Friday, March 20 - Sunday, March 29
For purposes of a travel blog, an account of these ten days is mostly one of sight-seeing and schlepping around on buses with the Elderhostel tour group. We always think that we have formed true friendships with people we’ve spent this much time with but there usually is no real follow up. Eight or ten of the people I would hope to stay in touch with, however. All are retired, intellectually active people. Most are thrilled with the election of Obama although there was more than a handful of people from Texas and we sensed that there were still some holdovers. Everywhere we were greeted as returning heroes to the world, though. It feels so much better to hold our heads up again. Which is not to say that the news on the financial front is good or that the US isn’t caught up with much ado about nothing in the form of the outrage over AIG bonuses (an outrage, yes, but it’s like worrying about a marshmallow burning on a campfire while the adjacent building is ablaze). I will never ceased to be amazed by our ability to be distracted or frothed up with much ado about nothing when the issues are so serious. I can only hope that the people at the top aren’t so overwhelmed with lack of support staff and the greatest challenges of our time to be able to function.
Tourists in Europe say they can’t look at one more cathedral; in Greece, they can’t look at one more rock. And in Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, one tires of Roman and Egyptian ruins, lectures on waves of marauding invaders and successive dynasties, power struggles, and theorizing on the engineering abilities (whether structural or political in the form of organizing slave labor). Highlights:
We visited Bethshean on the Israeli side and Jerash on the Jordan side of the Jordan River. Both are fantastically intact Roman cities reminiscent of but not quite equal to Ephases. Then it was back to Old Testament history with the visit to Mt. Nebo, where God gave Moses the view of the Jordan Valley and the land that he had spent forty years in the desert rallying the ancient Israelits to deserve only to be told that he would never enter it; Moses promptly died here.
My personal focal point for deciding on this trip was Petra, the ancient city of the Naboteans, mentioned in the Bible as the Edomites probably, and it did not disappoint. Most of my readers have probably seen filmed pieces on this incredible world heritage site so I won’t wax poetic about it but wow! In the middle of desert, there is a gorge through which spring floods have passed for eons. At least a half hour walk through this gorge yields a now ruined city. For centuries the Naboteans buried their dead in elaborately carved tombs in the sandstone walls of the gorge and near the entrance to the city. Eventually , they began to live here, however, and this was the scene of a thriving financial center at the crossroads of the east west caravan routes and the north south trade routes.
Summon up all the travel superlatives you can and apply them to seeing Petra. A once in a lifetime experience. We spent an entire day here and one of the first afternoons with truly free time. The hardiest of the group climbed the "1000 steps" (reminiscent of Machu Pichu or Nepal) up to the top of the city for the amazing view down the other side of the mountains which ring Petra and walked the two and a half miles back through the town for what was the first and last serious exercise of the trip!
We left Petra the next day, drove along the Dead Sea, visited another Crusader castle, and stopped to smear ourselves with Dead Sea mud, swim, have lunch and a beer for a few hours at a Dead Sea resort. Onward to the Amman airport and the evening flight to Cairo;
Tuesday was spent in Cairo visiting the Great Pyramids of Giza and the sphinx, Memphis and Sakkara. My sister and I had been to Egypt three years earlier and I had no intention of ever returning but, as it was included on this trip to Israel and Jordan which were my real interest, here I was again. You can see far better films on the subject on the Discovery Channel or History Channel that I can give. My impression then as now is that once you have seen these things that you have heard about all your life, you don’t need to see them again. It’s not that they are disappointing but besides the enormous size and the wonder you feel at how they could have been built, you are struck by the brownness, the sand, the desert. The Nile forms a green gash through the desert, an awesome phenomenon to behold but the desert, to me at least, is oppressive. At least this time, the temperature was perfect and the crowds were not so enormous.
The other thing I remember about Egypt is the chaos, the crowds, crowds mostly of men in the long Egyptian dress, men staring at me or whomever I am with. Yes, we’re white and Western. While I was an object of interest in India, I was far more so in Egypt. And while the Indians are also aggressive in hawking their wares or begging for Western money, the Egyptians feel far more sinister to me. I took a long walk one morning along the Nile while the rest of the group was visiting the Egyptian Museum and the Coptic and Jewish areas of Old Cairo and the bazarres which my sister and I had seen last time. I was wearing a turquoise sweat suit with a tank top underneath. It was warm enough to take the jacket off but even with it unzipped to let in a little air I was getting stares, an occasional whistle, and a few cat calls. In India, if your shoulders are appropriately covered, you’re simply an object of interest. Apparently in the Muslim world, the throat and neck and hair are the erotic zones. Interestingly though, the women may all be wearing headscarves and there is no skin showing, the jeans and knit tops are absolutely skin tight. Yes, some of the older women are in full abayas, some with only eye slits, but generally Cairo and Amman are secular cities with covering of the head accepted.
