Our days here at wordpress.com have been fun, but the time has come for us to move to our own domain name. You’ll find us at www.kazakaza.net – there are already some new posts waiting for you there

Don’t worry, we’re still using wordpress software, same theme, etc… just moved to the new URL.

Make sure to update your bookmarks, google reader subscriptions etc… I look forward to seeing you over there.

-David

The myriad tea invitations you will encounter on this trek testify to the endurance of these customs. If you are conversational in Arabic, drink tea/coffee, and/or smoke cigarettes, it is in your best interest to accept whatever invitations you receive. Of course, you do not have to accept every invitation in spite of those who say it is rude to turn down an invitation as such. Bedouins may be insistent, but they are not so stupid that they do not understand when someone has to get to camp before sunset. Of course, they may offer to put you up for the night. If you are not so inclined to accept, memorizing several mujaamilaat (“pleasantries”) and repeating them several times will smooth over any awkwardness. (Some good ones to keep in mind are hayak allah—“God grant you long life,” and baboos idekom—“I kiss your hands.”) Westerners are often taken aback by the hospitable gestures they encounter everywhere in the Near East, and indeed travelers in Arab cities long enough will encounter them there as well. However, there is a certain relief to being out of the town or the city where all relations seem to be commoditized at some level, and this applies to towns and cities in the West as well.

Limits of Bedouin hospitality: Ali 'Charlie Brown' walks from herders after trying too hard to befriend them.

What may have been the true mark of this hospitality was the presence of Israeli tourists in the valley. We ran into only one group of about eight on our trek, but it seemed as if we were always in the shadow of Israeli tourists. Local Bedouins would always assume we were Israelis by default and not treat us any differently as a result. Some of these same Bedouins even referred to Ber Sheeba as their original home, though without specifying the conditions of their relocation. Whenever we were asked if we were Israeli and then viscerally and immediately answered back no, a habit many students here develop, we were often greeted with a look of surprise by our interlocutors who could not seem to understand our virulence on the matter. Israeli tourists have frequented this valley since the 1994 peace accords. However, their destinations in Jordan appear to be out of the cities for the most part. Hence, the valley remains a little known arena for cross-cultural interaction.

Coming soon: Vignette #3, Sand Cat Epic

Rummana Campsite

Anyway, let’s continue on the trek toward Petra. As I mentioned last time, the Dana Nature Reserve is one of the most spectacular places one can visit in Jordan – and a lot more peaceful than swarming Petra. There are two places to stay in the reserve, one in the North (Rummana Campsite) and one in the South (the Feinan Ecolodge). At both sites you have to use the accommodations provided because the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN), which runs the reserve, wants to make sure that humans have as little impact on the reserve as possible – while still being able to thoroughly enjoy it. Dana’s accommodations are very nice indeed and thus also relatively expensive for Jordan (if you’re comparing it to budget hotel prices in Amman; if you compare RSCN prices with how much it costs to stay with the Bedouin in Wadi Rum for example, it’s about the same).

We decided that the first hike of our Dana-Petra trek would be the popular walk from Dana to Feinan through Wadi Dana. Crucially for us, this is one of the handful of long hikes one can do in the Dana Nature Reserve without an expensive guide. I recommend this hike for the first day of a multi-day camping trip because it is a relatively easy, downhill, 5 hour hike – and it ends at the incredible Feinan Ecolodge (more on that later).

View of the Route to Feinan through Wadi Dana from Dana Village

If you stay at the Rummana Campsite (which I absolutely recommend you do) keep in mind that the “official trail” to Feinan actually starts at Dana Village. In order to get there, you can hire a guide and hike for 5 km / Time: 4 hr or you can ask for the campsite to arrange transport by car (warning, even if it isn’t stated explicitly up front, RSCN will expect payment for the car ride – see Travel Vignette #1 on haggling).

Starting at Dana Village, our trek through Wadi Dana to Feinan took us from an elevation of about 1200m (4,000 ft) to 200m (650 ft). The initial descent consists of about an hour on a steep zigzagging path down to the floor of the wadi. A couple of villagers I met on the way down say there’s a beautiful natural spring right around where the path meets the wadi floor, but we were too focused on reaching Feinan to go looking for the spring on this trip. As we walked through Wadi Dana we passed through small groves of (what the guidebook told us were) oak, pistachio, acacia, and ziziphus trees.

