Flotsam, jetsam, seaglass and shards

There's a mosaic in my future.

All around my house, in glass vases, copper boxes and bowls that once belonged to Bedouins and Buddhist monks, are bits and pieces of flotsam and jetsam from bodies of water, sidewalks and trash piles around the world, and I value these as highly as any travel souvenirs I've collected.

Someday, when I have nothing to do, I'll gather in one place these intriguing chunks of detritus, along with my scores of stones and seashells spirited from dozens of beaches, and I'll design a mosaic that gives each nugget a special spot in some big, bold picture.

Each piece brings me back to the place where I acquired it: water-worn teacup handles and porcelain dinnerware shards washed up on Lake Como's rocky shore; a hunk of marble paving stone from an old Lisbon sidewalk; pieces of painted wall tile from a junk heap beside an 18th-century Porto home undergoing renovation; black rocks with white circles in their middles -- eyeball rocks, I call them -- found on the French shore of Lake Geneva; charms that once hung from strands of Mardi Gras beads thrown from floats navigating the streets of New Orleans; shells and coral from the Red Sea; shells and salty stones from the Dead Sea; fragments of pottery and pavement from Petra and ancient Argos; cooled lava from an ancient eruption of Chile's Mount Osorno; and green, white, blue, amber and yellow seaglass from oceans and lakes around the globe.

I'm thinking my mosaic will be a map of the world.

www.LoriHein.com

Dead Sea, Red Sea: My feet in pictures

"So, if you'd gone on your Egypt trip where would you be today?" asked Linda in my yoga class.

"Let's see..." I played the itinerary through in my head. "I think we'd be on the Sinai peninsula, camping on the beach at the Red Sea."

"Wow."

It did sound exotic, even more so when I said, "I've been to the Red Sea before."

"Did you float on top of it?"

"That's the Dead Sea. I've been there, too."

"Did you float on top of that?"

"No. I was on the Jordanian side, so I was all covered up in a long skirt and a tunic."

I did dip my toes in the Dead Sea at a public picnic area that sat off the road that rims the sea. I took a picture of my feet, and long skirt, in the salty froth.

My feet figured big in the pix from my trip to Jordan. Feet at the Dead Sea, feet at the Red Sea.

My Red Sea feet, sans long skirt and tunic, are propped on a chaise on the private beach of the Radisson resort in Aqaba. I'd paid good money to be able to dispense with the long skirt and tunic while a guest at the property, so I took full advantage and sat outside in my bathing suit.

It was rather extraordinary sitting there on that beach because I could see four countries at once.

I was sitting in Jordan; to my right and slightly behind me was Eilat, Israel; to my right and slightly ahead lay the Sinai desert in Egypt; to my left sat Saudi Arabia.

At night I stood on my balcony to look again at the four countries. In the blazing haze of day, they'd all looked about the same. In the dark, they looked very different, and you could tell exactly where the borders were by the amount of electricity in use, or not.

Eilat was ablaze with lights from cafes, restaurants, discos, beachfront apartment complexes and seaside homes that marched up the hills fronting the sea. Eilat was chic, highrise heaven so its lights had altitude. Aqaba, where I sat, was the next-best illuminated, with just enough lights to keep the modest beach resort from being completely dead after dark. Saudi Arabia was bathed in intermittent, muted pink and green lights that hung on sparse, low buildings. In Egypt, there was a concentrated splash of light at Taba, a dive town, but after that, away into the Sinai, nothing but black. Had my eyesight been better perhaps I would have seen the distant glow of a Bedouin campfire.



(And, I promised to keep you posted on my trip cancellation insurance claim. I'm happy to report that Nationwide/TruTravel came through. I got my check today. I now feel comfortable recommending InsureMyTrip.com as a source for travel insurance products. Nationwide took its time, but I got my money.)

www.LoriHein.com

Madaba: Mosaics and Kleenex

Madaba, Jordan sits some 40 minutes south of Amman, the capital. I'd spent several hours sightseeing in and around Amman and found myself, at 2:30 in the afternoon, with hours of daylight and a half-tank of gas left, so I steered the rental car onto the King's Highway, a desert road that follows the meanders of a 5,000-year-old route mentioned in the book of Genesis, and headed for Madaba, "City of Mosaics."

I found the Madaba exit, drove uphill into the town and popped in on the small Church of the Apostles, where I took in its interesting mosaic floor. But I'd really come for Madaba's mosaical piece de resistance, the 6th-century tile floor map of the Holy Land that sits inside the Church of St. George. The mosaic map, which dates from the reign of the Byzantine emperor Justinian, is the oldest map of the Holy Land in existence and was discovered during construction of the simple, plain-faced 19th-century church.

