Shalom & Toda
Hi, friends. And family. Hi, mom.
We’ve rewritten the opener to this one a few times.
Nine, actually.
Our near month in Jordan, Israel and Palestine was unremarkably hot and peaceful. Unremarkable because hot weather is boring to talk about, Jordan is the Switzerland of the Middle East, and nothing bad happened in either of the other two.
But our inclination was to remark on the nail-biting and apprehension we felt at times anyway.
We kept trying to find meaning in fears our experience never validated. It could be that fear is powerful precisely because it needs so little to go on. And when nothing happens, you still need to talk about it like something almost did.
And then, a few days after we left, violence erupted again. The steady drumbeat that resets any progress and sense of safety.
What follows is our experience for three boiling weeks in Jordan, Israel and Palestine's collective desert. Like most places, we wish we’d had more time. But frankly, we couldn't afford it anyway. Like a Jordanian Jerry Maguire, they want you to show them the dinar.
To everyone who keeps saying hello, thank you. We’ve opened your emails in sweaty, strange places and they make us extremely happy.
Off to the Dead Sea.
Where we’ve been: Israel, Jordan, Palestine
How long we stayed: 3 weeks
Hello: Shalom! (Hebrew)
Thank you: Toda (“toe-duh”)
If you’re feeling really grateful: Toda raba (“toe-duh rah-bah”)
What’s next: Seychelles, Madagascar, Mauritius
PALESTINE
Up late one night in Vietnam, I read about a Banksy project called the Walled Off Hotel. A fully-functioning hotel where every room looks directly at the separation wall between Israel and Palestine.
“A room with the worst view in the world,” quipped the website.
The piece is meant to be both a criticism of British imperialist gentlemen’s clubs - hence its posh style in a war-torn area - and the effect of the wall on daily life - hence its position in Palestine under a pair of Israeli guard towers.
We booked a room.
Our own hypocrisy, or maybe Banksy’s, was exposed the minute we stepped inside.
The area around the hotel was decimated. Riddled with bullet holes and positioned under the grey shadow of Big Brother looming 30 feet overhead in a machine gun turret. The area inside the hotel, meanwhile, was pleasant, air-conditioned, and adorned in street art people travel the world over to Instagram.
That’s the point, of course. The guilt intended. The ridiculousness glaring. The expense of it all symbolic.
But in making his point, Banksy is regenerating a third influence here he was hoping to lampoon: Westerners. If the hotel is meant to say, “How ridiculous that Britain came in and embedded itself in this place without asking the community how that’d play out,” starting his hotel does the same thing
A visit felt important anyway.
And in that sense, what Banksy has done is brilliant.
If it weren’t for his project, we’d never have visited Palestine. He knows that.
As we walked with other Palestinians through the snaking military checkpoint dividing their home from work in Jerusalem, the everyday of this conflict started to take shape.
The explosive events that grab the media’s attention every so often are capable of engendering fear and strong opinions in those of us from far away places. For good reason. But the torture for many here seems to be the prison of military threat as much as the death sentence of its exercise.
On the bus into Palestine, a local man could tell we were apprehensive. He went digging into his bag for a bit, furrowed his brow, and finally pulled out a handful of something for us.
Candies. Mere’s eyes lit up.
“Welcome.”
JORDAN
Ever since former King Hussein befriended the West in the 90’s, Jordan has been wildly prosperous for an oil-barren Middle Eastern country. Their airports gleam, Land Rovers roam glassy malls in the suburbs, and the dinar - local currency - trades over the pound, euro and dollar.
Yet the most valuable of Jordan’s riches, arguably, are its natural wonders. Here for millennia and almost all free of charge.
The wadis and deserts, dunes, ruins, and oases are transfixing parts of a geography that is unrivaled given Jordan’s size and location. You can walk through the set of Indiana Jones one day and Lawrence of Arabia the next, and if it’s June, you may very well be the only people out there besides the camels.
As long as you have someone pointing you where to go.
Our bedouin guide wakes up from a nap.
“Want to go to my cave near Petra?”
Yes we do.