Hiking Through Wadi Dana Toward Feinan

The closer we got to Feinan, the more signs there were of the presence of a Bedouin community (it turns out that around 50 Bedouin families live in the Feinan area). First we ran into a couple of goat herders who were quite amused at the antics of some members of our team upon the sighting of a scorpion crawling into someone’s clothing. Later we were called in for tea as we passed the first of several tents. As we sipped our tea, we noticed that a couple who had been hiking behind us were being invited into the next tent. Ah the Bedouin tea checkpoint system, obviously if the first tent doesn’t get you, then the second one will (cf. forthcoming vignette #2 on Bedouin hospitality). We stayed in the tent drinking tea for quite a while, talking with a group of mostly teenagers. Some went to school, some herded goats. If a Bedouin family invites you in like this, I thoroughly recommend sharing some food as a polite gesture of thanks for the tea. Our delicious trail mix (even one companion’s otherwise inappropriate party mix) was very popular indeed.

As I sipped my tea, I wondered whether I had met these young men before. I camped in Feinan in 1998 and had also spent time in a couple of Bedouin tents then. Most of the people I was having tea with now would have been small children then – like me. Maybe we did cross paths.

Eventually we had to leave, sunset was approaching and we needed to get to the Ecolodge. We were assured (correctly) that the lodge was just around the corner. Perhaps the best aspect of the Dana-Feinan hike is that you’re rewarded at the end with the Ecolodge. You’re just walking along, following a turn in the wadi (as you have many times over the course of the hike) and then suddenly – it appears!

Feinan Ecolodge

I’ll talk about the Ecolodge a bit more in the upcoming post on the wonders of Feinan (including a brief retrospective on 1998).

Back to the Dana-Petra trip tomorrow…

1. The fun of telling and being told stories.

2. As a guide to help other hikers follow the same itinerary we did.

Now on to Part I:

——————

It was a typical bright fall morning in Amman as we set off on our expedition. Ali and I had been up all night trying to get our new camp-stove to work. That saga really deserves a whole story in itself. Suffice it to say that Jordan is a land of contrasts. Yes, Amman has a 24-hour Safeway, but no, not a single piece of the camp-stove equipment sold by said Safeway seems to be compatible with any of the camp-stove fuel sold by the store. Anyway, future campers in Jordan beware. I’ll probably return to the saga later.

Back to that beautiful Ammani morning.There are a couple of ways to get from Amman to Dana: renting a car and taking the bus. Since we were doing a one-way hike, we decided it would be best to go by bus. Much as whether one enjoys Marmite is the true test of one’s Britishness, I think the ultimate test of whether someone is a native of Amman is whether he has mastered the city’s bus system. There are no maps, schedules, or information booths of which to speak. The bus schedules listed in Lonely Planet are not correct! (Heavens!) After some detective work, we were told that there were two buses a day to Qadsiyya (Dana’s neighboring village) that left at 7 and 9 am. We showed up in time to catch the 7 am, but we didn’t end up leaving until close to 9. In short, I would recommend visiting the bus station the day before you leave and checking with the bus drivers hanging about the place. You still won’t be guaranteed a bus, but you’ll probably arrive at more accurate information than through any other method.

The bus drive took us from the hills of Amman, through the northern Jordanian desert, to the jagged mountain ranges of the Great Rift Valley – a wondrous series of wadis and surrounding mountains that stretches from Syria to Mozambique. The majority of Jordan’s most stunning natural sites are located in the great valley. The nearer we got to Tafila, the closest significant town to Dana, the more frequently the bus driver stopped to catch up with friends and discuss his curious cargo of nine Americans decked out in über-chique camping gear. At one point, just about ten minutes away from our destination, now in the heart of Tafila-country, he decided to stop for about 30 mins to make fun of a local man for buying a pink shirt. All those interested are invited to share their favorite Tafila jokes in the comments section

Dropped off high above Wadi Dana, we walked down the road about 6 km to get to the entrance of the Dana Nature Reserve. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to take a moment to offer the highest possible praise for the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN), the organization that runs the reserve. The RSCN is an independent, non-governmental organization that has been given the responsibility by the Jordanian Government of safeguarding the country’s natural treasures as well as facilitating responsible access to them. The RSCN also does a very good job of making sure its sites contribute to the local economy (through the sale of crafts and herbs from the reserves). They run several sites in Jordan and the two that I have been to (Dana and Feinan) are both fantastic. I can’t wait to go to the others.

