...to the Eastern Desert...

After a good night’s sleep, we had a leisurely morning and then headed out to the Eastern Desert for a quick castle loop. While there are a bunch of castles east of the north-south-running Desert Highway, we focused on three main ones, all along Highway 40: Kharana, Amra (a UNESCO World Heritage Site), and Azraq. When you purchase an entrance ticket for 4JD, it also covers entrance to several other castles on the loop (Highways 40 and 30), so it’s quite the sight-seeing deal. The lesser-known & less-touristed desert castles are the focus of my personal research while here as a Fulbright Scholar, and I’ll post more about those explorations as they occur.

Side note on the Eastern Desert Highways:

Roadside mileage sign along Highway 40. Azraq (see below) is actually just 50 kilometers from the Saudi Arabian border. It's, umm...quite exhilarating to see a sign like this!

The Eastern Desert Highways exist mainly for truckers transporting goods between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. While politics might hamper personal relations, economies must still go on, and so Jordan does some business with Iraq, and even more with Saudi Arabia. This is not a new phenomenon. In the US for example, while we may have problems with our neighboring countries to the south, we still trade with them. And so it is with the Eastern Desert Highway. You can get close to Saudi Arabia and Iraq on these Highways, and even closer to Syria on Highway 10, a little further north (which we will be traversing for research in the coming months).

Kharana Castle, along Highway 40, a four-sided caravanseri (most likely).

First up, Kharana. Although the in situ plaque and guidebooks say it’s still up for debate about this castle’s function, based on the evidence there, the strongest argument is that it functioned as a Caravanseri—a kind of hotel for desert travelers (care-uh-van-sur-eye, or a caravan of travelers). Inside and out, it looks remarkably like Caravanseri I’ve visited in Turkey. All the evidence also points to it being erected during the Ummayid period. It has very thick walls, two stories plus a rooftop terrace, and a nice central courtyard. My mother-in-law noted how welcoming it would be as a weary traveler to see the candles glowing in its windows from a distance. I agree.

Amra castle, one of the Eastern Desert’s gems, contains multiple frescoes of raucous, wild, and psychedelic scenes. That’s my Mother-in-Law being silly!

Next stop, just a dozen or two kilometers down the Highway, was Amra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of its amazingly-preserved frescoes. Restoration of these ~1300-year-old artistic marvels is on-going, but what makes them totally unique for the region is their Bacchanalian focus—naked women, a banjo-playing bear, all sorts of animals and people in risqué poses/positions, and more naked women. It was apparently a bathhouse with an apodyterium, caladarium, and tepidarium, complete with a hot water heating system, where the water itself comes from a donkey-driven well pump. Desert engineering at its finest! Of course, scholarly debates about this “palace’s” exact purpose are ongoing, but most agree (including our great little tour guide, Mubarak) that it was like Las Vegas: what happened there, stayed there. A quick Google search of “qsar amra” will give you loads more info. My father-in-law said it reminded him of Tatooine (from Star Wars). I can see that.

Our last stop was Azraq castle, after a quick lunch at a truck stop. What makes this castle unique among the “desert loop” castles, is that it was constructed entirely out of basalt. That’s solidified lava, for non-rock nerds. T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) spent a cold winter here during the Arab Revolt, as it is (well, was) an oasis—he writes fondly of Azraq in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (our guide, Nadar, said his grandfather was actually there with Lawrence). Azraq Wetland Reserve is actually a major migratory bird and wildlife refuge. Or at least it used to be before Amman’s burgeoning population began needing water, and pumping it from the Azraq aquifer was the best idea at the time. Nadar showed us the castle’s now-dry well which, he said, was actually functioning until the 1980s. Indeed, the water table has dropped dramatically. In hydrology terms, the oasis in a sort of cone of depression, as the aquifer is being used quicker than it is replenished (and Azraq is also dipping deeper into the water source). A sad sight to see in what was once a vibrant and verdant area of an otherwise-stark desert. But, in true Jordanian style, the people adapt and make do. Jordanians are some of the most resourceful folks I’ve met.

On the return trip to Amman, we took Highway 30 past the refugee camps. The “camps” look more like Levittown (if you don’t know what that is, Google it. It’s an important part of US history and, just as importantly for me, referred to in Billy Joel songs). A quick image search might tug at your heart strings. But the crisis is real, and punctuated by the large military convoy that passed by us—and very well-armed—on the highway as we were driving by one of the camps. “That was kind of surreal,” My mother-in-law said, “You see guys with their heads covered like that and guns at the ready on the news, but here they are right next to us...” When I asked her about it later, she said she didn’t feel threatened, just kind of strange to see. But it was a jolting experience few people from the US ever see in person.

Side note on Refugees in Jordan:

In 2015, over 100,000 refugees came to Jordan. They live in the camps, in squalid conditions—and usually without heat or AC, and always with NO running water or indoor plumbing. And it’s still better than from where they came. The King of Jordan (a really amazing man) is doing all he can, and other countries have pledged funds to help. But it is a strenuous and tenuous situation trying to take care of your own people and still take-in others and use your own precious few resources to do so. You can’t give someone the shirt off your back if you don’t have a shirt to give in the first place, yet that seems to be what Jordan is doing. It’s not turning its back on its neighbors. It’s being a good global citizen. The UNHCR is working hard, but they can always use more help. In a nation of about 6.5 million people, a full 10% are refugees. If that figure was applied to the US, that’d be the equivalent of the populations of Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago COMBINED. Appalling.

After this humbling experience, we worked our way back through Amman, via some side roads through downtown, ending at the Galleria Mall for a large selection of food for dinner—the very antithesis of the refugee camps and where we had been a couple hours earlier. Name brand shops, a food court, a life-size animatronic T-Rex, heating, indoor plumbing, and the KidZone amusement park and go-kart track on the top two floors. (Really. They also have an indoor roller coaster!) Not to mention the bottom level with its myriad of banks and expanded Carrefour store. A lot to think about as you wander around eight levels of opulence eating gelato when just a couple hours before you saw the expansive refugee camps that have so little...