chris willett

Monday, July 31, 2006

A Grand Day Out

This was the plan as devised by Dan (the plan man) and fine tuned by me. Get up early, drive out of Eilat to the border crossing with Jordan and get there before anyone else. Go across the border and find transport to Petra.
At the border my first objective- to get there first was partially compromised by a large group of Dutch tourists amongst whom I found myself. Had my Dutch been better I may have coinsidered infiltration- they had a guide, a bus and everything but I went instead to great pains not to be dragged along with them by the Israeli border staff. The border procedure was a series of windows which, a bit like McDonalds drive in had several which are never used and follow no logical sequence. At the window where I was to exchange shekels for Jordanian Dinar I was advised I would need JD5 for a taxi to Aquabar where for JD40 I could get a taxi to Petra- this would be doubled for a return trip ie JD100 plus JD21 to get into Petra. The down side to this is that the JD is not like the usual Mickey Mouse money but not far off the value of the Pound. After about an hour I had cleared the Israeli side, walked the 100 metres of no man's land watched by bored border guards who looked like they had spent their whole lives waiting to see an 'international incident'. On the Jordanian side they were over friendly with the undertone- 'why are you on holiday in Israel visiting Jordan and not the other way round?' Finally in Jordan with another stamp in my Passport I met Osama and his colleagues at the taxi rank. Negotiations for a return to Petra began at JD80, I offered JD50 and after a few minutes of haggling straight out of Life Of Brian we settled on JD60 return to the border- so that was JD50 saved straight away. I climbed into Osama's luxury vehicle and headed off- only to stop 2 miles down the road and be transferred to another car. This was slightly less luxurious and I was suspicious of a blag but it turned out that my new driver Neve was late for work and Osama (Neve's boss) was filling the hole.

So, we headed off down the airport road. At the end we had he choice of heading to Petra (about 2 1/2 hours away) or to Aquaba-5 minutes. Neve said "I show you Aquaba-10 JD" and we headed off-this was definitely a blag and there was no getting out of in. I salvaged something by saying "OK but you buy the teas!" With this we screeched to a halt and sat there for about 5 minutes as the traffic whistled by- then as if by magic a man appeared from no-where at my window with 2 cups of sweet black tea, which Neve dutifully paid for and we were off again. It was a whistelstop tour of the city as he pointed out the interesting , and not so interesting stuff. Clearly a local scrote he waved to all the Policemen he saw and they nodded back as if you say, 'I know you are taking the piss so I'll get you when you don't have a westerner in your taxi'. as we passed the bay he said "sweem?" and did a breastroke motion, I assumed he was asking if I swam and I said yes to keep it simple. One place he hadn't been swimming lately was his bath tub! We left the town and hit the open road to Petra.

It was quickly apparent that Neve had the afliction of a heavy right foot and no comprehension of advanced driving techniques like looking to see if anythingis coming before overtaking. Luckily I am a calm passenger and was totally knackered after my poor nights sleep and let him carry on.

Then it happened, I am usually security aware and the hairs on the back of my neck are well tuned to pick up danger signals. Here I was in Jordan with a criminal taxi driver and a a pocket full of money- then it happened and my worst fears were realised. He slowly reached down into a storage pocket in the centre console, and I couldn't see inside. His hand fished for something and as it came out the lid popped open and he was clutching it. Not a club- worse, not a knife, worse still, not a gun- I could deal with that-no....it was an Arab music cassette and to top it all I could see it was his only one!!! He chucked it into the stereo and turned it up so it could be heard across the valley in Israel and began to whistle along with the wailing snake charmer style pipes.

After half an hour he said "you coffee"- his English was very poor but better than my Arabic. We pulled into a roadside cafe and pulled up a couple of chairs. While the coffee was brewing we were given some dodgy out of date cakes- see photo! You can also see the cuts on my leg from the Dead sea incident.

We headed off again, Neve and I were 'bonding' which is definitely a good knack to have when relying on taxi drivers in a strange country. I made him laugh and he wanted to chat- if only we spoke a common language.

"You harve wif?" "No I'm not married", "you harve gilfrend?" I reply "no." "Hi harve three, and nine keeds"- he then whips out snazziest mobile phone I have ever seen and dials a number, cradling the phone in his hand out in front of me so I can hear. A sleepy woman comes onto the speaker, Neve (still driving at about 150kph) cooes "hi larve you, hi larve you", the response in dozey Arabic sounds like 'what the hell are you calling me at his time of day for, you twat', he gives it one more "hi larve you" and hangs up. Next comes another voice, more awake but equally suprised "hi larve you, hi larve you", she giggles says something more amiable than the last one and hangs up. Still to prove the point he dials a third time and seems by the background noise to have got through to the local primary school. A fraught woman comes on "hi larve you, hi larve you" she tuts and next we are speaking to a 3 year old girl "hi larve you, hi larve you" (overtaking on blind bend), she giggles too and says "I love you, I love you" in good English before hanging up- "OK Neve, I believe you have 3 girlfriends- now can we go back to the right side of the road?"

To be continued...........

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