He grabs sleeping mats, pots and pans, water and flashlights, and quickly we’re in a beat-up flatbed listening to the thump and wail of bedouin music rattling from broken speakers while Ali, our driver, laments about his love life.
Meredith: You’ve been courting Nora for three years?
Ali: Yes.
Meredith: But you’re not together?
Ali: No. Her mother forbids it.
Meredith: How long do you talk?
Ali: Four hours each night.
Meredith: Every night? But we were in the desert with you all last night.
Ali: Yes.
Meredith: You talked?
Ali: I walked to the dunes where it was windy so you wouldn’t hear.
Meredith: Until when?
Ali: 4am or so.
Meredith: Did you sleep?
Ali: A bit. Until sunrise.
We were torn about Jordan when we left. Like Egypt, exchanges involved more yelling than we thought required. Like Wonderland, “yes” means “no” and everything is as it shouldn’t be. And like many places, money rules all.
But then we found ourselves talking to friends and saying, “Oh man, Jordan. You gotta go to Jordan.”
It’s probably the bedouin lifestyle. Everywhere is home. Food is sacred. And the views are whatever you see from the mat you’ve thrown on the sand.
Which was probably a very nice piece of sand.
ISRAEL
Israel reads like a tale of two countries.
In Tel Aviv, the best of times. In Jerusalem, the, how do you describe this place?
The former exudes a cool that’s cosmopolitan and modern. Strings of bohemian art galleries, graffiti’d warehouse workspaces, glimmering bank towers, tanned skaters, swarms of well-heeled businesswomen on lightly buzzing scooters. We walked out of our minimalist hotel in the Florian district and were pointed to the hotel’s breakfast service across the street in a sandy, driftwood coffee shop.
New York meets L.A. on the Mediterranean.
Whatever it is, this place has it.
Later we found ourselves on the veranda of an Italian restaurant across from a tiny synagogue and a surf shop. Hordes of American teenagers on birthright mobbed the bars nearby.
The chef had taken an interest in us, so he pulled up a chair, lit a cigarette, and got right into it.
“Meh, I don’t go to Jerusalem. Gives me the creeps. (pause) I should say, religion gives me the creeps.”
Not what we expected to hear. We asked him where he likes to travel, if not Jerusalem.
“California. I’m leaving in a few months for Mendocino to go pick weed.”
Cigarette butt in the ashtray. Handshake. A round of shots sent for us to shoot with the waiter and back into the kitchen.
Mere read a book about Israeli business culture dubbing the country “the startup nation.” Low on natural resources and surrounded by aggressors, Israel has created a scrappiness all its own. A way of using workarounds to build and fortify a country that has only recently gotten its own turf.
Nowhere embodies this ethos more than Jerusalem.
Young Hasidim approached us to chat about the Talmud; an enterprising old lady stood outside her coffeeshop selling cafe souvenirs with her silhouette and name printed on them; every inch of space was eaten up inside light rail cars zipping through the city; and waiting patiently in line at a lunch spot saw me cut 50 times by AR-15-toting teenagers in compulsory army service.
The place is busy and alive. Focused and on guard.
It’s also Jerusalem. Temple of the Mount, the Western Wall, Dome of the Rock, the four quarters of the Old City, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, King David’s Gate: they’re all there staring at you. Reminding you of the city’s status as the epicenter of the most important thing to happen to humans since agriculture.
The 45-minute ride from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is over in a blink, but stepping off the bus is to arrive in a different world. They’re both Israel only in the sense that Israel has the capacity to be dismissively atheist and devoutly orthodox, modern and ancient, innocuous and threatening, kind and cunning, generous and stingy, street art cool and Tevas-with-socks uncool at the same time. The roles feel hardwired and symbiotic, like binary code that keeps the country running.
While Tel Aviv moves forward, Jerusalem prays and stands watch.
ITINERARY
Where we went and what we did. In Jordan, our itinerary was dictated by a guide, which seems par for the course there. Holler if you’re going and we can try to save you some dinar.