The Apostles attendant told me to head back downhill to King's Highway then to circle back uphill at the busy intersection where Madaba's main street met the larger road.

Down I went and found the intersection. As in nearly all the Jordanian villages I drove through, the roadside was a place of enterprise and industry, commerce and conversation. A drive through a village center yields a pageant of people shopping, working, walking, waiting for buses, swinging book bags, digging dirt, herding sheep, tending goats, selling fruit, slicing sheet metal, fixing mufflers, driving tractors. Everyone -- merchants, schoolkids, mothers with toddlers, old men in plastic chairs smoking and rubbing strands of prayer beads -- is in the street.

I wasn't surprised, then, when I stopped at the intersection's traffic light and a gorgeous boy with chocolate eyes and teeth like pearls stuck his head and a box of tissues into my open passenger-side window and said, "Kleenex, lady?" I laughed, said thanks but no, and turned the car uphill when the light turned green. The boy and I waved as I drove up into town.

The Church of St. George, so very easy to find according to both the Apostles attendant and my guidebook, eluded me.

In retrospect, considering the artistic and archaeological wonder it held inside, I know I was looking for a building considerably more elaborate than the unassuming little church turned out to be, so I drove right by it. Three times.

After each failed circuit through Madaba, I'd end up back at the intersection with the traffic light, and each time, the beautiful, laughing boy would see me coming, wave, then stick his head inside the car when I came to a stop. Each time he tried to sell me something.

For a few passes, he stuck to Kleenex: "Hello, lady! Tissue, lady?" On the third pass, sensing a market need that he could fill -- Why, this tourist lady is looking for the mosaic map, and she can't find it, so she needs a guide (a valid conclusion under the circumstances) -- he asked if he could get in the car and help me find Karak, the walled city crowned by a massive 12th-century Crusader fortress. Karak, which rises 1,000 feet above the desert floor, loomed outside my windshield, just down the road from my Madaba intersection. It was hard to miss, so I declined the offer.

After three attempts, I found the Church of St. George and the mosaic map, a masterpiece. I joined a German tour group that crowded around the 35- by 15-foot wonder. The thousands of 1,500-year-old, still-vivid tiles formed a breathtaking cartographic view of the lands of the Bible, stretching from Jerusalem and the Dead Sea to the Nile Delta. Jerusalem was the map's focal point, and features like the city walls and Damascus Gate were disarmingly detailed and recognizable.

I left the church and drove back downhill for the last time, thinking of the glorious bits of ocher and blue and white polished stone I'd just beheld. I came one last time to the intersection and the boy with the gleaming smile. "I found the map," I told him. "Beautiful. And now, I'll go to Karak."

My friend smiled a smile nearly as big as the mosaic map, shook his head in approval, and said, "Goodbye, lady!"


For current information about Jordan visit the U.S. State Department's travel site or the Jordanian embassy's U.S. office site.

www.LoriHein.com

The Siq: the most wondrous walk in the world

Had I come halfway around the globe just to walk this magical mile, my journey would have been worthwhile.

The Siq -- the spectacular gorge that leads into Petra, a place of a lifetime hewn from pink and orange sandstone cliffs hidden inside a canyon in the Jordanian desert – is the most wondrous walk in the world.

I walked it four times – twice into Petra and twice out. I'd waited all my life to see Petra, and I wanted to savor it slowly, so I bought a two-day ticket. On my second morning, the Bedouin ticket collector at the Siq's entrance beamed when he saw me approach through the dust. "Welcome in Jordan! I remember you from yesterday. Two-day pass. Very good!"

Each of my four walks through the Siq – each of my four communions with the haunting gorge that reveals at its end the sublime al-Khazneh, the ancient Nabataeans' towering red-rock treasury -- was a profound and singular experience.

I'd dreamed of walking the Siq since I was a kid, when I discovered Petra in my grandmother's well-thumbed copies of National Geographic. I knew I would go someday.

I imagined what it would look like, be like, feel like. I would make my way slowly down the deep and twisting, 10-foot-wide chasm that leads to the city's wonders; I would touch the colored sandstone walls and run my hands along the water channels cut into the stone by ancient builders; I would hunt for niches and statues, carved by those builders into the gorge's overhanging rainbow walls, to venerate their Nabataean gods; I would marvel at ancient cobbles and cart ruts visible here and there underfoot; When horse carts captained by Bedouin drivers appeared in the narrow canyon, I would hug the orange rock wall to let them pass, and I would feel sorry for the tourists in the carts because their time in the Siq would be so much shorter than mine.

