On Tuesday we went on our first tour. we were expecting group tours for around £20 each, but instead all that is on offer is a private driver at a cost of over £100 for half a day. We booked it at the Hertz desk, where the guy had previously warned us that a drive to somewhere as far as Petra can be particularly challenging for the minds of women due to the constant up and down over hills and mountains (“it makes a woman’s head go “woooo!”"). We decided we’d visit Mount Nebo, Madaba and the baptism site of Jesus first, therefore, just in case my feable mind found a further drive altogether too disorientating.
The drive up to Mount Nebo was quite spectacular. Although you could describe the landscape as generally quite barren, there is a beauty to be found in the layers of rocks, the different colours of sands and stones. And, every now and again, an oasis of green will appear, threaded through rocky outcrops along the side of a mountainside, or perched precariously on a 35 degree slope. These are the olive groves of the Bedwin people, who is is said shun modern life, but looking at the general dwellings of the non-Bedwin people of Jordan (animal skin tents amongst a small herd of goats, and perhaps a donkey or the odd camel), I don’t feel that it’s something the majority of Jordanians have a choice in. Indeed, so many of Jordan’s people are so excluded from the country’s economy that, with so few people to tax, it is easy to see why the government collects Visa payments and tourist site entry fees at every opportunity.
Mount Nebo itself is supposed to be the place where Moses was summonsed by God to die, and for this reason, the mountain has been home to many churches and monastaries throughout ancient times. Archaeologists have gone to great pains to excavate and preserve the mosiacs created by these people, and there are similar works to be seen inside a Greek Orthodox church in nearby Madaba. This church is home to a mosiac map, still almost complete apart from the man in the boat and the lion which were intentionally ‘rearranged’ during the Byzentine period to prevent people from worshipping any idols apart from God himself. This in itself was interesting enough, but the Greek church was rather plain and ugly – certainly nothing special – and P insisted that we hang around in it to feign interest to the driver who was waiting for us outside, as if he’d really care.
Discovery of these ancient mosiacs seems to have spawned an entire mosiacs industry in Jordan, something that we were obligated to see through a scheduled stop-off of our driver at a small mosiacs workshop with very large shop attached! We were encouraged to view and buy as many mosiacs as we wanted with “free delivery anywhere in the world!” It’s nice that it’s giving people jobs (particularly as many of these workers have special needs), but we were neither interested nor in a position to afford hundreds of pounds worth of mosaics.
After killing a bit of time here, we managed to escape without spending anything and were whisked away to the baptism site. This was probably the thing I was looking forward to most in the day. I didn’t really know what to expect, but it was definitely a surreal experience, looking down onto the steps where Jesus may have walkd, and into a pool where he would have been baptised by John the Baptist close to 2000 years ago.
The concept that this was indeed the site does seem to be confirmed not only by Bible descriptions of the site, but also by the presence of so many churches here over the centuries. Despite this being a very risky site to construct a church – back then, in a highly active earthquake zone, and always under constant threat of flood from the River Jordan – time and time again, churches were consructed and reconsructed on this small patch of land, to overlook the site at which Jesus was baptised.
Although not a religious person (though with plenty of religious upbringing under my belt), the presence of such sites – even for historical interest – surely cannot fail to entrall most people. This one historic event undeniably changed the world. The baptism of Jesus, the beginning of his ministry, was the beginning of a religious, moral and even political framework which has lasted and evolved (albeit in a highly corrupted and often destructive form) to this day.
After overlooking the baptism site and viewing the foundations of the four destroyed churches, we went on to see the River Jordan. Walking along the dusty path which often wound through the native foliage of the region, we emerged onto a wooden platform directly opposite the almost garish equivalent of the Isaeli side. white tiled floors and stone buildings rose up on the other side, with 10x the number of pilgrims, all dressed in white gowns, singing and wading into the waters. I felt like shouting out; “don’t you know the baptism site is on our side?” It seems that the Israelis have constructed a tourist site out of nothing. They’ve used pomp and circumstance to create (rather misleadingly?) a holy site, in their constant attempt to be forever out-doing their Arab neighbours. But, if people find joy and inner peace in such an illusion, who woud I be to shatter their dreams? That is, after all, my general opinion of religion anyway (despite one of my holiday reading books, “The Shack,” being a thinly-veiled attempt to convert readers to Christianity. I recommend the first 4 chapters, then skip the rest unless you enjoy being patronised by a pretty weak attempt at brainwashing).
The rest of our time so far has been spent relaxing at the spa. The view across its infinity pool and across the Dead Sea (where Jerusalem can be seen glowing over the top of the mountains at night) is unbeatable, but again, this is definitely a hangout of the rather wealthy. P struck up conversation with a rather unsavory individual named Al. Originally from Oman, he’d spent some time studying in Canada and was now finishing a college course in Jordan. He admitted quite openly that he had more money than he knew what to do with, and proceeded to recount his various sexual experiences, from “getting laid” at the age of 14, to perving on topless women with binoculars in France, to sharing two Singaporean “whores” with his brother in Thailand. He let us know that he probably had every STD under the sun at this point, which was just lovely, and then returned to his chair by the pool with his three tequila shots and second Long Island Iced Tea. Presumably thinking himself and P were now best buddies, he also ordered a couple of these cocktails for us, which I managed to sneak most of into an empty water bottle as P refused to drink any of his (he doesn’t like alcohol in the day time), and I only managed about half of mine.
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