JORDAN
Amman
3 million people hang on the hills of Amman, the Middle East’s answer to San Francisco. There are ruins everyone wants you to visit - the Roman Ampitheater, the Citadel, Jerash - though we found purpose in a dirt-cheap, well-run little place called the Amman Pasha Hotel. Bunnies, turtles, gerbils, and refreshingly relaxed Jordanians hang around the rooftop restaurant 24 hours a day, so we stayed put and loved it.
Dead Sea
A Mars-like landscape surrounds this historic body of water known for its levitating effects. Voila! You float impossibly! And it’s great. And you rub the famous exfoliating mud on your body. And it burns everywhere. And you shouldn’t have shaved that day. And you wash it off and it still burns. How’s my skin? Terrible? Fantastic. The Kempinski Hotel was lovely.
Wadi Araba
Dunes and canyons, oases and mile after mile of desert. Our guide introduced us to a village mayor-cum-grocer-cum-stable owner who had been gifted royal horses by King Abdullah II and sent his sons to look after us while we rode them irresponsibly through the desert. Our best night in Jordan was spent on two mats on the floor of a bedouin encampment with a quiet man named Odeh who smiled, spoke in lightning-fast Arabic and cooked us freekeh, a soup made of green durum wheat we’ll try to recreate when we get home.
Petra
A sprawling, spectacularly preserved city that absolutely lives up to the hype. We assumed you hiked a canyon to see the Treasury building made famous in Indiana Jones and that was it. We were wrong. Beyond the Treasury is a 5-mile network of beautiful, enormous monuments, an entire Nabatean city built over 500 years and still occupied today by bedouins who refuse to leave. Worth the trip to Jordan alone.
Wadi Rum
The setting for Lawrence of Arabia and a quietly powerful place. Stretches of desert are interrupted by monumental outcroppings and the occasional patch of shade. The only way to get around besides camel (don’t) is by 4x4, and while most come for a day trip, we’d recommend staying overnight at one of the camps to sit around the fire and chat with the shisha-smoking guides about life in the desert.
Aqaba
A salt-crusted, tacky port town famous for its shipping docks and diving options. We got stung by jellyfish and hooked a grocery bag underwater with one of our tentacles. Couldn’t encourage you to skip it more wholeheartedly.
ISRAEL
Tel Aviv
Like several of the world’s cool cities got together and decided to be occasionally Jewish. There’s an established art scene, boutique hotels, stretches of sand, food that can leapfrog typical Middle Eastern staples, and a very good vibe. Not everything was a breeze - our four-hour effort to retrieve cash from a dozen ATM’s ended with Mere’s card being eaten for good - but it was immediately countered by a generous Israeli chef who waived the bill when he heard our troubles. (Side note: we would’ve paid double what we owed; his restaurant is called Shmaya: go, go, go.)
Jerusalem
A Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew walk onto a tiny patch of land and it is the least funny joke of all time. We’d say visit. Especially if you have an interest in history or religion. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre encloses both the hill where Jesus was crucified and the cave where he was buried, a mere 200 feet away. The Western Wall is a sacred, radiating site, and placing a hand on it to the chanting of two hundred bowing Hasidic Jews nearby is spiritual regardless of your faith. Plus there are markets, great restaurants, and a polished transit system; it’s buttoned up.
PALESTINE
Bethlehem
Getting here isn’t easy. A bus to a military checkpoint to a long walk to a hotel, in our case. That said, we felt safe on both sides of the wall - a luxury that didn’t escape us - and experiencing the Palestinian side of the conflict is a gift we found significant. Despite our qualms, the Walled Off Hotel is a great project, well executed. The staff are lovely, proceeds go to the community, and the refugee camp tour compulsory with a stay there is eye-opening. For Jesus fans, his birthplace is enclosed in a wooden church that gives you great shivers despite elbowing for space with the throngs of visiting pilgrims.
And with that, the Middle East is over. For us. On this journey, at least.
We’ll spend the next three weeks around southern Africa in the Seychelles, dusty Madagascar and Mauritius.
For those who made it through this one, sorry and thank you. Or thank you and hello.
Wait, what is this thing called? Doesn't matter. We love you.
Pete & Mere
