From the Pyramids to Petra

Writing this sitting in Frankfurt Airport. It’s five o’clock in the morning – just arrived from Amman, Jordan. My eyes feel like someone’s been pouring sand into the sockets, and my mouth has been a testing ground for a glue factory. But it’s reassuring to know that Germans are just as incompetent at running airports as the British.

We actually started out, via another overnight flight, landing at 4.30am in Cairo last Friday. I’m not a big fan of conferences, but I know, I’m a dinosaur, everyone tells me, and I must enjoy the networking opportunities and long-winded, jargon filled speeches. Yes, and it is, truly, a chance to meet up with old friends.
Then on Sunday we left for Amman in Jordan, and the Egyptians airport authorities are right up there fighting for the last place in the competence stakes. Cases lost or broken, flights over-booked, long delays with no information. Oh. Joy.

But it’s all quickly forgotten as we drive down to Petra. We are getting lots of complaints from tourists about the treatment of animals provided by the local Bedouin for the tourists. These are getting worse and worse as no-one seems in control or willing to enforce the bye-laws.

Riding horses are raced up and down the tourist tracks at breakneck speed as teenage riders show off their macho inferiority complexes to the visitors who at the same time they envy and despise. Saddle and girth sores, with swollen and skinned joints attest to the indifference of their owners.

There are a few carts for carrying tourists too fat or lazy to make the mile-long walk through the rock-cleft to the fabulous ‘Treasury’ at the start of Petra proper. These carts are whipped-up mercilessly, soaked in sweat, as they race back up the hill to the entrance gates with their grinning passengers - the soonest back get another load.

And once past the treasury, children hawk their donkeys to carry fat visitors up a thousand or more steps to ‘the Monastery’, for a stunning view across the whole ruined city. Why can’t they just walk up?(And the vista seems even better for the little bit of effort involved.) Clearly, donkeys were never designed to carry the huge American lady we watched, as the little creature struggled to carry her. I wonder how much Mary weighed when she road down to Bethlehem. Not a hundred and twenty kilos, I bet! Depressingly little SPANA can do as we don’t have a project in the area, and it’s a hundred and fifty miles from Amman.

Still, apart from that, it’s impossible to visit Petra without being almost overwhelmed by the whole place – the sheer enormity of the task the Nabateans took on – carving whole cliff-faces into temples and tombs. And the colours. Pink, red, purple, ochre – hard to describe it as the sun moves and changes the light and tones. Let’s just leave it as unique and unforgettable. Certainly something everyone should try ‘to see before they die’.

After all that a good night’s sleep would have been welcome. Instead, the Saudis in the room next door threw an all-night party, with girls and Black Label – after all that’s what they come to Amman for, but it was too much for us, and finally at four in the morning we admitted defeat and moved rooms, two floors up. Could still hear the singing and screaming – what on earth could they be doing in there?
Then for our sins, in the morning it was over to the SPANA clinic in Wadi Al-Seer to spend a happy few hours fighting over the budget.

Then via the Education Centre – amazing how tiny saplings grow in a desert when you chuck on a bit of water now and again, and down the long hill to the clinic in the Jordan valley. There we treat the animals of the field workers who toil amongst the little plots of strawberries, lettuce, tomatoes and other winter goods – doubtless heading for Europe – but also the donkeys and livestock of the Bedouin shepherds who bring their flocks down from the freezing hills into the warmer valley – and watch over them diligently.

As we climbed back up the steep road to Amman in the dusk, we could see the lights of Bethlehem twinkling away across the river in the distance.

Happy Christmas.