Looks like I’ve rambled on long enough for now. In my next post I’ll discuss the Dana Nature Reserve and our travels through it in more depth. Also stay tuned for a series of “travel advice vignettes” from Ali. For now, I’ll leave you with a photograph of the view from the RSCN campsite in Dana. Imagine waking up to this in the morning:

Approaching Petra from the North

Well I am glad to report that it can be done! Not only that, I can also tell you that you don’t really need a guide (as I lose the readership of all our dear Bedouin followers). There are some important things that one needs to know before embarking on such an epic expedition though. When I was planning the trip, I lamented the fact that I couldn’t find any good online descriptions of the Dana-Petra trek, so we will frame our account of our recent escapade in the south of Jordan as just such a guide in the hope that it will enable future travelers to enjoy the same wonderful itinerary we did.

Before I get into the details about each of the particular components of the itinerary, there are a couple of introductory notes about the trek that need to be made:

1. Water: As with most hiking trips (particularly trips in arid areas) the single most important requirement for ensuring that the Dana-Petra trek is enjoyable and safe is planning one’s water supply carefully. If one plans on doing the trip without a guide or car (as we did), then obviously at any one time you will only have access to as much water as you can carry. Considering that one liter of water weighs one kg and each person should have at least 4 liters of water on hand for each day of hiking/camping, it was not feasible for us to carry enough water for the whole trip (four days) on our backs. To overcome this challenge, we planned for each of our campsites to be near a village in which we could buy water. This system worked relatively well for us except for a few kinks that we will discuss in an upcoming post.

2. Directions: Some of the routes we took for this itinerary are not self-evident. We benefited from the fact that our team included a number of people who had done portions of our route on prior excursions and the fact that we had an excellent hiking book on hand – Tony Howard and Di Taylor, Jordan: Walks Treks Caves, Climbs and Canyons (Milnthorpe, UK: Cicerone Press Limited, 2008). I recommend you get the 2008 edition (rather than the 2001 edition). The more recent volume includes color maps and photographs as well as GPS coordinates. That brings me to another point. Though we did not use a compass or a GPS device on this trek, I thoroughly recommend both tools for those serious about trekking in Jordan. The GPS device definitely would have helped make our Dana-Petra trek a little smoother. It appears to be quite difficult to get your hands on a trail GPS in Jordan so I recommend bringing one with you from outside the country. When I say “trail GPS,” I mean something like the Garmin GPSMAP 60. Such devices can prove very useful, especially when used in conjunction with Google Earth. If one doesn’t have a GPS device, Google Earth can still prove useful. We used it to map out our Dana-Petra expedition and it really helped us visualize our route so when the time came to actually do the trek, many of the landmarks were already familiar to us.

On that note, I leave you with a Google Earth (.kmz) file with all of our hiking routes from Dana to Petra (located on the sidebar to the right). If you have Google Earth installed on your computer, all you have to do is download this .kmz file and double click it for it to display the routes in Google Earth. Subsequent posts will go into each of the stages of the hike in more detail. To see pictures of the hike (the most notable of which will be highlighted in the posts dealing with the appropriate sections of the hike), click here!

I hope this information proves useful and engaging.

Stay tuned,

David

Heading out this morning on an epic trek from Dana to Petra. Won’t be back in Amman until Thursday probably when we’ll post tales of our adventures. We’d love to hear what you think of our blog thus far. Post some comments if you get the chance.

الى اللقاء

-David

In my second cousin’s house, I now had a bedroom with a bed. Because his family was visiting Palestine, the house should have been quiet. However, in defiance of local zoning regulations, he was expanding all of his balconies so that they protruded an extra three feet each. For those who have never been to Palestine or Jordan, balconies are like the fucking SUVs of the region. The jack-hammering would wake me up around 10 AM, which was early for me because I was still jet-lagging (or that’s what I told people).

My second cousin introduced me to all the young men my age he knew from the neighborhood. They were all excited to know me and practice English. Jack-hammering notwithstanding, I now had the space (I always had the time) to read and study. Instead, I would pass afternoons wandering around the store where one such shab (or young man, singular for shabab, a social group of great importance here) worked. It was hard for me to bond/communicate with him in Arabic, and his English was all too clear for me to really like him. He is a young acolyte of the burgeoning gym culture here and showed me cell phone photos of him flexing for proof.

