Freesteel Blog

Damascas gate in the middle of the day

We rolled into Jerusalem bus station at about 9pm and found our way to the old city and Damascus Gate. How can I describe the Old City? Well, it’s like Gormenghast, only more condensed. It’s a maze. It’s like a nest of stone tunnels. You can follow sets of steps and ramps and passages high up the hillside if you go west. To the south-east is the Jewish quarter with its Western Wall, their most holy site. On the other side of this wall is the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock, Islam’s second most holy site. Back in the streets where we were stuck because it was nighttime, it was crawling with spare cats. Cats with fleas, cats with one eye, cats in rubbish bags. There were cats in the dormitory on the roof of the hostel where we stayed. In order to check in we had to step over scores of bodies of gringos all on the floor watching television to get to the desk.

The next day was devoted to sight seeing in the old city. There is nearly as much to see and read about in this quarter square mile as there is in rest of Israel put together, and the hostels are cheaper than anywhere else.

We got up too early. People were just starting to roll their wheel carts down the ramps to their stalls. In order to reduce the chance of getting out of control on the slopes they all had these spare tyres attached to the rear of their carts by a chain which they would stand on and skid and look worried as they were going too fast.

Looking over the rooftops of Jerusalem past the Dome of the Rock towards the Mount of Olives

We sussed out the right streets (the ones that lead to Damascus gate) and the wrong streets (the one from Jaffa gate to Temple Mount which seemed to be the tourist alley). Occasionally we would pass crowds of Christians singing hymns at one or other of the 14 Stations of the Cross. We paid our money and got onto the walls for a walk around half the city and were entertained by a happening on the main road outside. The police blew up someone’s suitcase in the street only to find that there was nothing but clothes in it.

We came down and walked out the Lion’s Gate, across the valley, via the Tomb of the Virgin Mary, to the Mount of Olives. One thing to say about all these Christian shrines here. Due to the Byzantine Empire getting this half of the world when the Roman Empire collapsed, the ancient and little known Greek Orthodox church have control over most of the places. Rather than investing their money in inquisitions, missionaries and PR like the Roman Catholics who made it big, they seem to have put all their money into floating candles and sensors. The latter are the size of hookahs and tend to hang from every square inch of the ceiling. They really do like them. I can imagine them giving each other these things as Christmas presents year after year until they no longer can get into their houses.

View of the fort of Masada with a clear view of the Roman ramp on the right

Becka’s itinerary ran smoothly the next day and we caught a bus down to the fortress of Masada on the Dead Sea which was built as an emergency backup palace by King Herod, and was then taken over by Jews on the run from the Romans who had kicked them out of Jerusalem in 66 AD. The Romans laid siege to the place until they got bored and then built a ramp up the side of the hill which was higher than the wall, whereupon everyone inside committed suicide because they knew that the Romans were complete bastards.

My knees got sore on the walk up and we caught the cable car down, fetched the bus south to Eilat on the Red Sea and struggled to get across the border into Jordan. No one would tell us if it was open at that time of the evening because they wanted us to stay at their comfortable hostel or hotel for the night. This was really the only bit of hassle we experienced on the trip. Whenever we approached the bus station too closely in our search for an answer to the question: “How do we get out of here?” this trail of dumb asses would latch onto us again as though they had forgotten that we really did not want to have anything to do with them. A taxi driver finally rescued us and took us to the border.

Jebel Rum from Jebel Ishrin during a minor sandstorm

Wadi Rum is a very popular sandstone climbing area a short journey north of Aqaba in the desert. It is a sea of sand with vast mountains of wind-weathered rock spaced several miles apart each. A Wadi in local speak means canyon. Now the local Bedouins seem to make their living here by driving tourists around in jeeps to see the sights on the different outcrops. A spring here, a natural rock bridge there, and a sunset site in the evening (you can see the sunset only from certain places due to the placement of the rocks). Naturally we didn’t hire one and cleared off as soon as we could to the rock outcrop called Jebel Ishrin on the opposite side of the valley with the town called Rum in it.