I would do this someday. And I imagined it would be exquisite and marvelous far beyond my ability to ever adequately describe.

And it was.



(Note: I originally posted this story on October 13, but Blogger and browser voodoo caused the photo to disappear and generally made a mess of the story. Some of you may still see a perfect post from the 13th, some half a post, and others nothing at all. I don't want anyone to miss the Siq, hence the re-post. )


www.LoriHein.com

Jordan: A simple act of kindness

Hatred continues to blow its bloody way through the Middle East and rain despair on millions. And that is all many people know about that part of the world.

In the current issue of The Traveler, I take you to Jordan, where, by being kind to a stranger, a young boy became the face I will always see when I think of the Middle East.

Click here to read the story.



www.LoriHein.com

Jordan mourning

Jordan’s King Abdullah has declared a national day of mourning. Most of the victims of yesterday’s hotel bombings in Amman (right) were Jordanian. Wedding guests at celebration. A three-month old baby. Terror has come to a country that has long been an oasis of peace and conciliation in a contested part of the world that's become the poster child for man's basest traits. Surrounded, penetrated and influenced by the aggression, hate and ignorant self-interest of individuals, factions and nations with stakes or claims to protect, Jordan has managed to keep taking the high road. It is a place apart. It seems to live by a simple rule, a golden one.

Jordan is the most gracious country I have ever had the privilege of visiting. If I had a dollar for every act of kindness, every gesture of hospitality, every “Welcome in Jordan” proffered me during my 1999 visit, I would be rich.

But I am rich for having met Ala’a Haddad, owner of the rental franchise where I picked up the car I’d use to cross Jordan. He served me thick coffee and became excited at my itinerary, one that would show me crenellated castles and Roman ruins, antiquities and modern marketplaces, beach resorts and ground Moses had walked. “Very good,” he said as he smiled his approval. “You are welcome in Jordan. Please do not believe what people tell you. We do not eat anybody. Everything is friendly and safe and easy to find.” Haddad gave me his cell phone number and told me to call, 24/7, if I needed anything. We talked about King Hussein, the tireless Jordanian peacemaker who'd recently died from non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I'd long admired Hussein. On the day of his funeral, I’d risen in Boston at 4 a.m to watch on TV. Haddad told me the sight of the world’s leaders gathered in tribute to the king had made him proud to be Jordanian. “You cannot know what it was like for us that day,” he said, recalling the emotion of knowing that Hussein, even in death, could bring adversaries together.

And Nadim Twal, the elegant gentleman whom I’d stopped on an Amman street to ask directions to the Safeway grocery store. “That is in the direction of my house,” said Mr. Twal, “so we will walk together.” He told me of his work in the insurance business and, at our parting, gave me his card. You are welcome at my house at any time," said Mr. Twal. "And please call if you need something.” I hadn't yet left Amman and already had phone numbers and open offers of assistance from two new friends.

And the gorgeous little boy with wide chocolate eyes and teeth like pearls who tried to sell me boxes of Kleenex every time I passed the intersection he hawked from. I was in Madaba, driving in circles trying to find the Church of St. George and its exquisite mosaic map of the 6th century world from Jerusalem to the Nile delta. As I rolled to his traffic light for the fourth time, my small friend and I both belly-laughed. He smiled brilliantly and shouted, “Hello, Lady!”

And the thin Bedouin ticket collector who manned the Siq, the magical chasm that leads to Petra, a wondrous ancient city of sculpted stone afire, and my place of a lifetime. My first day in Petra was an appetizer, and when I approached the Siq for another day, the old man beamed. “Ahhh! Two days! Good! I remember you from yesterday!”

And the bride and groom who welcomed me into the midst of their proud, joyful procession as the wedding party and guests gathered in the Amman Marriott where I was staying. Dancing and singing and clapping and smiles and laughter and tears.

And the young boy who offered me his rented plastic chair when I visited the shores of the Dead Sea. A gesture I will never forget.

And the soldier guarding the mosaic-covered Byzantine church that crowns Mt. Nebo where Moses is said to have died and been buried. As we stood on the sun-kissed summit and looked across the West Bank and into Israel as far as Jerusalem and the Sea of Galilee, this Muslim caretaker of one of Christianity's most sacred sites asked where I was from. "The U.S.," I replied, to which he exclaimed, “Ah, brothers!” When I told him Jordan was a beautiful country, he bowed slightly and said, “It is your country. You are welcome.”

