered with pop culture familiarities like “Samsung” and “Lady Gaga”. Where was God? I thought, fairly depressed by now, even though I knew I was on my way to fabulous Petra. There was no rich spirituality here as in Istanbul, I mourned. I needed a reminder in this bleak land, but was not really expecting one. I turned to my headphones in a bid to escape the sights, sounds and their associated ruminations.

My music happened to be set to random, inexplicably still playing from last time I had it on, an hour or so before, when I had been listening to a specific album. Amy Winehouse finished her song and I was surprised to hear Stevie Wonder begin. I had forgotten that I downloaded some of his songs before the trip. This is the song that broke me out of my somber desert reverie:

They say that heaven is 10 zillion light years away
And just the pure at heart will walk her righteous streets someday
They say that heaven is 10 zillion light years away
But if there is a God, we need Him now
"Where is your God?"
That's what my friends ask me
And I say it's taken Him so long
'Cause we've got so far to come…

Suddenly , civilization: a town. A cement factory in the distance. An unkempt, and graffitied, mosque. Children rummaging in the inevitable concrete rubble and refuse. It was a weak heartbeat, then more desert flatlining.

I struggled, as did some others of us, with the personality of the place. Perhaps it was my rejection from the mosque that had put me on the defensive. Maybe it was my high expectations of Jordanian hospitality. We tend to expect so much from people who often have so little to give…

There was a proliferation of men in the roadside falafel bar on the way to Petra. Eyes were not welcoming as I stood waiting to order. They seemed about as happy to see me as if this was their mosque, and I was a Labrador Retriever. My salaams seemed to be met with suspicion rather than welcome, or amusement, as I had noted in the case of the women at times. My hijab and my salaams did not always convince of my Muslim status, especially out here: I could just as easily have been a tourist, trying too hard. Maybe that is just what I am…

My Rough Guide to Jordan was particularly effusive regarding Jordanian hospitality and I wondered when I was going to see more than a promise. But why should these people have been pleased to see me? It was quite possible that I represented something resented, even hated…

Or was it, that in spite of the highlights, there was an “underlying negativity” in the place, due to a level of social control which was greater in Jordan than in Turkey, or even Malaysia? Obviously there was the fact that there was a lot of hardship, with a growing gap between rich and poor, and many earning only something in the region of 150-200 dinar a month. Or perhaps, as was my feeling, the bleakness here, of spirit as well as landscape, was due to the tension of surrounding boiling points, particularly Syria at this time? We were used to such security and freedom. Maybe that is why some of us felt uncomfortable. And of course there were those of us who had experienced outright abuses and rebuffs in the mosques of Jordan.