Journey to Jordan

That’s my status message on Facebook and gchat.  When I wrote it, I wasn’t speaking figuratively.

Classes are OVER!  That means that this is our last week to fit in all the touring and goodbyes and souvenir shopping that we can before we leave the country.  I heard of a group going up to tour some caves up near Um Qais, and it sounded like fun, so I decided to go.

Abila (also know as Quwayliba) is WAY off the tourist-beaten path.  To get there, we took a bus to Irbid, took another bus to the north station in Irbid, then took a bus up to a little village called Harta and had to ask the driver to take us out past an olive orchard to the edge of a wadi in the middle of nowhere.  A lot of Jordanians don’t know about it, or they think it’s somewhere else.  At least a few of the locals know about it, though, since one of the passengers on the micro was able to help us direct the bus driver.

Abila was an old Roman/Byzantine city between Jerash and Um Qais.  It may or may not have been one of the cities of the Decapolis.  As far as tourist sights go, however, this place is nothing like the others.  Almost nothing has been excavated, and what has been excavated is unmarked and, for the most part, fenced off.  There are a couple of old Byzantine churches that are in the process of reconstruction (meaning that there are standing columns and the dirt has mostly been cleared away), but it’s really easy to jump the fences.  Nobody is around to stop you, so it doesn’t really matter anyways.

The olive orchard at the top of the wadi gives way to a fenced off set of columns that once belonged to a Byzantine church.  We jumped the fence and explored the ruins a bit.  There were some exposed mosaics in the corner, and, using my hand, I swept away most of the sand to expose about five times as much as was buried.  The columns of the church alternated between white limestone and black basalt, which was kind of cool.  The coolest thing, though, was that nobody except us was out there.  Made the place feel that much more enchanting–like it was really something ancient, something that had been abandoned.

We climbed back over the fence and down into the wadi, where we saw a whole bunch more partially excavated ruins.  We had originally come to explore the caves, but the ruins were calling out to us so we climbed around them for a while.  They were WAY cool, and exploring them was all that much cooler because there was nobody there but us!

A completely intact basalt road lined what once was a city street, with a Byzantine house that still had a window and a tall courtyard jutting out of the dusty hill.  How much more was buried under that giant mound of dirt?  How had a hill, with olives growing on top, come to cover half of this city?  What did this place look like fifteen hundred years ago?  Those were all questions in my mind.

After exploring the ruins (including another Byzantine church with columns at the bottom of the hill), we followed a path that led through a pomegranate orchard that sat at the bottom of the wadi.  There, we saw what had once been an old Roman bridge.  It was right in the middle of the orchard, still in use, though evidently the road had a lot more traffic in the old days than it does now.  We sat in the shade, eating figs and talking about our experiences with Jordan, the homestays, each other, and a lot of other things.

While the ruins are cool, the caves are much cooler.  I would say that the place is known for its caves, but that’s not exactly true because the place isn’t really…known (it only has half a page in the Lonely Planet guidebook).  Some of the caves are purely natural, but the vast majority of them are Byzantine tombs, with cysts, crypts, frescoes, and, yes, bones.  Human bones.

There are four of them that have been mostly excavated (though not completely excavated), and these ones have a locked door in front of them.  In order to get to them, you have to find the guy with the key.  We went up to a house on the other side of the hill to a partially built house and asked the people there about it.  One of them drove off in a tractor to the village to get the key, while the other guy entertained us in the living room.

I’m not sure what the house is for, but the people there were really nice to us.  Like many of the local villagers, they weren’t really in any kind of a hurry, so they were plenty willing to help us out.  We sat around for about half an hour, waiting for the guy to come back with the key.  It was good to be indoors during the heat of the day.  While reclining on the couches and mattresses, we talked about all kinds of stuff, like “you know you’re in Jordan if…” (I finished that sentence with “…you see the Tatooine alien spy from Star Wars episode IV and do a double take, only to realize that it’s a local girl wearing the Nikab with sunglasses.” Yeah, I’m weird).

The tombs were amazing.  We dubbed it the “Byzantine valley of the kings.” Katie the archeologist was with us, and it really did seem like she’d died and gone to heaven.  Each cave was roughly square shaped, with box-like cysts carved out of the walls.  In some places, cysts were actually carved into the backs of other cysts, and in one of the caves a tunnel led to a whole other room above everything else.

The coolest thing about these tombs were the frescoes.  Some of them were mold damaged (it can get quite damp in the caves), others had caved in at various places, and most of the surviving frescoes were really faded, but still they were quite a treat.  There were images of roosters in one (why roosters in a tomb?), and a really creepy face in another.  This one that I really liked had grapes all over one of the arches.  Others had artistic patterns and images of things like plants and fishes.  The frescoes reminded me of the Chronicles of Narnia, interestingly enough–C. S. Lewis based a lot of stuff in his novels off of Greek mythology, and it had that sort of feel to it: Christian/Greek.  I guess that’s the best way to describe what “Byzantine” feels like to me (I who am such an undisputed expert on all things Byzantine…yeah, I know next to nothing about that civilization).

