Author: Alan

Petra was built around 100 BCE and served as the capital of the the Nabataeans, an ancient Semitic people that settled in southern Jordan. At the time, the Nabateans were undisputed masters of the Arab trade routes, so their architecture reflects a unique mélange of Graeco-Roman, Egyptian and Mesopotamian styles. As the title of this post states, Petra is an archaeological paradise.

When I left the hotel at 5:30am, I still didn’t have a bus reservation. The concierge had tried to sneak me onto a bus with an Air France flight crew, but since they canceled at the last minute, I was left high-and-dry the night before my trip. Luckily, when I got to the office in the morning, tickets were still available. Whew.

I bought a falafel sandwich, climbed into the bus, and promptly went back to sleep. By the time I woke up, we were well outside of Petra, and at 10:15am pulled into the Petra Visitor’s Center parking lot. I bought a day pass for 21 JOD (~$27), handed my ticket to the “tourist police” (I love that term), and began my day-long journey.

After 10-15 minutes I entered the Siq, a twisting narrow gorge that runs for 1200m. Flanked by towering, geologically exotic walls, I walked slowly, enjoying the curvature of rock, the delicate and creeping mid-morning shadows.

The Nabataeans used water channels to ferry water through the 1200m long gorge.

Bend after bend I meandered through the canyon, pausing to drink up the atmosphere. Before long, I neared the end of the canyon. Despite my shabby cinematography, I did my best to capture the end of the Siq as it opens up to the Treasury. Cue the Indiana Jones music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrA1qj4Khw0

Dwarfed by this otherworldly monolith, I felt like I was in a George Lucas dream. The Treasury (Arabic: Al-Khazneh) is the pride and joy of Petra, undoubtedly the most famous attraction amidst the Nabataean ruins. Fortunately, there weren’t any booby traps or 700-year old knights to distract my endless attempts to capture the scene with my camera. Just call me Indiana Perlman.

While I could have spent all day lounging and marveling, there was plenty more to see. I climbed up to the High Place of Sacrifice, where Nabataeans held important religious ceremonies and sacrificed animals to honor the Gods. Much of the path up the gorge was marked by stone-cut steps.

After the High Place of Sacrifice, I trekked back down towards Colonnaded Street, a once-bustling avenue in Petra’s city center. The marble pavement is still visible, as are a few columns. Archaeologists from Brown University have been excavating here since 1993.

When I was asking around for directions to the Monastery, a young, donkey-reigned child almost coerced me into paying for a ride. I told him that I wanted to walk, but he quickly pointed out that it was a two and a half hour climb. There was something about his salesmanship that didn’t feel right, so I decided to pass. That, and most of the donkeys looked flat-out fatigued.

So did the camels. Occasionally they would make these loud, wailing sounds that I would equate to a drowning hand-horn. Maybe they were just saying hello, but it sounded like they were pretty beat.

The Monastery (Arabic: Ad-Deir) is Petra’s second-most famous structure, another large, impressive, architecturally stunning chunk of carved-out stone. The guidebook mentions that it’s over 800 stairs to reach the Monastery. I stepped off 709, but who’s counting?

By the time I climbed down to the canyon floor, it was almost time to leave. I had been walking for more than 5 hours and hadn’t stopped to eat or drink anything. I felt like the fatigued donkeys and camels. I hurried back through the canyon, away from the Monastery, through Colonnaded Street, past the Treasury (stopped and took 20 more pictures), through the Siq, and finally emerged out of the canyon. I bought myself some ice cream at Indiana Jones’ Snack Shop, bid farewell to Petra, and promised that I would return again.

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It’s my last night in Amman, and I leave in a few hours for Damascus. Syria, here I come! Stay tuned for more updates.

With work finished in Ethiopia, I was almost ready to head off to Djibouti, though I couldn’t leave without exploring some of Addis Ababa’s finer attractions.

First, a visit to the Ethiopian National Museum. The main attraction here is Lucy, a 3.2 million year old skeleton (er, plaster replica…the real skeleton is in storage) that serves as a link between apes and bipedal humans. Given the indoor lighting, my images of Lucy didn’t come out that great, though I managed to capture some of the other skeletal plaster reconstructions.

Creepy, eh? Our distant cousins!

During lunch, I sampled tej, or honey wine, a sweet-tasting mead with a deceptively high alcohol content. Yummy.

I spent the afternoon walking around Merkato, considered by many to be the largest open-air market in Africa. It was wild—a seemingly endless mélange of hawkers and smells and colors that one can only find in certain parts of the world. My colleague and I squeezed past crowded stalls and snaked our way through spice tents, eventually settling on a kilogram of mitmita, a deep ochre-hued blend of spices that, when sampled, left a pleasantly strong kick on both of our tongues.

The weekend was nearly complete. Yet my colleague and I still had not tried qat, the amphetamine-like stimulant so popular amongst locale in Ethiopia and its neighboring countries. It’s like the coca leaf of Africa. We asked our driver to help us buy some, and before we knew it were ushered into a small, curtained cement room with five or six guys camped out on thin mats, relaxed and chewing away.

It felt like an opium den without the smoke. Our driver taught us what leaves to pull, and how first timers typically chew the leaves with a carbonated beverage or with peanuts. In my case, I used both. I watched other eyes, gradually dilated, soft and lazy, thinking to myself, Why was I trying this again? After a few chomps, I felt slightly elated, a temperate warming in the back of my head. That feeling lasted awhile, as I sipped my Coke and listened to the Dixie Chicks on a boom box someone had placed in the corner of the room. Who would’ve thunk it—the Dixie Chicks? In an Ethiopian-qat den?

