Jordan - A Matter of Life or Death

by Iva Vucinic Simic (Serbia)

I didn't expect to find Jordan

What no one tells you while you are packing and rushing through information for your sudden trip to Jordan, is that all places that you are about to visit are in a way - dead. Starting your journey in a city as big as Amman or Aqaba, it is easy to get carried away into thinking that this is just another ordinary touristic destination to visit. Then, you get into your rental car or start a bus tour and realize, after a while, that you haven't seen one house or tree along the way. Only sand and stone. You will see the red dust of Petra swirling among hundreds of living, breathing tourists as you approach the Treasury, horses will loudly trot on the stone floor of the Siq, to leave you swept away by the fact that residents of Petra once lived there only to be forgotten for centuries to come. When a night of lit candles is brought to an end, the city will be left empty in all its kilometers of hiking trails and actual homes that once protected and fed numerous tapping, curios children, hungry for life. You will get muddy and certainly laugh as you dip yourself in the Dead Sea, but as the fascination wears off and you pass south at nighttime, next to its lowest-point-on-earth magnificence, shiny lights of factories on its shores will give you the chills. Nothing ever lived there, and it never will. You are suddenly in a hole on the surface of the Earth. However spacious it might be, strange thoughts might preoccupy your head, until you cannot wait to climb out to a higher altitude. A perfect chance to feel claustrophobic in a wide, open space of the sea, in the midst of the promised land. If you catch a sunrise, sunset and a starry night in Wadi Rum, it is inevitable to get swept away by the essence of uncompromising, rigid nature of our wondrous Earth. You will meet your chosen bedouin and find that his sneakers are branded and bought somewhere far away from the desert he will give you a tour of. As you jump into the jeep (or climb on top of it), moving from one point on the desert map to another, dozens of people will climb enormous rocks in front of you, risking their lives to see the open space of no-life-at-all. Think of this as a perfect chance to conquer your fear of heights, where no one really gives you the rope since obviously - nothing lives there anyway. As our journey ended on top of one of those desert rocks, I sat there with my feet carelessly swinging from its edge. My heart was pounding with deep and sincere excitement and I realized that here, I am happy simply because I live. Perhaps this is what gives glow to those warm and welcoming strangers that poured spiced tea for us whenever they saw us approaching. I have never seen the eyes of Jordanian people anywhere else. I have never stood or swam so close to the unforgiving side of our Mother Nature. Where else to recognize the magnitude of one single life if not in a place where life must be deeply and thoroughly nurtured to continue? If this is the place you visit, honor it with depth of view and feel the richness of essential life of people living there. It will make you rich for a lifetime too.