Thu 28 December 2006

I woke up at 06:30 next morning, and wondered what had happened to the 5 o’clock wake-up call from the mosques. The answer became evident when I tried to turn the lights on: another electricity blackout in the town. This time the blackout lasted nearly all day, blocking access to the Internet, and silencing many cellular phone operators. My phone kept operating all the time, but many others who were using a different operator were unable to call or receive calls.

After eating breakfast at 7 o’clock, the residents of the hostel gathered in the lobby with their luggage, waiting for news about the weather and road blocks. My main concern was how to reach Ben Gurion airport before 19:50, when my flight would leave for Cairo. Some others had a ferry to catch from Aqaba to Egypt, and yet others had reserved a bus ticket from Eilat to Jerusalem.

The police reports about road blocks varied all the time, and for a while we believed that the road south to Aqaba would soon be open. Then we got new information that all power shovels were working on the road north to Amman instead, and the road to Aqaba would remain closed all day.

At 08:30 it was believed that the road to Amman would soon be open, and I entered a taxi. The taxi driver asked 150 dollars for a trip to Sheikh Hussein border terminal, where my rental car was parked on the Israeli side. The price was outrageous according to the local standards, but not so bad according to western standards — for a 350 km ride in a private taxi.

We were able to drive a kilometer or two only from the hostel, and then we had to stop at a road block, waiting for the road to Amman to be opened. We and other taxis packed with western tourists had to wait for more than an hour behind this road block, until the policemen finally opened the road at 10 o’clock. There would have been plenty of time and a good reason to sing “...may all your ChristMases be white”, but I doubt that anyone did so in their full-packed taxis.

Our spirits were greatly raised when the road block was finally opened, but work on the road was not ready yet. We had to drive slowly behind a power shovel that was clearing snow off the road. The queue of cars often stopped for a long time, and no one really knew what was going on. In two hours we proceeded only a few kilometers from Wadi Musa.

After 12 o’clock we encountered a long queue of cars coming from the opposite direction — living proof that the road was finally open all the way to the main highway. (The snowfall was limited to the high mountains only, and on the main highway 20 km away from Petra there never was any snowfall at all.) When the queue of cars had passed us, we were able to go past the power shovel and drive with nearly normal speed.

While the queue was stopped on the snowy road, my taxi driver chatted with another taxi driver on the back seat of our car, and haggled with him a price for taking me to Sheikh Hussein border terminal. They were speaking in Arabic, but I understood enough of the conversation to know that the other taxi driver agreed a price half of what I was paying to my taxi driver. The first driver earned 80 dollars for driving 20 km in 4 hours and a half, and the other driver earned 70 dollars for driving 330 km in 3 hours and a half — plus the way back home.

When we finally got out of the snowy region and arrived on the four-lane highway to Amman, this second taxi-driver did not spare the gas pedal of his old Mercedes Benz, knowing that I was in a haste to catch a plane to Cairo. The speed meter showed more than 160 km/h, but the driver did not care to wear a seat belt. I wondered if there are any speed limits in Jordan, and if it is legal here to drive without a seat belt. Both questions were kind of answered when the driver occasionally slowed down to 80 km/h and held the seat belt on his lap, while passing a police checkpoint.

“I used to be a driver for the king in Amman”, the taxi driver said to me, while we were chatting about various topics. I did not ask how he had ended up driving an old Mercedes in southern Jordan, but the man was clearly a very skilled driver — sort of. Skilled in making narrow passes and forcing three cars side by side on two lanes. Skilled in making many risky things that are common on the roads in Jordan, but illegal in western countries.

We arrived at Sheikh Hussein border terminal at 16:30, and I believed that there still was some hope of reaching my flight to Cairo at 19:50 from Ben Gurion airport. The border crossing took a record-breaking three hours, however — even longer than the airport security checks take. While standing in numerous different queues behind a busload of Asian tourists, I slowly got used to the fact that I would miss my flight to Egypt. I had planned to end the day with a late night dinner on a luxurious restaurant boat on river Nile, but this dream would never come true.

When I finally got out of the border terminal, I called my car rental and extended the hire for another four days. Then I went to the shopping mall of Beyt Shean, and compensated the loss of a five-star Nile dinner cruise with a fast food meal at McDonald’s. Then I started driving towards Jerusalem via the Jordan Valley road.

There were two teenagers hitch-hiking under the lights of a road junction, a boy and a girl seemingly unrelated to each other, possibly from the same school or something. I picked them in my car, as they were travelling to the same destination as I, Jerusalem.

I tried to entertain my guests with music from the radio, but all Hebrew channels were airing talk shows, and music was available in Arabic only. After surfing from channel to channel for a while, I finally chose Radio Sawa, which plays a mixture of Arabic and American pop music. The sound of Arab music was soon mixed by Jewish snoring, as my two guests fell asleep, without waking up before we arrived in the noisy traffic of Jerusalem at 21:30.

The trip meter of the car showed 2730 km (of which 130 km had been driven today), as I parked on Mount Zion, and went strolling in the Old City in search of a hostel room. I took a room at Jaffa Gate hostel, and paid an outrageous price for one of the poorest accommodations that I have ever seen. The receptionist required all five nights to be paid in advance, and a sign on the wall said that there will be no refunds. Later on I found out why such a sign was necessary on the wall — I wanted to cancel my reservation and go somewhere else as soon as I saw my room without a window, and the showers with ice-cold water.

Not having a window in the room had one advantage, though: unlike most other rooms in the hostel, my room was not too cold. After the icy adventures in Petra, I welcomed the warmth of this windowless bunker room, and fell asleep around 23 o’clock.