The outcrop was maybe eight miles long, half a mile wide and over 400 metres high, and shaped like a carrot. The plan was to find our way through it to the other side via the complex system of interconnecting canyons that were there. Five hours later after having explored half a dozen such promising canyons we were still not out of sight of Rum! There were these comedy cairn trails that tended to lead to cliffs going up, down and sideways. The rocks were kind of weird. They had holes in them, like swiss cheeze gone so far it’s about to collapse. In places there were huge overhanging cliffs with not a smooth patch on them. It began to rain on us. We ran out of food and energy and headed on back to the government guest house where we had rented a place on the flooded roof top.

“Don’t throw bulks / Heavy duty in the bowel / Papers thrown in bin” — sign on bathroom door in guest house.

After some food using pans probably belonging to a group of Italian-Swiss climbers that were there, we walked through the darkness of town and ran into Vernor, a Belgian caver who was getting a lift with a local Bedouin to his house. He’d just had a meal of sheep’s head with his family where they got him to eat an eyeball. They insisted we use the floor space in the Bedouin’s house, which we did, and had a long conversation with Vernor. Vernor is a landscape gardener who takes at least four month’s holiday a year and for the past eighteen months until December had a non-Belgian girlfriend whom he met in China going to University in Cambridge. He visited Cambridge every few weeks during that time, but failed to drop in on us local cavers in the pub, which was a shame because we would have been more sociable to him than Becka and I were at the time, but that’s how it goes. We’ve invited him on expo this summer; he’s in southern Austria anyway at the right time teaching his friends how to do Alpine climbing.

A wind-weathered rock mushroom

Vernor had also spoken to the pair of strange Germans who were on the bus with us when we arrived in Wadi Rum. They were big and wore black corduroy jackets with black corduroy waistcoats. Black corduroy trousers with bell bottoms the size of Big Ben, and wide brimmed black corduroy hats. What they were doing was going on a three year pilgrimage from their home to learn to become good carpenters in order to be let into a particular religious sect founded at around about the twelfth century. The asked the driver to drop them off in the desert some way off, and pick them up a week later. We had forgotten about them entirely because they couldn’t possible be for real.

Before six in the morning we cleared out while the sky was still dark, stashed our bags in the Government Guest house kitchen and began walking through and around Jebel Rum, the lower and wider rock outcrop on the same side of the sandy valley as the town of Rum. It was a long hot day and we saw not a single soul until we rounded the corner eight hours later, re-entered the Wadi with Rum in it and headed for Khazali, a most magnificent stone pillow-like outcrop way out to the south. There was a Siq, or narrow canyon like inlet on the north side which we were heading to. The thing about these rock mounds is you walk towards them for ages and ages with nothing happening, and then “Bang”, they are above you like a tower of ancient candle-dripped wax.

The Siq was two metres wide, had water in it and all sorts of Bedouin inscriptions in the walls. It was obviously one of those secret unlikely drinking spots that must exist for the camels on their way across the dessert in their caravan trains. Today there was almost a traffic jam of tourist jeeps rolling up there and arriving. In order to maintain our solitude we ran up the siq, did a difficult climb and hid on a shelf out of view of the noisy visitors. Then hurriedly climbed back down so that, if one of us fell, the other could run back out the siq and get help from the jeep before it went away.

On the walk back we climbed up a smallish outcrop in the middle of the sand and had the best view of the entire day. You could see the shape of all the wadis and their windblown mountains of sand piled up against the east sides of the outcrops. And, if you looked closely, you could spot tiny jeeps crawling about everywhere like ants you hadn’t seen on the ground before because they were so well camouflaged.

That night we slept on the roof. There was frost on our fifteen layers of smelly blankets when we got up at dawn to fit in another spot of walking before the eight o’clock bus out of here. We trekked up to Lawrence’s well in the rocks overlooking Rum behind us, and it was none too interesting. However, the shapes of the cavities cut into the walls overhanging the path up made the rocks sing like a chorus of a thousand howling voices in echo to a dog’s bark or the racket of the mosque. It was like tubular bells in a train tunnel, and was a very unexpectedly beautiful sound.

We caught the only bus out to the junction on the dessert highway and waited as 24 numbered luxury busses swished up from a P&O cruise ship docked at Aqaba on their way to Petra where we wanted to be. Finally an Arabic bus came and Becka drove a hard bargain which got us a taxi the last part of the way at no extra charge into Petra and even, miraculously, to the hotel we asked for: The Sunset Hotel, recommended by Becka’s parents because it is at the bottom of the hill so you don’t have to walk up to it at the end of a tiring day in Petra.