On Wednesday, March 25, we flew to Aswan to embark on the three day cruise of the Nile. The ship is one of probably fifty plying the exact same route and schedule. Picture six by eight ships tied up together and having to walk through the lobbies of five other ships to get to your own. The result, of course, is that even your state room is looking into the stateroom of the ship next door. And, of course, Egypt doesn’t have electrical hookups for the ships so all fifty have their generators running so opening the window will also bring you lots of diesel fumes - and the cigarette smoke from other ships or passengers. Ugh.
Most of these ships look a bit shabby; certainly ours was. The dining room is below water level so you are eating in a room that makes you feel like it’s the middle of the winter somewhere. There is a lovely bar and lounge on the fourth deck and on the fifth is the pool.
The one day we were sailing, Thursday, was magnificent. A line of ships rather than fifty tethered together. The Nile is wide and lovely. The shores are lined with pastoral settings of lovely green fields and crops. Immediately behind looms the desert and pure brown. An awesome contrast.
The long and the short of it is that I’m not sure whether the way to see the wonders of the Nile in Aswan and Luxor is by cruise or the way my sister and I did it - boarding a plane everyday to fly to a different city, check into a different hotel, pick up a different guide, etc.....
The sights of Aswan and Luxor are incomparable. The temple of Karnak is what had knocked my socks off before and did again. Fully intact, it is immense. Unlike most of the Roman ruins, though, like Ephesus particularly or Jersash etc, Karnak and Luxor are temples not cities. As on the grand tour of Europe one thinks that one couldn’t see one more cathedral, in Egypt one can’t see one more temple, one more rock. Karnak is the best of the best, though.
By the end of the Elderhostel trip, I have bonded with three couples and a number of the individual members of the group. Often real lasting friendships are made on trips like this and it will be interesting to see if we actually do stay in touch.
Would I do it again or take another Elderhostel tour? I will probably never go on another tour again in my life but if I did, it would be with Elderhostel. This was a grand way to see lots of things but not to experience the life in the places we went. I would love to have spent two weeks in any one of many cities in Israel or Jordan as I did in India. The daily or every-other-daily schlepping between hotels, the pace of group travel which slows to the speed of the worst knees or hips in the group, the buses, all of it gets very, very old. Group touring is only good for seeing sights and having the details taken care of for you....
A final note on one of our guides and the culture of Jordan. Zuahir is a forty year old father of three, son of a Bedouin sheikh whose position he is entitled to inherit but which he has ceded to his brother, fully fluent, and considered one of the best guides in Jordan. He was chosen to be one of the first translators into Iraq with the Brits and we were extremely fortunate to have him. I have encouraged him to apply to the Mid-Career MPA program at the Kennedy School at Harvard because he will undoubtedly be a leader in his country one day.
Zuhair gave us great insights into desert/Arab/Bedoin/Muslim culture. He emphasized the strength of tribal culture - and even shariah law. Tribes settle differences between people, command absolute loyalty because they deserve it, maintain the glue of social control and a sense of belonging. People stay in line because to stray would be to bring dishonor on the tribe. He admits that it is all very good except in the instance of the extreme of punishing women who "stray," even if the straying is rape. He defends the covering of women as a way to maintain modesty but doesn’t deal convincingly with the flip side of the coin which must be that men cannot be expected to the control themselves in the face of the female body so it is women’s obligation to stay covered.....
Zuhair makes a convincing case for tribal culture; surely the failures of democracy in taking care of our own people in America or in providing order or justice in most Muslim countries - Iraq or Afghanistan come to mind - are obvious. I really did come to understand that we focus on and judge Arab culture for the way it treats women but we often fail to see that our world of mass culture and the void in values that it has widely created may actually bring greater pain for more people. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to judge. Similarly, Zuhair notes that our "successes" in Iraq have come only when we engaged tribal leaders; he also suggests that we give up on this "democracy" business and the whole "election as vehicle to nirvana" idea. Some cultures just aren’t ready for it. Or, perhaps, the best way of organizing and governing people has just not yet emerged.
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