And I know I would be today. May days of peace follow this day of mourning.

LoriHein.com

The Dead Sea: A day at the beach

In the October issue of Smithsonian magazine, Joshua Hammer, former Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek, reports on the slow death of the Dead Sea and the mammoth measures that must be taken by Israel and Jordan if this briny, ancient, liquid treasure is to survive. Dams and agriculture are shrinking the saline sea, and the fresh water aquifers that line its perimeter are receding into the area’s subterranean salt deposits, causing the land above to collapse into great sinkholes. Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME), an environmental group with staffers from Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, is, along with other active efforts, lobbying those countries to nominate the Dead Sea for World Heritage site status, which would mandate a long-term protection plan. FOEME is also trying to foment change in agricultural policies that are sucking the Dead Sea dry.

I first looked on the Dead Sea and its stark, blinding white shoreline soon after leaving Karak, a great walled Crusader city rising from the floor of the Jordanian desert like a hulking stone ship. One side of Karak looms over the Desert Highway, a straight, hot shot from Amman to the Red Sea resort of Aqaba. The back door of Karak empties onto a steep, winding road that leads downhill to the Dead Sea. Its cobalt water, ringed by sandstone and white-hot salt cliffs, fills your eyes and imagination shortly after leaving Karak from the rear. It is a harsh, beautiful vision.

I drove down past Jordan’s potash factories. The mineral emits a stink that takes you momentarily out of the Bible, Koran or Torah and puts you very much in the 21st century. The Dead Sea separates Jordan and Israel, and both countries keep watch on this water border. Just out of Karak, at a military post set high above the distant shoreline, I stopped for a mandatory vehicle and document inspection, one of three I’d check in at before picking up the road back to Amman on the sea’s northeast corner. A soldier looked at my passport, asked me where I was going (“Back to Amman. I’ve just been in Petra and Aqaba."), and, with the characteristic Jordanian courtesy I’d been shown since touching down in this gracious country, proffered a “Welcome to Jordan” and waved me through.

When I reached the sea, the hot road hugged the coast and delivered dramatic views of sandstone bluffs caked with salt or sculpted with eight- to 10-foot salt piles. Sodom and Gomorrah are said to be near here, and I swear I saw Lot’s wife a dozen times looking down at me from frozen positions atop various cliffs. These salt pillars looked, for all the world, like women, headscarves drawn over their mouths and thin dresses wind-whipped across their bodies.

I grew up with the Bible, and I felt I was driving through it. Only the smell of potash, the military watchtowers along both shores, the zippy rental I was driving, and the small white pickups parked alongside Bedouin tents signaled the 21st century. Otherwise, it was 2,000 years ago, and I was in it.

The earth was dust and sand, the seashore, sandy mud. I drove slowly past villages of low, wattle and daub houses built under the shade of great, spreading trees that must have provided oasis in Jesus’s time; children in gray and brown clothing running and playing barefoot in the dirt; people in caftans and headscarves squatting at the edge of the road, selling eggplants and tomatoes; sparse but fruitful groves of date palms, the tree of the desert, which needs little water to yield bounty; scraggly farm plots; men riding donkeys and moving them forward by slapping their rumps with sticks; encampments of black goat-hair Bedouin tents, here two tents, there 20; women cooking over open fires; men tending sheep and herding goats, the animals bleating and braying. All of this set along the shores of the salt-encrusted sea.

I wanted to float in the Dead Sea, Earth's most buoyant water body. Years ago, I’d seen a photo of a man reading a newspaper while drifting around in its brine, and I thought it looked like a fun thing to do. I didn’t have a newspaper, but I had a guidebook. I was hoping to get someone on shore to photograph me reading while floating. I looked for a beach where I could stop and have this long anticipated experience. I passed some fancy hotels, which looked severe and unwelcoming (and which, according to Hammer’s Smithsonian article, could be in jeopardy of being swallowed by sinkholes), then came upon a small sign at the end of a mud parking lot: “Dead Sea Rest House.”

Cars and trucks were parked willy-nilly all over the unkempt lot, so I knew nobody was going to kick me out because I didn’t have a reservation. I parked and walked down to the water across a beach that was chocolate-colored, hard-packed mud sprinkled with intermittent patches of sand. Along the mud beach, groups of Jordanians were enjoying their day at the shore.