The famous view of the treasury as you reach the end of the Siq The view of the Siq from within the treasury We had three tiring days in Petra. On the first it was heaving with those cruise ship tourists and herds of dirty horses the locals were trying to hire out to them for the journey from the ticket office to the entrance of the main kilometre long Siq that lead to the ancient city. After that it was completely deserted.

Let me explain what Petra is. Petra is a bizarre forgery in rock. It’s like a film set, all facade and no content. Supposedly set up by the so-called Nabathean kingdom two thousand years ago as the headquarters for a protection racket run on the caravan trails, the people got so much money that they began to carve monuments into the rocks. The simplest of these are the “God-boxes” for boxing up your gods in a rectangle of stone hacked separate from the cliff, to the vast edifices that you see in the books and brochures. Usually you have a five metre tall first floor fronted with beautiful columns. On top of that is a second floor with more columns and false windows, fancy split pitched rooves with a sort of skirting board effect around the rim, and usually a huge urn in the middle like out of some gothic novel. It’s ridiculous. Now you climb up the stairs and go inside, and what do you see? Nothing. It’s just a box. Absolutely square at the corners, and huge. They maybe removed four or five hundred cubic metres of rock to make this space, and they don’t even decorate it. In fact if they left a few columns in there to spice the place up it would have been less work to create because you wouldn’t have to remove so much rock! So what is going on? A crazily ornate exterior, and a needlessly blank inside. My own theory is they put glass in the front doorway and used it as a fish tank.

An exposed facade The pattern is repeated throughout the city, although much of it is weathered away. Sandstone not being the best material if you want something to last. These facades were everywhere throughout the valley, sometimes high on nearly inaccessible ledges. The rooms were mostly used for keeping goats and sheep. There were paths of eroded steps leading to the tops of all the peaks, known as High Places. The Romans had moved it at some time in the past and predictably carved themselves an obligatory amphitheatre in one place. There was a lot to wander round for two days.

Beautiful rocks with random steps in them On the third day we headed up the road to Little Petra, some miles away. It was hard to find and the people there gave such hassle trying to hire themselves out as guides. It was one narrow Siq with similar but much smaller tombs than Petra, and we wandered through and clambered out the other side into a complex system of intersecting canyons. This time we found our way mostly through until foiled within sight of the ground by a too steep drop. Fortunately there was an escape route along a two and a half thousand year old water channel chiselled into the cliff which you could just about crawl along pushing your rucksack ahead of you.

The Chess piece at the top of Ein Deir Of course once out in the flat plains above Petra, the going could not be so simple. I’m not sure how it happened, but pretty soon we were strolling on down a tight canyon with pools of water you could only just traverse over or jump as long as you threw your rucksack ahead of you. Our chosen canyon headed on down a thirty metre pitch, so we backtracked and scaled one of the walls with a leg up followed by a short piece of rope for the second person. It led somewhere, judging by the goat droppings, and pretty soon we were on a road where a Jordanian army truck was towing an army jeep with a good heavy chain. When the jeep wasn’t being jolted to death it was driving over the chain and snapping things. Back out in town where all the hotels were kept, we had a couple of nights out at the one passable restaurant in the place (most of them are inside hotels). Cheap food, a selection-for-you of dishes and friendly service. Downstairs a quartet of Australians were smoking a hookah. I tried it and then forced Becka to try it. The smoke is so smooth you cannot tell it’s there, except that it feels slightly purer than ordinary air when you breath it in. Becka said, “I didn’t get anything,” with white smoke pouring out of her face and nostrils, before she ran out the door.

Typists in front of the court-house in Amman Early in the morning we caught the bus to Amman and checked into a hotel recommended by Becka’s parents on account of being cheap and close to the northern bus station. Things were slowing down. We weren’t walking twenty-five miles a day from sun rise to sun set. The cafeteria-like restaurants would beckon you in and take you to the kitchen to show you their four pans of food from which they could dish you a meal. Becka negotiated long and hard over fractions of a Dinar for each bowl of humous or foul. It got to complicated for me. We went to the cinema that evening. Boy oh boy. English sound track dubbed onto a Japanese film with arabic and greek subtitles, sometimes superimposed on top of each other. Reels were shown in no particular order, and we saw “Army of Darkness”, by the director of “The Evil Dead”, and it was remarkably crap.

