thomas m wilson

Mountains entered.

Size incalculable.

Mystical weight and folds of stone.

Still blue air.

The first day in Petra we headed out to Little Petra, a few kms away from the more famous site, where a narrow canyon is filled with Nabatean caves, carved around 2000 years ago. On the way we took a dirt track down a valley through the ranges of stone mountains and passed Bedu tents in secluded niches, encircled by rock. Flocks of brown and white sheep and errant goats.

Caves, several still inhabited, that have the vantage and vista of feudal fortresses.

Stepping into the shade of a cave in Little Petra I was impressed how this is a land both wild and yet accommodating of humans.

The next day we entered the main site at Petra.

Standing inside the caves and looking out I imagined what, around 2000 years ago, the men and women who lived here saw and may have felt about their surroundings – the almost biblical scale of the mountain ranges and rocky canyons that were their daily backdrop.

Such surroundings couldn’t but help elevate their days above the mundane.

Water cisterns and carved channels in the rocks are evidence of how good the Nabateans were at harvesting water, water that would have made their desert fortress a garden paradise.

Bedu people used to live in Petra and the Jordanian government moved them out, building free, if not very pretty, housing for them a couple of kms from Petra. For this reason nobody is very strict in regulating what rude and swaggering Bedu teenagers are doing inside this UNESCO listed world heritage site. Unfortunately they are detracting from the experience of visitors to the site (who have paid $100 AU to get in), as they offer to sell trinkets and donkey rides with a badgering insistence that mars the peace of Petra. Their makeshift stalls have spread even up to the foot the Royal Tombs. I only worked out how to escape the touts and vendors by the second day – you need to go after three pm in winter and go to areas of Petra that are not listed in guide books.

Fortunately I did this, and found peace amongst the old tombs of Petra.

 As I sat on a rock ledge and watched the sun set I saw Petra’s wide spaces and red sandstone cliffs and peaks, its warren of caves, its worn yet still glorious entrances into the mountain faces, and reflected on this place’s sense of having a mysterious history that we will never fully know or understand, but that which we will always feel awe in the presence of.

As I sat on the stone ledge and looked down over the ancient valley I thought ‘this must be one of the most beautiful sights I will ever see’. Those few minutes by myself looking down over the valley in the quiet of the evening are up there with the first few minutes of silence after I entered Ta Prom in Angkor early one morning in the Cambodian jungle in terms of providing me with a deeply touching and uplifting experience of place. Both places showing humanity’s signature accommodated in and by wild nature.

Later that evening around 5pm, almost all of the tourists had left the site.

To exit the site we took camels and a donkey out through the siq (canyon). Dusk was turning to darkness. The towering walls of the valley narrow to a crack in the stone.  

We pass within.

I feel beneath me the long, loping gait of the camel. I see the camel in front of me flex its hindquarters with languid ease. The camels hold their heads tall and proud on long, mobile necks. I feel I am traveling into history. Pacing into a world that might have been an adventure undertaken 1000 years, or 2000 years, ago. I imagine in the darkening space, high above the ground, and yet far beneath the surface of the earth, that I am moving through the night to a nameless city. I am journeying on a camel train through a cleft in a stone mountain. The clop clop of the donkey beside us is all that can be heard in the gathering gloom. This experience made me more happy than many of the things I have done in my life.

I’ve arrived in the Middle East, in Jordan.  It is winter here.  Yesterday afternoon I visited the Amman Citadel, a raised acropolis in the centre of the capital. It lies atop a prominent hill in the centre of the city, and as you walk around the ruins of Roman civilisation you look down on box-like limestone-coloured apartment buildings that huddle down steep hill sides. Flights of pigeons wheel about in the cold blue sky above. Looking down into the mini-panorama of a street below me I watched an old man walk along with a cane and a hatta, and two young boys were chased by an older man for some unknown reason. I felt like I was in the Middle East.

Standing on the Citadel you are also in a place that once had a Roman temple to Hercules at its centre.  When the temple was intact it would have radiated civic pride over the surrounding city with its massive stone columns and lofty stone steps leading up to an elevated portico.

Atop this acropolis there is also an Umayad (Islamic) palace.  The following photo was taken from within this palace.

Amman is not an immediately charismatic city, but then I’m not a great lover of cities in general.

The constant and impatient beeping of horns that I hear in Amman is for me an expression of the culture here in the Middle East.