I didn’t float in the Dead Sea. It wouldn’t have been proper. While I’d worn my swimsuit under my clothes in anticipation of my Dead Sea float, this was not a private beach resort. The only people in bathing suits were the tourists across the sea in Israel. I was in a public recreation area in Muslim Jordan, and respect for the culture precluded any degree of stripdown.

The Jordanian women sat at the shore in long pants, long sleeves and headscarves, and so would I. The travel clothes I’d driven in became my bathing costume (bathing being a relative term) – ankle length skirt, long-sleeved tunic, and scarf covering a reasonable amount of my hair. I did take my shoes off and sink my feet in the salty foam that tickled the shore so I could say I’d been in the Dead Sea. I collected bronze-gold rocks, oily to the touch, and licked them. Salty. I saved them as souvenirs.

Facilities were scant at the Dead Sea Rest House. There were a few Coke, tea and coffee sellers, and several entrepreneurs offered camel rides. Families sat in white plastic chairs and looked out at the water. Only three young boys splashed in the frothy, buoyant sea. Standing there in my tunic, I envied them their fun. Sometimes, you have to be content being a spectator. I crouched in the mud, watching and laughing.

A young boy who’d been sitting with his family enjoying the scene approached me and offered me a white plastic chair. I knew the chairs were rentals and that his family had paid for every chair they occupied. I also knew enough about Jordan’s millennia-old culture of hospitality to graciously accept. I sat for a few minutes, then returned the chair to the boy who’d given it up to me. I thanked his family:"Shukran." They nodded and smiled warmly.

I turned and walked back through the muddy sand to my car. As I drove to Amman, 40 minutes away, I was filled with good feelings. A boy, a plastic chair, and a gesture that will last my lifetime.

The Dead Sea is in danger of dying. The hospitality of the Jordanians who live near its shores is alive and well.

www.LoriHein.com

Pope in a snowdome

I first met them in a chasm no wider than four feet. It was my second day inside the glorious, ancient city of Petra, the archaeological wonder that was the reason for my trip to Jordan (related posts: An egg in Baghdad; Mt Nebo). I was on the thin, rocky path leading up to the High Place of Sacrifice when I came upon the spry, elderly couple clambering among the boulders.

We three stood in the narrow defile, taking up most of it, and gazed up at the Lion Fountain, a leonine head sculpted into live stone, the open mouth a faucet for the ingenious, life-giving water duct and channel system the ancient Nabateans carved into this desert world.

We talked for a bit. They were from England’s Lake District. When I said I was from Boston, they said, “Ahhh! We thought we detected that proper new English accent!”

I’d see these intrepid seniors all day, full of vim, smiling, exploring every inch of Petra on their own steam. I hoped I’d be like them when I came to be their age.

I saw them for the last time at a souvenir stall run by Bedouins who live around Petra. I was considering a tar-sealed sand bottle containing a carefully crafted scene of palms and camels, sun and desert layered in pink, black, white, olive and ochre sand. I hesitated, thinking the bottle was a bit pricey and too heavy to carry back to Amman and, eventually, home. I know better. When you see something in your travels that intrigues you, buy it, on the spot. It will be gone if you wait, and you’ll sigh and think about it for a long time if you come home without it.

I needed a push, or pushes, and there they came. “These really are quite interesting,” said Mrs. Lake District. “They are,” I said. “A year from now, when Petra’s a beautiful memory, this sand bottle would look lovely in my living room. If I don’t buy it, I’ll probably think, ‘I should have bought that unusual sand bottle from Petra...’”

“How true!” exclaimed the Lake Districts, almost in unison. “When you see something that catches your eye, you should get it!" And they told me about their pope in a snowglobe.

“We were in Rome, and we found a snowdome with a picture of the pope inside. You shake it, and the snow flies. We didn’t know what we’d do with it, but we liked it, so we bought it. We use it as a centerpiece. We put it on the table at dinner parties."

Not only had they just convinced me to take the gorgeous sand bottle back to Boston, but they had me imagining fun, funky dinner parties in England’s rolling Lake District. I laughed. “Who needs flowers on the table when you can have the pope in a snowdome?”

“Exactly!” chimed the Lake Districts. I bought my sand bottle, and they bought one, as well.