A half day trip to Jerash was on the menu for the next day, and it rained a bit. Jerash has a very well preserved Roman city, excavated by the French this century. There are temples and fountains and an oval meeting place, two amphitheatres and long, broadly paved avenues lined with columns. But I don’t believe any of it is real. Who would put up that many stupid columns made out of granite along a road for the purpose of holding up nothing? It’s silly. If you want to line your street with tall things you use trees. They’re a lot cheaper and also produce oxygen. Completely daft, these Romans. No wonder they died out.

The border was crossed the next day. Same old fun and games. Not. And we were back in Jerusalem checking into the much posher Al-Hashimi hotel this time, though it suffered a shortage of pans in the evening, especially when the Germans got going with their meal. We boiled our potatoes in a teapot and ate the rest of our beans. I farted continually during those days, and it smelt bad.

All that was left was time for three further jollies out of Jerusalem before we flew home. The first took us to Ein Gedi, a nature reserve the size of the Waterfalls Walk in Ingleton which they say gets 1.5 million visitors per year(!) and where you are not allowed to take any food. That’s because no animals live there any more. All the Ibexes (very tame goat-things) and half the Hyraxes (fat ginea pig things) have moved out into the carpark where they can get some food. The walk went well until I fell in a puddle up to my middle and never went there again. The Dead Sea down the road at the foot of the hill was chilly too. It looked beautiful, but tasted nasty. The signs said it was forbidden to drink it. I’m not sure they understand here what the word forbidden means. In Akko there was a sign saying “Walking on the walls is Dangerous, Forbidden, and it is At Your Own Risk.”

Apparently the Dead Sea is retreating fast due to the pumping of water from the rivers that are meant to be feeding it. It goes down by metre every year at the moment. This is a problem for the posh resort hotels at the south end of the sea where it is at its shallowest (and saltiest) as there would be no point in visiting them were they to be left high and dry in hundreds of acres of salt flats. The maps are not accurate now because it seems that the Sea has shrunk by a factor of four and fragmented into two pieces, with a canal running between them, possibly pumped from the north end to the south. Also, near to the hotels are dikes around their portions of the sea probably used to keep the water level up. Pretty soon all that will be left will be a bunch of hotels in the middle of nowhere with some really salty, slimy swimming pools out the back for people to bob around in on their own.

St George’s Monastery as you approach it down Wadi Qelt The second day out was supposed to be a visit to Jericho, but we went there down Wadi Qelt, a canyon with an working aqueduct that feeds water to Jericho. Becka made an abortive attempt at following the instructions in the book and leading us up the valley, against the flow of the water, but that was never likely to work, so we turned around and followed it down. The aqueduct was a nice little flowing trough built into the ground halfway up the Wadi with a path along the side. Occasionally there was a narrow little aqueduct bridge for it when the ground fell away for a short distance. You were supposed to go via the path, down into these tiny valleys and back up the other side. We didn’t do that, but instead balanced our way along the thin walls of the aqueduct where it felt to me that at any minute a large section of the concrete wall could peel away like an eggshell leaving all the water to drain out of Jericho, and us at the obvious problem. With the state that my knee was in on that day it didn’t look like I would be up to the running across cross country that would be necessary were that to happen. Halfway down the Wadi was St George’s Monastery, another Greek orthodox establishment with a long history of monks being massacred and so forth. Eventually we strolled into Jericho and had to practically catch the first taxi out without seeing anything. The final trip out from Jerusalem was to the north. I vegetated and Becka packed the bags which meant she had the good and heavy load, hopefully to slow her down a little bit.