Katie REALLY got excited when we started to find bones.  There were femurs, a pelvis, and various other fragments inside of some of the cysts.  As our resident archeologist, Katie told us all about the process of excavating these places and what the bones can tell you.  She spent the first six weeks of the program in Petra, excavating tombs up there.

Katie told us that a lot of these tombs aren’t completely excavated.  The ground at the bottom of the caves is generally wet and muddy–not the solid rock that you find on the walls and ceiling.  She pointed out a whole in the floor and said that the archeologists probably dug out that cyst but not below.  In a couple of caves, there was probably a whole level of cysts under our feet that weren’t even uncovered!

Those were the locked caves.  The guys at the house accompanied us the whole way, which means that they probably work for the ministry of tourism, but I’m not sure.  In any case, they were really laid back and basically just showed us to the caves and opened the doors for us.  Afterwards, we left to explore the other caves on our own.

There were TONS of caves to explore!  We only went into six or seven of them, and that took up the better part of the afternoon.  These caves were completely unexcavated–we saw some cysts in one, and we KNEW that there were more under our feet where the dirt and mud had filled in the cave, but we couldn’t see what else was in there.  Katie was way excited.  Others had thorns covering the entrances, which made it really difficult (but not impossible) to climb in.

Most of them had really narrow openings, so you had to crawl in on your stomach and got REALLY dusty.  Gini had a head lamp and dove headfirst into one of them.  When she stuck her head out, David said she looked like a mouse crawling out of its hole and Nikki shot a video of it!  In another place, Nikki found a tunnel that went through and out another cave entrance.  There was an excited ant colony in the dust crawling in, and in the tunnel itself there was a dead bird, GIANT grasshopers, and these really weird disc shaped beetles crawling all over the dust.  I got really dusty in that tunnel–climbed through to the exit, only to find it too narrow and thorny to crawl out, with the tunnel to the tombs underneath (if that’s what it was) too filled in to lead anywhere.  Had to crawl through the bugs again and step around the dead bird on the way out.  What an adventure!

We tried the caves on either side, crossing the pomegranate orchard on the way.  Pomegranates are an interesting fruit, and the orchard was really fun to walk around in.  The trees looked like they hadn’t been cultivated in a while, and there were a lot of thistles on the ground, but I improvised with a stick to bushwack my way through.  It was fun just to hang out and talk with everyone, jump around and play.  Good times!

Getting back was a little tricky.  We were in the middle of NOWHERE, in a group of seven (Lorien, Ruth, and Brianne took off after the locked caves for an appointment at six in Amman), and covered in dirt and mud.  When we got to a paved road, we followed it up to a country mosque at an intersection, and what was our luck to see a microbus driving past!

At least, that’s what we thought.  We yelled out and waved to the bus, and it started to pull over, but then the driver thought better of it and drove off, David Kerman running behind it waving his hands in the air!  We learned from a couple of locals sitting under the shade of the olive trees (the road was in the middle of an olive orchard) that this wasn’t a microbus route–the bus that didn’t stop for us was probably just going somewhere for maintenance.  There was nothing else but to hitchhike.

Unlike the US, however, it’s not very dangerous to hitchhike in Jordan.  Before we had split up into groups, an empty truck drove by, and the driver agreed to take us to the nearest village where we could catch a bus to Irbid.  His accent was thick and incomprehensible, but he was a nice man and didn’t charge us anything.  Sitting in the back of the cab, it was hilarious to listen to Gini and Nikki squeal every time we rode over an exceptional bump!  They were standing up, bracing themselves against the bar above the cabin, and must have had a really fun little ride!

We arrived at a traffic circle in the local village.  The next micro came not two minutes later, but that’s all the time it took for about half a dozen local children to come out of the olive orchard and congregate around us.  They asked, in broken English, “what’s your name?” and were delighted to see that we spoke Arabic.  By that time, though, the bus had arrived and we were already climbing on, so our conversation was cut short.  These small villages don’t see a lot of foreigners, so any group of Westerners is a spectacle and an oddity, and attracts lots of attention.

We saved about eighty qirsh and took the micro back, arriving in Amman after sunset.  While the others mostly slept, me, Gini, and Nikki had a lively conversation that was surprisingly fun.  I didn’t realize how long our day had been until we got back.  We’d left early in the morning–around eight o’clock–and didn’t get back until around nine!  I walked into the house dirty and exhausted, wearing the dust of Byzantine bones and aching for a long, warm shower.

To my delight, I got it!  The solar water heating system on the top of our roof had done its job, and for the first time in a long while I had a wonderfully refreshing hot shower, at exactly the moment when I most needed it!  An excellent ending to my last touring excursion among the ancient sites and ruins in Jordan.