The world has a new pope, but somewhere in northwest England, John Paul II smiles from a snowglobe atop the Lake Districts’ dining table at people gathered to enjoy food, drink, friendship and the adventure that is life.

www.LoriHein.com

An egg in Baghdad revisited

I wrote the following post on October 28th and titled it "An egg in Baghdad: The price of UN sanctions." I'm posting it again. The price of the egg, it seems, was driven not only by UN sanctions, but by the UN itself and the rotten eggs that ran and benefited from the oil-for-food program. The original post:

If armed conflict is part of the current fabric of a place, I avoid that place, but conflict sometimes oozes over, around and through borders and colors a journey, nevertheless. In March 1999, I made a surgical strike into Jordan, seizing a period of calm between storms to visit Petra, long at the top of my goals list. I will take you to that exquisite rock city in a separate post.I’d planned to go to Jordan three months earlier, in December, but Saddam Hussein got in the way. He was a bad actor on a good day, and in December, there were no good days.

A week before my scheduled departure, the U.S. and Britain began bombing Iraq, and Jordanians joined others in the Arab world in protest. King Hussein, one of the world’s most tireless peacemakers, allowed anti-U.S. demonstrations, provided they were orderly. I kept tabs on State Department travel warnings, loitered in chat rooms at Arabia Online and daily read The Jordan Times Web edition, trying to gauge the mood. Would I be safe? My husband, Mike, and I stayed glued to CNN, watching Christiane Amanpour’s live broadcasts from Baghdad, flak popping behind her, the city’s mosques glowing an eerie neon green. One evening, Amanpour signed off, and CNN cut to Amman, the streets alive with men massed in protest. I looked at Mike. “I’m postponing.” His relief was palpable. I called British Air and rebooked for March.

I landed in Amman one day after the official 40 days of mourning for King Hussein, who’d died from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in February. On the day of his funeral, I’d risen in Boston at 4 am to watch on television, and I cried some. I’d respected this man, a voice of reason and conciliation, for many years. I felt I’d lost a friend and knew the world had lost a man of peace. Ala’a Haddad, owner of the Amman franchise where I picked up my rental car, told me the sight of 40 world leaders gathered to pay final tribute to the king made him proud to be Jordanian. “You cannot know what it was like for us that day,” he said, recalling the feeling of knowing that Hussein, even in death, could make adversaries discover common ground. For a day, Greeks mourned with Turks, Israelis with Syrians, Americans with Iraqis.

As I traveled Jordan and got to know its powerful desert landscape and gracious people, U.S. and British planes dropped bombs daily over Iraq, Jordan’s next-door neighbor, and chased Iraqi planes from the northern and southern no-fly zones. American pilots were busy. Five days after I landed in Jordan, American B-2s began bombing Yugoslavia. NATO had had enough of Slobodan Milosevic. Every night, I’d watch the bombing campaign on television. Every day, I’d sightsee, in my long skirt, long-sleeved tunic, dark socks, flat shoes and headscarf. While America was not alone in pummeling Kosovo and pieces of Serbia, or in bombing Iraq and enforcing economic sanctions, much of the world looked at America and saw arrogance and aggression. I felt a heightened need to blend in. To see Jordan without being seen.

I drove across Jordan to Aqaba on the Red Sea. I stood in the sun on my hotel room balcony and took in four countries with a single sweep of my eyes. The beachfront before me was Jordan. To the left, Saudi Arabia met the sea. On my right, the windows of high-rises in Eilat, Israel caught sunlight and bounced it back into Jordan. Across the Gulf of Aqaba, the mountains of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula sat in a shroud of desert haze.

I turned back into my room and picked up an envelope someone had slipped under my door. In a letter dated March 25, Consul Charles Heffernan of the U.S. Embassy in Amman wrote, “To all U.S. citizens in Jordan: Following the commencement of Nato Military Operations on March 24 against Serbia-Montenegro, there is the possibility for acts of retaliation by Serbians and Serbian sympathizers against Americans and American interests worldwide. The department of state urges U.S. Citizens traveling or residing abroad to review their security practices and remain alert to the changing situation...” A second letter dated March 17 urged traveling Americans to “maintain a low profile, vary routes and times for all required travel, and treat mail from unfamiliar sources with suspicion” because of “Usama bin Laden, the Dar Es Salaam and Nairobi embassy terrorist bombings, the Iraq situation...”

I spent my last night in Jordan at the Alia Gateway Hotel near the airport. The TV in my room offered only a mullah reading from the Koran, so I hung out in the lobby, watching a large, bubbly group of Indonesian hajis enroute to Mecca. The Haj was in full swing, and Amman is a main transit point for flights to Riyadh and Jeddah. While all the men wore white robes, the women’s robes and head coverings spanned the color spectrum. Their pilgrimage brought them such joy that they seemed lit from the inside out.

