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:: Extreme Measures
August 13, 2000
Extreme Measures
Israel and Jordan
At Tel-Aviv's Ben-Gurion airport, I passed through what I thought was immigration only to have a young man wearing a white shirt and blue jeans, take my passport.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
I pointed to the carousel. "To pick up my bags."
The man flipped through my passport while scores of young men and women questioned other passengers.
"Are you alone?"
"Yes."
"You are meeting no one here?"
"A tour company representative."
He kept flipping. "Tell me about Egypt."
"Oh, in 1998," I said emphasizing the year.
"Why were you in Egypt?"
"I was a tourist."
"In a group?"
"Yes."
"Do you bring anything for anyone in Israel?"
"No."
"And Jordan?" I had a Jordan visa for the cruise, which I hadn't yet used.
"Do you have friends in Israel, Jordan or Egypt?"
"No."
"Do you understand why I am asking you these questions?"
I nodded. He asked for my itinerary. Then, in Hebrew he consulted his colleagues while flipping through the blue pages in my passport and pointing to the special security sticker I received in Rome. Finally extending my passport to me he said, "You may go. I apologize for the delay."
As I waited for my luggage, the tour representative approached me, shook my hand and said, "Shalom. Welcome to Israel."
When visiting the Holy Land, forget the conventional travel guides; bring the Bible, the Torah and the Quran. I'm not intimately familiar with any of the three, but even with my limited knowledge of religious history, it was clear I was in the middle of something big.
I spent three days zipping past landmarks in places like Nazareth, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Jericho. Considering that the Bible mentions Jerusalem 667 times, I'd only scratched the surface.
In Israel and the Palestine territories, temples and churches identify significant religious events at the locations where the devout believe the events occurred. In Nazareth, the grotto where Gabriel announced the coming of Jesus to Mary, is a tiny cave in the floor of the Church of the Annunciation; in Jerusalem, the location where Christians believe Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected, is now the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; in Bethlehem, marking the spot where Christian tradition says Jesus was born, is a silver star embedded in the floor of the Church of the Nativity; and the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest Islamic site after Mecca and Medina, covers the Temple Mount where Muslims believe Mohammed rose to heaven.
Church after temple after mosque. Admittedly, I was disappointed. I'm not sure what I expected - thunder bolts and lightening? A burning bush? I would have settled for an intuitive revelation. But as it turned out, I was moved at the Western Wall.
The Temple Mount, within the walls of Jerusalem's old city, is also the site where the first and second Jewish temples were built and then destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. What remains of the second temple - the Western or Wailing Wall - is Judaism's holiest shrine.
I didn't feel compelled to scrape my way past the throngs to touch the wall but contented myself further back at a railing to witness something I'd heard much about but had never seen - a bar mitzvah or coming-of-age ceremony for thirty-year old boys.
I watched as generations of men raised the Torah in sync with their own melodic voices, and women onlookers cheered and threw flowers. With assistance, the celebrant read from ornate scrolls and then his male elders lavished him with kisses.
Also moving was the story of Masada, an isolated mountain in the Jordan Valley where 976 Jewish men, women and children chose suicide over Roman slavery.
Religious persecution. War. Slavery. Welcome breaks from this onslaught of somber history were a dip in the River Jordan and mud bathing at, and floating in, the Dead Sea.
I asked my Jerusalem-based tour representative exactly what I should expect and prepare for when crossing the Israeli-Jordanian border at the Allenby Bridge. He said, "After you cross the bridge, you take a shuttle bus and that's it."
No, that's not it.
You pass through three Israeli checkpoints then arrive at border control. Your Israeli driver disappears and porters take your luggage without saying where to collect it as they point toward a building. Once inside, you pay a hefty 122 Shekels or thirty-four transit fee. Then you present your passport and departure card to Israel immigration. They make certain you have a Jordan visa because you can't purchase one at this particular border. You're waved outside to identify your luggage in a holding pen and then it is loaded onto a bus. You ride through the first Jordan checkpoint where passports are inspected and then collected. Before disembarking at the second checkpoint at border control, you pay one and a half Jordan Dinar or one dollar for the bus ride. If you're lucky, your guide is holding up a piece of paper with your name on it. If you're me, you search for the sign, don't see it, then silently plot how to return to Israel for an early flight to Rome. After a minute of panic, you see a man smoking a cigarette unfurl a piece of paper with a familiar name. With everyone else, you crowd up against the glass in front of the Jordan police who process the passports and then a breezy forty-five minutes later, return yours.
And that is how you cross from Israel to Jordan via the Allenby Bridge.
On the King's Highway, the world's oldest continuously used communication route referenced in Genesis, we drove to Jerash, an ancient city of the Decapolis - a confederation of ten Roman cities dating back to the 1st century B.C.
From Amman, Jordan's capital, we continued south to Madaba, the site of a Greek orthodox church housing a 6th century mosaic map from the Byzantine period, depicting for pilgrims, the holy places in Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Jerusalem.
From Madaba, we visited the Crusader castle at Kerak and Mt. Nebo in Pisgah, where Moses is presumed to have died and been buried.
My visit to the ancient rose-red city of Petra alone was worth the trip to Jordan. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Petra is the legacy of the Nabataeans, an industrious Arab people who settled in South Jordan over 2,000 years ago and who dominated the trade routes of ancient Arabia.
Much of Petra's appeal comes from its spectacular setting deep inside a narrow desert gorge. Through the chasm or siq that ripped through the rock in a prehistoric earthquake, I threaded my way between the cliff walls as I passed ancient inscriptions and chambers carved into the whorls of sandstone.
Petra's most famous monument is the Treasury that appears at the end of the siq and in the final sequence of the film, "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." The Treasury is only one of hundreds of tombs, temples and facades in ancient Petra, including the imposing Monastery, worth the 40-minute sun-baked rock climb.
Crossing the border back into Israel was more arduous than the first trip. The distance across the King Hussein/Allenby Bridge is less than a mile. Two hours after immigration processed my passport at the bridge - following bomb inspection of the shuttle bus, fine-tooth comb luggage x-ray and my personal, private fifteen-minute bag inspection and questioning - I gained re-entry to Israel.
Twenty four hours later I completed the drill one last time. At the airport, the young female security officer had dozens of questions. In those forty-five minutes, the story of my four-month journey unfolded: The cruise from hell; the change of gears in Tahiti; the first half of my itinerary secured in a suitcase graciously escorted back to the States with a new friend; the U.S. plane ticket waiting for me in Rome; the dead laptop.
It was a miracle she let me through. If I hadn't lived it, I wouldn't have believed it.
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