Let me explain.  I’m in an Arabic culture, and people speak loudly here.  Even at the souk, the local market, the sellers shout about their wares more loudly than in South Asia or South-East Asia. People repeat what they’ve just said once or several times, not because they think you haven’t heard them, but just to add emphasis to their already urgent bursts of speech. There is a slightly aggressive edge to the speech of people – admittedly more in the case of men than women. What a different approach to the polite and deferential interlocution of the Anglo-Saxon chap. It turns out that the only way I can co-exist with Arabic cultural manners without getting irritable is to enter into the spirit of the thing and start using some of these speech patterns myself. Otherwise I don’t get a chance to talk. Still I’d not want to live forever in a place where I have to employ this heavy-traffic congestion tactic in my daily conversation.

A casual argument (for them a discussion) over the price of cucumbers ensues…

Admittedly people seem to have fun with this style of communication.  There often seems to be an element of the mischievous amid the high volume.

As we passed a shop of Arabic sweets the man offered us one to try. In a local delhi the previous day the shop owner had, noticing we were foreigners, offered us a banana each – as we had been looking at fruit to buy. This kind of thing happened again and again.  People in Jordan genuinely are hospitable and friendly: the evidence is in the shops and in the homes of the locals.

Recently I spent the day at an old Roman fort and sixth century stylite tower south of Amman.  On the way we passed this wadi (valley).

Driving out of Amman the hills were surprisingly populated for a desert landscape. Makeshift tent camps with dozens of brown-headed sheep and a scattering of trash blown by the wind were, I suppose, Bedouin residences. It was sad to see that some of today’s Bedu culture has a dilapidated and poverty-stricken appearance.

A large flock of sheep being herded somewhere on the steppe.

The air was cold and we were the only people visiting Umm ar Rasas, a Roman fort built 1600 years ago.

A small white cat followed me through the tumble of old stones, purring softly.

You could climb over the remains of the Roman world, cisterns and arches and walls and all, in a way that would never be permitted in a Western country.

This is the interior of an early Christian church.  Jordan used to have lions roaming its wild places but they have been locally extinct since the nineteenth century because of hunting pressures.  You can still see them on the intricate floor mosaics on the church on top of Mt. Nebo that were made in the sixth century AD.

Many Westerners think of the Middle East as the heart of Islam, however it was Christian before it was Muslim, and there are still many Christians living here.  This morning I went to a service at the Syriac Orthodox Church in Amman, the Cathedral of St. Ephrem.  Since the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD in present day Turkey, Christians split in two over a semantic issue.  Most Christians we know in the West went the way of Rome and its descendants, however there are a variety of Eastern Christian denominations who still think they got it right after this schism, and are really the true Christian church.  I was intrigued to see what this alternative version of Christianity looked like.  Indeed it is very different.  As I walked into the cathedral a powerful aroma of incense came over me.  The priest faced away from the congregation and sang in a haunting and mournful Syriac language.

Those long staffs have small bells on the end which are shaken as part of the liturgical music.  As the largely Iraqi and Syrian congregation (some refugees from Aleppo) joined in the singing I felt moved by the mystery and pathos of the moment.

Tomorrow, finally, I will see Petra.

I just arrived in Tangalle.  What a journey… local bus from Galle Fort. Fast paced Hindi music, big buddha in the ceiling with flashing lights, another buddha on the dash board of the bus wrapped in plastic, a driver who swung the old 1970s Leyland bus around corners to the point where any more swing and it would have fallen on its side, so many passengers that people were literally pressing hard up against each others flesh while standing in the aisle… Sri Lankan men who look intently at you and don’t smile, a bus driver who kept breaking so hard that we were thrown forward, and then who would accelerate into oncoming traffic while overtaking and beeping his thunderously loud horn for the 13^th hundred time (the driving in Sri Lanka seems to be an extension of the national habit of rudely shoving yourself to the front of a queue), scruffy and ugly ribbon development along the coast for hour after hour… it was tiring and as we drove I revised my intention to visit any more hot and developing tropical countries.

Don’t worry.  It didn’t last long.

Sri Lanka is a green island.

Here are some of its shades of green.

 

 

 

 

 

Washing the buffalo in the quiet of the countryside in the morning.  Buffalo curd is produced which is possibly even more delicious than good yoghurt.

Fantastic food from the local market at Tangalle at very, very cheap prices.

Bananas so good you almost don’t want to eat them back in Australia.

 

 

The coast here is long and sandy and coconut tree fringed and the water is warm and soporific in its repeated murmuring on the sand. This morning I watched a German man do yoga on the sand while his girlfriend lazed in the shallows in a bikini. His salute to the rising sun really was a salute to the rising sun, and at the tip of the entire sub-continent and its jewel like extension, Sri Lanka, he faced south and clasped his hands in prayer position. A dog sat on the sand before him. The water sparkled in the early morning sun. His girlfriend lent back and let her hair drop into the water behind her. All seemed calm and well with the world.  And indeed it was.