In the lobby bar, I met an Iraqi expatriate on his way home from Baghdad to Newcastle, England, where he’d lived for 40 years. This was his first trip back to Iraq. He’d gone to see how he could help his relatives, suffering under UN sanctions. Sanctions prohibited direct flights to Iraq, so he’d flown from Newcastle to Amsterdam to Amman, then taken a dusty, 12-hour bus ride to Baghdad. Now, he was making the trip in reverse. He was exhausted, and profoundly sad.“The West has no idea how the Iraqi citizenry is suffering,” he said. He would not call Saddam Hussein by name. “Him. I won’t say the name. He and his cronies are not suffering at all, but the rest of Baghdad is reduced to begging. One of my relatives rents a wing of his house. Now, the monthly rent for that apartment buys one egg.”

The morning moon was still high in the indigo desert sky when I checked in for my flight to London. The London-Amman flight ten days earlier had taken us directly over eastern Europe and the Balkans. The world had changed since then. When all the passengers were seated, the pilot announced over the loudspeaker, “Rest assured that we will be staying well clear of the Yugoslavian conflict...”

Travel can show you the beautiful and the brutal, sometimes in the same journey.

"May Peace Prevail on Earth"

I don't know what group or organization plants these pillars around the globe, but I've seen them at many tourist sites. This Thanksgiving, my family gathered, and my dad led the prayer before we sat to dinner. He thanked God for what we had and then asked for peace. His prayer was simple, like the prayer on this pillar, which stands atop Mt. Nebo in Jordan. Of all the places I've seen this pillar, nowhere have I been more affected by its simple plea than when I stood on this spot where Moses first looked upon the Promised Land. God would not let him enter, and he died on Mt. Nebo.

I looked down from Mt. Nebo at a landscape that has been and continues to be the source of a mighty amount of the world's strife. Peace prevailing on earth is contingent upon it prevailing in the Middle East, where this pillar stands, at a Christian site in aMuslim land, overlooking the West Bank, its towns sprinkled below in the haze, and Jerusalem and the Dead Sea shimmering in Israel. All the weight of centuries of conflict over religion, politics and oil gripped me in a powerful chokehold as I stood atop this holy mountain and looked down on perhaps the most contested stretch of soil and sand on the planet.

A Jordanian guard at the mosaic-filled Byzantine church that crowns the mountaintop asked me where I was from. When I said the US, he said, "Ah! Brothers!." I told him Jordan was a beautiful country, and he said, "It is your country. You are welcome." I stood next to a small group of visitors, and we contemplated, silently, the places spread below us. It was late afternoon, and the Dead Sea was like a brilliant silvery-yellow mirror stretching to the horizon. Jerusalem's towers were just visible in the haze. A map pointed to and identified the towns and settlements peppered below: Hebron, Bethlehem, Nablus, Jericho, Ramallah, Nazareth. The tip of Lake Tiberias -- the Sea of Galilee -- was lit by the muted rays of the waning sun.

I stood here before there was a security wall running through parts of this landscape. Perhaps a reader will tell me whether you see the wall when you stand atop Mt. Nebo today. To see it would, in my mind, add a powerful layer of sadness to what is already one of the most simultaneously moving and troubling views I've ever contemplated in my travels. A vista that encompasses the best and the worst of what human beings have wrought through the ages.

Rose-red rays lit the prayer pillar. In four languages, it asked that peace prevail on earth. That can happen, but only if the language of peace becomes our lingua franca.

An egg in Baghdad: The price of UN sanctions

If armed conflict is part of the current fabric of a place, I avoid that place, but conflict sometimes oozes over, around and through borders and colors a journey, nevertheless. In March 1999, I made a surgical strike into Jordan, seizing a period of calm between storms to visit Petra, long at the top of my goals list. I will take you to that exquisite rock city in a separate post.

I’d planned to go to Jordan three months earlier, in December, but Saddam Hussein got in the way. He was a bad actor on a good day, and in December, there were no good days. A week before my scheduled departure, the U.S. and Britain began bombing Iraq, and Jordanians joined others in the Arab world in protest. King Hussein, one of the world’s most tireless peacemakers, allowed anti-U.S. demonstrations, provided they were orderly. I kept tabs on State Department travel warnings, loitered in chat rooms at Arabia Online and daily read The Jordan Times Web edition, trying to gauge the mood. Would I be safe? My husband, Mike, and I stayed glued to CNN, watching Christiane Amanpour’s live broadcasts from Baghdad, flak popping behind her, the city’s mosques glowing an eerie neon green. One evening, Amanpour signed off, and CNN cut to Amman, the streets alive with men massed in protest. I looked at Mike. “I’m postponing.” His relief was palpable. I called British Air and rebooked for March.

