Part 2 of A very Arabian Christmas continues to do for Speccie Christmas articles what Die Hard did for Christmas movies. It was all downhill from here. You can read Part 1 here.
Years after getting married in Jordan, I had the opportunity to spend a sabbatical there. The plan was to stay at my in-laws and work with a university in Amman. I have some longtime friends and colleagues there, and I have nothing but fond memories of Jordan. But in the midst of a less than cordial relationship, rather than claim aggrieved status here, I will try to make the most of a rough patch that included stolen cars, flying princesses, and late-night wreck dives in the Red Sea during a storm with the Russian mafia added for good measure.
I’d spent a few months speaking with telecommunications professionals in Jordan. They were all very generous with their time. My professor mate accompanied me and made life easier. He loves Australia, having spent some time at a uni in Sydney, and he and I worked together on some open-source projects that were too cutting edge back then and are so passe now, in hindsight, it seems like a waste of time. His assistant had an office where we sat around smoking and drinking Arabic (not Turkish) coffee all day. Let’s just say the skills levels are much lower there than in richer countries.
I attended one lecture where the class were learning the accounting software, MYOB, without a computer or the software. They had lectures on the software from the software manual. This is no criticism. Given at the time Jordan’s GDP per capita was some thirteen times less than Australia’s, and it is now some 14.5 times less, they do the best they can with what they have.
When the lecture started, the doors were chained shut. If you were late to the lecture, you failed. Period. Nada. Zip, Diddly. No complaints. Just don’t be late. This impressed me no end.
Once I had finished my work in Amman, I wanted to go down to Aqaba. Aqaba is the place where British Army officer and legend, Lawrence of Arabia, attacked. He had been known for harassing the Ottoman forces from his base in Wadi Rum. The Turks thought nobody would be stupid enough to cross the desert, so all guns faced the Red Sea. Unfortunately for the Turks, Lawrence was a complete nutter, and Aqaba fell to a surprise attack from that very desert.
To get there, I asked to borrow the fateful in-law’s car (mentioned in Part 1) and headed off to Aqaba. A while later, we received a phone call suggesting that we had stolen the car, and the police had been called. It was all shades of no, but I pushed on in accordance with the original arrangement. On the way there, a police officer stopped me. He said in Arabic, how are you, sir? I just wanted to say hi. Hi, I said, and we were on our way. Phew!
In Aqaba we stayed with a pilot who would later become a princess. She sent us to a dive school for a ‘discovery’ dive on the reef off the coast towards Saudi Arabia. The rumour was that Jordan, one of the few countries in the Middle East without oil, swapped a portion of its inland territory for an extra stretch of coastline near Aqaba, only for the Saudis to find oil in the swapped inland portion. Or so the story goes.
I had never been diving. I grew up in Cairns but could never afford to go diving. But unexpectedly, I found myself doing a buddy dive in the Red Sea, the same sea Moses had parted.
I must digress for a moment. At my local Anglican church in Gunning, NSW, last week’s service focused on John the Baptist. I’ve been to the Baptism site east of the Jordan, and I’ve been in the water of the Jordan River where Jesus was baptised. I’ve even been to the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus where you can vaguely see the head of John the Baptist that is reportedly housed in a crypt inside the mosque. (Saladin’s tomb is in a building just next door.)
I was able to see the Sea of Galilee from the Roman ruins at Umm Quays, and I have seen Jesus’s tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. I’ve floated in the Dead Sea, seen the pillar of Lot’s wife, and I’ve also stood on the spot on Mount Nebo where Moses looked out upon the Promised Land before taking his last breath.
The privilege of having seen these places is not lost on me. But I digress.
I love diving. I was like a fish in water. Probably more like a whale in water but you get my drift. Speaking of drifts, one day, the experienced commercial diver who was my buddy on my first dive took me out for a drift dive. We went for over 5 km underwater that day. It was amazing. My friend and guide who had first taught me said I was ready so off we went.
The Daintree north of Cairns is where the rainforest meets the reef. The interesting thing about Aqaba is it is where the desert meets the reef. All the dive crew were Bedouin divers. The support staff were all Egyptian workers. One day, I saw a young Egyptian lad fixing a broken garden hose with wire. I wondered why the boss didn’t just get a new hose. I soon realised that it was cheaper to pay the Egyptian worker to fix the hose than to spend US$3 to buy a new one.
I’d noticed too that the houses in Amman were all stone. I wondered if the patterns in the stone were manufactured until I noticed late one night an Egyptian worker chiselling the patterns into the stone. Any wonder Australian houses can never be as grand as they are in the rich suburbs of Amman.
I used this to my advantage with taxi drivers. Whenever they asked me where I was from, I’d say I was from the rich suburb of stone houses known as Abdoun. This backfired once when a taxi driver insisted that I loan him some money and he would drive back to repay me the very next day to where he dropped me off. Let’s just say it was a bit of a walk to where I was staying in Abdoun that trip!