Cans of horrible Heineken washed out of the Mediterranean Sea at Akko We caught the 7am bus to Haifa, and then another bus to Akko (Acre), famous for being the final Crusader city before they were kicked out by the Muslims. It was like a smaller, less intense version of Jerusalem. The city walls looked out over the sea on two sides. After a brief forbidden walk along the walls we made it into the Subterranean Crusader Castle which is basically a series of large halls that had been filled in with dirt rather than demolished so that people could build over the top of them. It’s been mostly dug out and given set up with an “Easy-Talk” guide system. What you do is take one of these large portable phone things and walk to the sign that says “Easy-Talk (1)”, type “1” and put the thing to your ear to hear a load of credits and instructions on how to use the device. Then you move to the sign which says “Easy-Talk (2)”, and carry on. Why not just print the words out and nail them to the wall instead? We proceeded through 24 tiresome stations, and avoided the ones that necessitated standing in the rain. At around “Easy-Talk (18)” there was a loud sound of rats nearby, so we got out the trusty zoom (which of course you always carry around with you in the middle of the day) and looked up in the darkest corner. A mass of bloody huge black bats fighting and squawking in the ceiling. Two stations later the obvious way on in the tour was locked, so we went out a side door and found ourselves wandering around the open streets of Akko with these stupid Easy-Talk things not knowing where to go. Eventually we stumbled into an old Turkish bath-house which was meant to be a fragment of the tour, but were soon lost again, and had to wander around and come back to the museum through the front door.

Byzantine floor mosaic in Jerash On top of the Crusader Castle is part of the Akko Citadel. This is owned by the Israeli government because it is an important part of their history. Apart from being the place where the Turks imprisoned Baha’u’llah, the founder of the Baha’i religion, it was used as a jail for Zionist terrorists waiting to be executed during the so-called British mandate when they were ruling Palestine. At the time it was more or less an arab land, but by sheer force of terrorism from within (including a mass break-out with the use of explosives from this prison, the Jews of which who were killed are recognised as martyrs of the yet to be formed state), and boatloads of refugees pouring in from the rest of Europe, the British got sick and tired of it and took their leave, thus allowing the state of Israel to be founded, as it was, by acts of terrorism. As far as I can determine, the only difference between the founding of Israel, and the hypothetical founding of Palestine by the then terrorist PLO twenty years later was that the Israelis won. This then means they are allowed to cheat and get away with it. Down on the beach we completed our triplet of seas (the Red, Dead and the Med), and Becka gathered the fruits of the shore which rather looked to me like several crates of Heineken cans washed up on the sand after an indeterminate amount of time floating out at sea. There were tiny barnacles encrusted on the insides of the rims. I refused to drink it because, being Heineken which is extremely nasty stuff, I wouldn’t be able to tell if it had gone off or not. So Becka got slightly pissed. We went out into town to a humous bar and she ate five pita breads before I finished counting them. Off we went in the morning ridiculously early to Tiberious. There’s another town with a nice sounding name. This is on the Sea of Galilee which we were intending to cycle round in the afternoon. What? Cycle all the way round a Sea? Incredulity. It’s 55 klicks around, so not that bad. Looks big, but obviously isn’t of Great Lake scale. Becka drove a hard bargain with the hire shop while I sat outside on the pavement with the money, and the man was quite keen to keep our price secret from the other customers. The fields around the lake are green with rolling hills. It’s like England really, and there are the various Christian shrines around the north end where Jesus did this, that or the other thing, and these chapels tend to be owned by Benedictine monks and have tourist busses parked outside. If the Roman Catholics could have their way they’d probably say that the whole lake ascended into heaven in the twelfth century, thus depriving them of their trade. The late bus got us back to Jerusalem and in the morning it was the last day. The final sights of the city had to be done. We took a rain check on the 6am morning service in the Armenian quarter and headed for Temple Mount at eight. This is very beautiful. We took turns to visit the mosque and the Dome of the Rock (to where Mohammed one night rode on a flying horse from Mecca and ascended to heaven in order to pray with Jesus and all the other prophets of the past (why pray in heaven? Surely you need only to talk?)), while the other person guarded the shoes. These mosque things are rather comfy to be honest. Perhaps it has something to do with walking barefoot on miles of lovely Persian carpets. At eleven we joined a tour in the Citadel of Jerusalem and listened to a guide speaking. Behind him you could see “Easy-Talk” signs with numbers as large as 212 on them– what victims. We should have done this at the start to find out the history of the place. And then we might have had enough time for we had to abandon it halfway through and leave for the plane. We would have felt conned had we not had a full luggage strip-down at the airport, and the security man at the check-in desk dutifully obliged. Was our story not good enough? We showed him our diary as corroborative evidence, but I guess they must know that someone’s out to get them.

Julian Todd 1998.