I landed in Amman one day after the official 40 days of mourning for King Hussein, who’d died from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in February. On the day of his funeral, I’d risen in Boston at 4 am to watch on television, and I cried some. I’d respected this man, a voice of reason and conciliation, for many years. I felt I’d lost a friend and knew the world had lost a man of peace. Ala’a Haddad, owner of the Amman franchise where I picked up my rental car, told me the sight of 40 world leaders gathered to pay final tribute to the king made him proud to be Jordanian. “You cannot know what it was like for us that day,” he said, recalling the feeling of knowing that Hussein, even in death, could make adversaries discover common ground. For a day, Greeks mourned with Turks, Israelis with Syrians, Americans with Iraqis.

As I traveled Jordan and got to know its powerful desert landscape and gracious people, U.S. and British planes dropped bombs daily over Iraq, Jordan’s next-door neighbor, and chased Iraqi planes from the northern and southern no-fly zones. American pilots were busy. Five days after I landed in Jordan, American B-2s began bombing Yugoslavia. NATO had had enough of Slobodan Milosevic. Every night, I’d watch the bombing campaign on television. Every day, I’d sightsee, in my long skirt, long-sleeved tunic, dark socks, flat shoes and headscarf. While America was not alone in pummeling Kosovo and pieces of Serbia, or in bombing Iraq and enforcing economic sanctions, much of the world looked at America and saw arrogance and aggression. I felt a heightened need to blend in. To see Jordan without being seen.

I drove across Jordan to Aqaba on the Red Sea. I stood in the sun on my hotel room balcony and took in four countries with a single sweep of my eyes. The beachfront before me was Jordan. To the left, Saudi Arabia met the sea. On my right, the windows of high-rises in Eilat, Israel caught sunlight and bounced it back into Jordan. Across the Gulf of Aqaba, the mountains of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula sat in a shroud of desert haze.

I turned back into my room and picked up an envelope someone had slipped under my door. In a letter dated March 25, Consul Charles Heffernan of the U.S. Embassy in Amman wrote, “To all U.S. citizens in Jordan: Following the commencement of Nato Military Operations on March 24 against Serbia-Montenegro, there is the possibility for acts of retaliation by Serbians and Serbian sympathizers against Americans and American interests worldwide. The department of state urges U.S. Citizens traveling or residing abroad to review their security practices and remain alert to the changing situation...” A second letter dated March 17 urged traveling Americans to “maintain a low profile, vary routes and times for all required travel, and treat mail from unfamiliar sources with suspicion” because of “Usama bin Laden, the Dar Es Salaam and Nairobi embassy terrorist bombings, the Iraq situation...”

I spent my last night in Jordan at the Alia Gateway Hotel near the airport. The TV in my room offered only a mullah reading from the Koran, so I hung out in the lobby, watching a large, bubbly group of Indonesian hajis enroute to Mecca. The Haj was in full swing, and Amman is a main transit point for flights to Riyadh and Jeddah. While all the men wore white robes, the women’s robes and head coverings spanned the color spectrum. Their pilgrimage brought them such joy that they seemed lit from the inside out.

In the lobby bar, I met an Iraqi expatriate on his way home from Baghdad to Newcastle, England, where he’d lived for 40 years. This was his first trip back to Iraq. He’d gone to see how he could help his relatives, suffering under UN sanctions. Sanctions prohibited direct flights to Iraq, so he’d flown from Newcastle to Amsterdam to Amman, then taken a dusty, 12-hour bus ride to Baghdad. Now, he was making the trip in reverse. He was exhausted, and profoundly sad.

“The West has no idea how the Iraqi citizenry is suffering,” he said. He would not call Saddam Hussein by name. “Him. I won’t say the name. He and his cronies are not suffering at all, but the rest of Baghdad is reduced to begging. One of my relatives rents a wing of his house. Now, the monthly rent for that apartment buys one egg.”

The morning moon was still high in the indigo desert sky when I checked in for my flight to London. The London-Amman flight ten days earlier had taken us directly over eastern Europe and the Balkans. The world had changed since then. When all the passengers were seated, the pilot announced over the loudspeaker, “Rest assured that we will be staying well clear of the Yugoslavian conflict...”

Travel can show you the beautiful and the brutal, sometimes in the same journey.


To read excerpts from Lori's "Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America," visit www.LoriHein.com