So, after my first experience of Aqaba and the in-law drama, I drove back to Amman and returned the ‘stolen’ car, bid my farewell (or was kicked out, you be the judge) and headed back to Aqaba in a rental car.
Unlike Australia where the number one killer resulting in premature deaths tends to be incurable health issues, in Jordan, at the time, it was death by traffic accidents. It’s always a toss-up between a nanny state and being killed by uneducated people. But I learnt quickly that in Jordan, as in many other places throughout the world, pedestrian crossings don’t mean a thing.
As I drove off to Aqaba, this time down the desert highway instead of the King’s Highway that passes the Dead Sea, I learnt another lesson. Roadworks signs are optional in Jordan.
After becoming airborne as the road disappeared under me in the darkness of night, I realised that the road was being repaired and that it had been dug out. Just as I was working this out, I had to brake to stop the car crashing into an enormous gravel pile that was ready to fill the excavation I was flying over. This happened more than once on the trip.
Later, I dodged a piece of wood full of nails that crossed the road. Or so I thought. As I drove into Aqaba, a truck full of workers was looking at me and I was looking at them and they were looking at me. All my tyres were completely flat. Because I was airborne at least half the drive, I hadn’t noticed. The concierge at the flash resort I stayed at that night had them fixed for me at very reasonable prices (unlike the 350 euros paid by our good editor in Italy!) but they forgot to put the hubcaps back on first.
Since our time at the flying princess’s house was causing quite the stir in the apartment block, I had to find somewhere else. So, off I went to my new mate at the dive centre and negotiated a weekly rate plus a few training sessions to help with his business. I was set until January and would complete my work while doing my PADI courses while I was there.
One of my diving highlights was when my new friend, James Bond, woke me up one night and said, let’s go for a dive! It was a bit stormy and dark but off we went.
Just off the local beach was an old wreck with an air pocket inside. If you’ve ever experienced claustrophobia, this is not the best place to experience it for the first time. I’d watched others freak out there during the day, let alone at night. But like imposter syndrome, once you know what it is you can deal with it even if it never goes away so I was fine.
Mr Bond says to me, let’s jump in off this jetty, and we’ll use our snorkels out to the wreck to save our air. It sounded like a plan, but it was so rough it was quite the swim. Anyway, we made it and then dove down and into the wreck, into the mysterious air pocket that took on a whole new life at night, and then out to lay back and look at the moon and stars from under the water. It was complete bliss.
Of course, James Bond was a far superior diver to me, so I was running out of air when he had at least a quarter of his tank left. Don’t worry he signalled, and he gave me his buddy regulator and I hung on to the back of his tank and off we went towards the shore. We ended up snorkelling back in and then filling our feet with the obligatory sea urchin spines as we stumbled back up the beach to the dive centre while avoiding the packs of wild dogs that roamed the desert. Try doing that in this nanny state!
Christmas was another non-event. There were moments when Russian women from the crew’s local mafia mates would turn up to sunbathe in their bikinis beside the pool. This sent the Egyptian workers into a flat spin. Much of Jordan, even its seedy side, is so PG (parental guidance recommended) that they’d die if they ever saw anything hardcore.
But New Year’s Eve was another story. One of the crew said his Russian mates had a bar and we could go there for New Year’s. One of the things about bars in Jordan is that they tend to be hidden away, especially during Ramadan. Instead of mixer drinks and beers on tap, everything is bottled. So, if you’re at a nightclub, you buy bottles of vodka and you don’t pay for these until you are done.
(Note to self: Don’t drink too many bottles of vodka at a Russian mafia nightclub.)
Long story short, our mate had got himself into trouble and had to bring us in to make up the difference. Somehow, we managed to leave him to his fate and the several bottles of vodka we’d drank at an inflated price of something like JOD80 dinars (about AUD$160 a bottle) were resolved and our mate lived to tell the tale.
Outside it was midnight and the sky erupted with fireworks and that was the beginning of the end of the trip. I could tell you other stories of watching an in-law in a fight while everyone else perambulated around me as if I wasn’t there. Drunken Jordanians are much more polite than drunken Australians and they all apologised to their respective families the next day, so it was all rather lame, really.
But I will never forget my experience of the Fertile Crescent, even if the excitement about getting my grunge on for international travel is declining with age. And while it was never a Merry Christmas for me in the Middle East, its absence brought new meaning to Christmas in Australia where I can buy drinks by the glass and on tap and I don’t have to fight my way through enormous men with shepherd’s crooks or Russian mafia with too many bottles of vodka on my bill. Merry Christmas!
Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is a political scientist and political commentator. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILTA), and a Member of the Royal Society of NSW. He is Managing Editor of the Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy, Chairman of the ACT and Southern NSW Chapter of CILTA, and a member of the Australian Nuclear Association. Michael is a graduate of the Royal Military College, Duntroon and was appointed to the College of Experts at the Australian Research Council in 2022. All opinions in this article are the author’s own and are not intended to reflect the views of any other person or organisation.
