Amman to Petra: A Stop at Mount Nebo, “Memorial of Moses”
Ahmad, my driver and guide, was taking me from Amman, Jordan to Wadi Musa and Petra. It isn’t a long trip. We had several stops built in, including two grand spending opportunities (whatever the product or artifact was, “it’s cheaper here than at [fill in name of next stop]”), and Madaba, where I saw the ancient mosaic map of the Middle East in the Greek Orthodox church of St. George. I hired a guide at Madaba, a young Jordanian with a Dutch surname thanks to his Dutch grandfather. Next was Mount Nebo, where Moses stopped to look out to the Promised Land he would never reach.
A Stop on the Way
As we got close Mount Nebo, Ahmad asked if I minded him stopping for cigarettes and a coffee. He always asked (and he never smoked in the car). We stopped at a small shop on a sloping street of sand-colored cubical houses. Some parked cars along the street were draped with rugs instead of foil sunshades. Outside the store, under a sun shelter of long canes on a frame, there were Coca-Colas, plastic-wrapped cases of water bottles, beach balls, soccer balls, pretty decorative mats, straw sun hats, charcoal for grilling, plastic drink glasses, potted plants, Arabic dallahs (coffee pots) and a lot more. I didn’t always follow Ahmad into shops but I did here at the Panorama Mount Nebo.
Three men were talking with Ahmad. They greeted me, and one offered us a taste of cloudy, straw-colored honey fresh from his garden. It was mild and good. Then they offered us Arabic coffee in china cups – I had a refill, too. But for the next round Ahmad got us Turkish coffee, cup type unrecorded. So there at the small store with the purple plastic table out front, the Jordan valley before us, haze concealing Jerusalem, I got my first taste of roadside Turkish coffee. From then on, I got Turkish coffee at every stop, no matter how hot the weather, no matter how many coffees I’d already had.
Panorama Mt. Nebo
Long after I’d eaten the honey at Panorama Mount Nebo, I remembered that two Jordanian physicians I’d met on the flight to Amman told me that I must eat only cooked food. They were emphatic. My gut wasn’t used to local foods, they said. But neither the honey nor tea I drank later from a family’s common cup made me ill.
Mount Nebo
I found the reference to Mount Nebo in Deuteronomy. Moses is instructed to climb and look, and there his days will end. As always Ahmad told me to take my time visiting. He would wait near the parking lot. I bought a ticket and headed up. I didn’t hire a guide this time because I’d read enough, I thought. It was over 100 degrees. A sad, blond street dog was inert in light shade. Ahead of me a man wearing sandals, a straw sun hat and a thigh-length garment that looked like a nightshirt walked with his guide. (He had nice legs. Showing off?) I was wearing long black pants, a black and white mosaic pattern tee shirt and large black and white scarf wrapped tight around my neck and shoulders. We both were clearly outsiders.
Construction at the chapel on Mount Nebo cut me off from the ancient mosaics and elements of the Byzantine church that was once there. It also blocked my way to Giovanni Fantoni’s strange serpentine cross. Nothing seemed to be going on in the church at the moment though, so I slipped under the yellow tape to get a look inside and a better view of the cross. Instead I got a scolding from the nightshirt man’s guide. I didn’t really catch what he said, but it worked, and I abandoned my quest. Nearby I stopped at an olive tree planted by Pope John Paul II. All the Popes come here – Ahmad may have said that, or maybe I just thought it.
Memorial of Moses
In the end, unlike Moses, I didn’t see much of the Promised Land because of haze and blowing sand. My pictures are dusty looking. Selfies of me with the hazy valley behind, an inadvertent video which amused me and I kept, the sad dog, a tiny black plastic automatic weapon in the gutter. And the church was closed. So my visit to the Memorial of Moses was brief, but I am conscious that it was someplace of note. There are reasons Jordan calls itself “the other Holy Land.”
Abandoned Ottoman Valley Town
After Mount Nebo, dry grassy stretches, dry grassless stretches, Bedouin grazing sheep and goats on stubble and dry grass and watering them with tanker trucks. Ahmad said that since I was interested, he’d show me something. So we turned uphill on a back road where he presented me with an abandoned Ottoman valley town that still looked solid enough from where we stood. We drove further up the ridge to the amalgamated ruins, additions and reconstructions of Qal’at ash-Shawbak. Shawbak was a crusader castle built around 1100. It lasted only 75 years before it was taken by Saladin (Salah al-Din). It’s still impressive on its ridge but we didn’t look in. Ahmad promised me a better castle later. That was at Ajloun, and it was spectacular.
Trip date: June 2015
