Jordan travelogue
Traveling is life for me. However, it happens that if you want to travel often to make up for lost time, you run the risk of repeating the same type of journey over and over again. You know, when you start traveling you always try to fly to the most beautiful places on earth. Until one day what you see seems less beautiful than what you have already seen and you start making comparisons, which is always an ugly thing, like with people! What I want from a trip is emotion, reflection, introspection, personal enrichment, amazement. So now that I have more time and more freedom ‘but also a greater chance to spin that globe, I don’t have much time to go in search of the most beautiful and unspoiled places on earth.
Jordan has always been a mystical place for me, a crossroads of countless civilizations but also the deep root of our being Christians. After just four hours of flight, we arrive in one of the most famous and talked about places of the First World War. The British officer Thomas Edward Lawrence after having fixed his base of operations on a plateau that reaches 1750 meters above sea level whose sandstone boulders and red sand bewitched him, conquered Jordan’s only outpost on the sea, the city of Aqaba. We did the reverse. We spent the first night on the Red Sea in Aqaba and the second in that magical place chosen by Laurence of Arabia as the operational base of his mission, Wadi Rum. The light and silence of the place under the sandstone mountains in fabulous Berber tents, after a spectacular sunset over the desert behind the mountains, gave us a rose tinted sunrise. So early we left the jeeps to reach Petra an hour and a half away.
Few places in the world evoke the charm of this city hidden in the gorges, scattered with tombs carved into the pink rock, corroded by two thousand years of wind. The site, a Unesco heritage, among the seven wonders of the modern world, contains among others, the most famous monument called the Treasury, a tomb with a Hellenistic facade over 40 meters high.
Petra, capital of the Nabataeans, a merchant tribe from Arabia who settled in its gorges in the 6th century BC. C., at the year zero, at the height of its splendor, it housed 30 thousand people.Destroyed by numerous earthquakes, after the Crusades the city fell into oblivion and its position was forgotten. Only in 1812 did the young Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt join her dressed as an Arab pilgrim. Submerged in sand, secret of the Bedouins, memory of the desert: the legend of Petra was revealed to the world, after centuries of silence. All together you do not pay for the long visit of the first day, we got up at dawn and before heading to the Dead Sea, for the last two days of relaxation in the deepest place on the planet, we retraced the five kilometers between seeing the “Treasure” of Petra through an even more magical light. Just 50 kilometers from Amman, in barren and earthy countryside, religion has written history: on Mount Nebo, according to the Bible, Moses arrived with the Jews fleeing Egypt and saw the Promised Land. In the distance you can see Judea, Jericho, the Dead Sea, that sea that saw him walking on the water. Jerusalem is only 46 kilometers away. Bethany beyond the Jordan, on the border with Israel, is the place where according to the Gospels John the Baptist baptized Jesus. We were there for two days of peace and serenity. Two days full of joy for the show that was delivered to us from the lowest point on Earth located at 400 m. below sea level.
I will have many good memories of this “Safari”. The melancholy singing of prayers in the mosques of Aqaba lying on the mountains at sunset on the same sea that appeared to Lawrence of Arabia. The sunset and then the starry sky until the improbable in our tents at Wadi Rum and the evening of singing and dancing together with other travelers and a group of young Muslim women one of whom, inviting us to dance slowly, took off the hijab releasing splendid and shiny black hair and in the sinuosity of the dance he seemed to free himself from a sort of atavistic slavery ”. The image of the “Treasure” seen after keeping your eyes closed between the high and narrow crevices of the rocks in Petra and all the wonderful archaeological site. The harmonious purity of the Dead Sea and the pink mountains almost touch the Palestinian Territories and then the choirs of a splendid Lebanese song sung together with Jordanians, Lebanese Arabs and Europeans in the restaurant on the Dead Sea in a night of peace and brotherhood. The constant gaze on the earth seen from Mount Nebo and the vision of what Moses must have felt by looking at the promised land unfolding before his eyes. Five days full of joy for the spectacle that was delivered to us in this small and peaceful kingdom from
Laura Trifilò