Another guy my age lived next to where I was staying. In the evenings he would pass by the driveway where I would be conveniently sitting, sipping tea served by my cousin’s Indonesian female house worker. Sometimes he would join me, other times we would go to the café with his friends. In Arabic, our conversation would follow semantic webs revolving around the first thing I saw (e.g. “water pump”). In English, we would share our ridiculous ambitions. He wanted to study business in the States and lose his virginity a thousand times over. I wanted to conduct a comparative study of Jordanian political parties. We were both tactful in showing our skepticism.

Soon after, I found a flat near the city center with a fellow Fulbright grantee and stopped taking all their calls. As all my fellow grantees began to arrive with their well-worn study materials and their day-planners with little checks next to the line items—as opposed to arrows repeatedly bouncing them to the following day, I began to regain time consciousness. I really do plan to call back the shabab one day, but not until they stop reminding me of how elusive routines remain for me.

Postscript: The days I spent with them reminded me of the summers I used to pass in Palestine. Back then, my cousins and I would wake up late, walk around, drink coffee, play cards, play pool, smoke shisha, drive around within the village or sometimes—if we had a registered car—to Ramallah to get a watermelon (for having with shisha), and get to bed before the fajr prayer. I never got any reading done in those days. All my cousins were unemployed and waiting for the opportunity to marry a girl from the village with American citizenship. They passed every day like I did my vacation with them.

Once I asked one of them, somewhat naively, why he did not have any hobbies or plans?

“You don’t understand.” He said. “Here, you have all the time, but you feel like you cannot do anything.”

So what characterizes the Shinlar Refugee Camp? Dusty roads cluttered with litter, concrete houses jammed together with multiple extensions stacked upon one another, no green spaces and the ubiquitous smell of diesel exhaust. Of course that is a simplified picture, meant to provoke outrage. The place has its color. The stench of gas comes from the abundance of auto shops, which, along with food and cell phone stores, account for practically all the storefront space. One day while going on a run in Zahiya’s husband’s taxi, he bought a cell phone and delivered it to a mechanic as a gift. It became conceivable that the three main goods in town were being perpetually exchanged to create the illusion of commerce. Zahiya plants small citrus trees in recycled plastic tubs on her roof. Beside them is an overhead grape vine trellis that leads back to a renegade patch of dirt at the house perimeter three stories below. The improvised architecture of the camp produces labyrinthine streets comparable to European city centers or Oriental souks from elsewhere. Even the litter, which is worse than anywhere in Amman, can be read as a rebellion against the tenuous relationship with the land. But now I may be romanticizing. That would be easy for an outsider to do.

All my days there consisted of playing with Zahiya’s children, riding in her husband’s taxi or eating with all of them. Sometimes I tried to escape their company and do some reading, but then I would run into Zahiya’s 90 year-old father-in-law who always seemed startled by me, as if I reminded him of a British solider who killed someone he knew (I do not look Arab…sometimes). It was only possible to study late at night when everyone had left the living room, where I slept on their thin floor mat/couch. It would have been comfortable for me as I spent my senior year sleeping on my friend’s dormitory floor. But, even though the nights here are cool, I would wake up after an hour’s sleep in fits of thirst and sweat with spider bites on my back.

Some days I would take the bus into downtown Amman for the anonymity and to smoke. I would always see European couples or American groups at the popular sha’bi restaurant (the word actually means popular but more as in “of the people,” like the French populaire, because the restaurants serve cheap eats) and feel lonely about traveling without anyone. If I had a traveling companion, or companions, the whole wasting away in a foreign café could have been very Hemmingway. It is as if there are people in this world who can give themselves tasks, who have a natural discipline that allows them to experience love and leisure at a higher level, who can even make their ennui interesting; and then there’s the rest of us. Being reminded of my place in the natural order created even more anxiety. How could I be in this sort of paralysis just days before beginning a Fulbright grant? The only way you get one of these as an undergraduate is by convincing people that in the absence of formal PhD training or published works, you can, at the bear minimum, manage your time well.

*CORRECTION: “Shinlar” is typically transliterated as Schneller and is the local name for what is officially known as the Marka Refugee Camp, which is officially recognized by UNRWA. It also goes by the name Hittin. It remains, however, that there are characteristics about the camp that warrant an investigation into its increasingly informal nature: the presence of non-refugee residents, amorphous borders with adjacent neighborhoods, etc.  Further, the “displaced persons” designation applies only to those Palestinians who were fleeing violence for the first time in 1967. Anyone who was already a refugee during that war and fled maintained their status.