That night, we went to Harlem Jazz, a live-music venue, and boogied down to multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Kenny Allen. The tunes—mostly reggae—were energetic, and the crowd was all about it. I couldn’t stop dancing. I’d like to think it was the music, but I’m guessing it was the qat…I didn’t go to sleep until 4am.

Whew, what a week. Which brings me to Djibouti.

Djibouti, one of the tiniest countries in Africa, is an interesting place. Considering its proximity to Somalia, Eritrea and Sudan, Djibouti is a relatively stable, unassuming (and in the words of one expat, “stupidly expensive”) oasis in the armpit of East African volatility. Claiming independence from France in 1977, Djibouti has a strong French influence. While stray camels stroll around the city’s environs, short-shorted French militia order up fresh poisson at restaurants named La Chaumièire and Le Kintz. Throughout the week, I made a few unique observations:

• One car dealership insisted that we take a look at their high-end furniture for sale. Shouldn’t they be selling us on their vehicles? I must say, though, that the furniture was quite nice.
• Most of the currency is battered beyond belief. If you ever find yourself in the presence of Djiboutian francs, look for staple holes. Not once did I see anything close to a fresh bill!
• Nobody works from 12:00p-4:30p. That’s quite a siesta.

Oh, and the heat! It’s penetrating! One day, it got up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit. In certain parts of the city, the heat takes on an almost unbearable sulfurous scent, enough to make one feel like a struggling asthmatic. Remind me why I requested this region of the world in August?

On Friday, my colleague and I hired a driver to take us to Lac Assal, at 150m below sea-level the lowest point on the African continent, the second saltiest body of water in the world. Exiting Djibouti city, we drove past broken flatbeds, wild gazelle, monkeys, camels and trash-snacking goats. We hit desert fairly quickly, rocks strewn across the sun-beaten horizon.

Halfway to the lake, we slowed through a French Foreign Legion outpost, where kids crowded around outdoor Foosball tables. When a truck, chock full of qat from Ethiopia, drove past via police escort, our driver announced, “his majesty is arriving.”

Lac Assal is wild—miles of barren salt shores and craggy outcroppings.

After Lac Assal, we off-roaded into a petrified lava field, a lunar landscape not far from where the original “Planet of the Apes” was filmed. I ran across shards of what was once molten liquid and darted into a lava tube to escape the relentless heat.

On Sunday, we went snorkeling on Moucha Island. While it wasn’t the season to snorkel with the whale sharks (a must-do for anyone visiting in the fall or winter), I had an incredible time darting through schools of wish, coming up with comical questions like, If the brain coral could think, what would it think of me, and Do the white and black and yellow fish get along? I held my breath for as long as possible, spotting all kinds of colorful creatures swimming through never-ending nooks and squiggly, gnarled coral crannies. Our boat was mostly U.S. soldiers, and I had a fun time asking them about their Djiboutian post and lives in the military. One guy, Dave, gave my colleague and I some amazing recipes that I’m looking forward to trying upon my stateside return.

All in all, an excellent visit! I’m writing this update from a 6 hour layover in Dubai, and tomorrow it’s off to Amman, Jordan for the next week. Petra, here I come!

Greetings from Addis Ababa, capital of the Ethiopian hinterland, and at 7546 ft (2300m), the 3rd highest capital city in the world. I’ve been here for 4 days now, which means it’s about time for an update.

As my 15+ hour flight approached landing, I pulled off my Ethiopian Airlines socks—yes, free socks folks—and filled out a customs form and Save the Nation from the New Flu questionnaire. The next day, my colleague and I surveyed a few supermarkets, and even though the electricity cut out four times, we managed to get a ton of work done.

For dinner, we went to Habesha Restaurant, a place known for its traditional dishes and nightly dance and music shows. I ordered sautéed chicken (chicken tibs), which was served atop injera, Ethiopia’s iconic, sourdough flatbread made out of fermented teff flour. Local entertainers wowed the audience as my fingers frazzled the spongy circle, and my colleague and I, situated at the front-most table, enjoyed our first round of St. George’s beer. My favorite performance was an Esketsa-style dance, which involved nearly impossible gesticulations of the neck, back and shoulders that would make a chiropractor cringe. The dancers were like psychedelic marionettes, being thrashed around by a maniacal puppeteer. It was rhythmic and captivating in an almost hypnotic way. Apparently the dancers noticed my interest, because at some point during the 30-minute charade, they motioned for me to stand up and join them. Luckily my colleague had her video camera out.

Ready for 15 seconds of my best Esketsa impression?

Note: if you can’t see the video, click here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOoNzjUO0bk

Well that was embarrassing.

I spent the next morning hunting down new automobile prices, and while idling in traffic, rediscovered some of citified Africa’s traits. The smell of diesel. Broken streets and puddled, unkempt alleys. Sidewalk herds of impish goats. Eucalyptus-branch scaffolding, ribbed metal sheets and even a Britney Spears ad for Stolichnaya vodka. Over the last few days, my senses have been utterly stimulated (especially taste—last night, I had lamb brains for dinner).

With our cost-of-living survey nearly complete, my colleague and I are looking to explore Addis Ababa over the weekend. On the agenda:

• A visit to the Ethiopian National Museum to see the plaster replica of Australopithecine Lucy.
• An afternoon in Merkato, the largest open-air market in Africa.
• Drinking tej (honey wine).
• Chewing leaves of qat, a plant native to Ethiopia known for its stimulative properties.