What I thought would be a quick confirmation of the partial collapse and then a surgery schedule/release turned into a week-long stay in the hospital and a lot of time in bed with IV catheters, chest tubes, stitches, spinal epiderals, and catheter-catheters (yes, that kind). I’d never been under general anesthetic before, so that was kind of fun to discover that yes, it’s just like how they say it is – one second I’m lying on a a hard table in a gown, and the next I’m staring up a bunch of different faces and wondering why there are so many wires running into me. It really was as instantaneous as a switch being flipped.

It's definitely an upgrade in drama from the previous hospital stay, where all I had on me was a breath mask!

After another 3 days in the hospital recuperating and slowly learning how to walk again while being on intense painkillers, I was released back home on Friday and have been trying to keep on the mend. The last time I had intensive surgery was when I was 7 or so when surgeons merely had to pull some glass out of my chest (punching a window is never a good idea) and those were relatively shallow cuts. This time, my entire left lung had to been deflated and blown back up over the course of a few hours. Every time I try to take a deep breath I feel like my ribs are in a vice, and there is a 5″ square patch of skin on my chest that’s completely numb because the chest tube incision required that a bunch of nerves in that area had to be severed that led to that area. It might take 2-3 months for those to grow back, even after the scars themselves have closed over (hopefully!)

The pneumothorax occurred just a few days after one of the most unusual Thanksgiving dinners I’ve ever been part of – and I’m counting roasting a turkey in a 50 gallon oil drum buried in the Jordanian desert sand in that one too! My father has been sent to Antarctica – specifically the South Pole – for work on the Ice Cube Project. He’ll be doing some drilling there to plant the optical sensors that he helped build during his normal work here in Wisconsin. He left just a week before Thanksgiving, so we had an internet-powered teleconference with him while he was in layover in New Zealand. He could see and hear us from our laptop on our side of the ocean, but he could only type back to us (his laptop wasn’t equipped for transmitting anything but text, unfortunately). So he watched us as the 7 of us at the table carried on with our usual boistrous conversation at the table, and I glanced at the screen occasionally and transmitted dad’s questions and comments to the rest of the table so that they could ask him new ones.

As dad is normally the main chef for Thanksgiving, it was amusing watching mom holding the laptop’s webcam up to the turkey so that dad could inspect its moisture levels, and demurring the state of the drippings left in the roaster to a screen (especially when she was just reading what he was saying and not telling the rest of us, so it looked like she was just having an argument with herself).

Since then, dad has since arrived at the South Pole and presumably he’s set to work! I’ve created a posting account for him here on this website (there might as well be a 2nd Heise on HeiseHeise.com, right?) but I see there aren’t any drafts in the admin section of the website yet, unfortunately. He’s a great writer (where do you think I get it from?) so I hope that if he has time, he’ll share more of his thoughts on the incredibly unique experience of a 5-week driller down at the South Pole. To be honest, I’m jealous – it’s an incredible opportunity that such a tiny percentage of humans will ever experience, and he didn’t even need to sign up for a year-long contract down there in the frozen wasteland – just a little over a month!

Our trip started off with my usual trip from Madison on the bus, and we took the front two seats. The difference was this time I discovered that our driver was the uncle of one of my best friends back when I went to school in Janesville almost two decades ago, so we began chatting. Then he continued chatting with me as I started to take a nap, and Christine muttered to me in Arabic “mumkin hatha kursi mish kwayis” – maybe this wasn’t such a good seat. However, I enjoy bantering and learned that Illinois drivers are terrible, and also that the Texas Roadhouse is a darn good steakhouse.

Out of the two modes of transportation for today, though, Spirit Airlines was definitely the worse of the two. We weren’t overly perterbed when we saw that our flight from O’Hare to Fort Lauderdale had been bumped back an hour (apparently because it had been struck by lightning and it needed to be “safety checked” or something silly and inconsequential like that) but we became less happy when Spirit told us they were booting us from our second flight from Florida to Costa Rica. I knew Spirit was budget, but they basically just screwed up the travel plans for at least 2 dozen people (it was a long line to get the answer to my question, with only one computer and no screen with times on it at the gate) because the second Spirit airline wouldn’t wait 15 minutes for our flight. Then, the discounts that they offered us for a hotel for the night were approaching $80 (and that’s with the so-called “discount code” they provided me). I called their hotline and left them a formal complaint, but what could we do?

I regaled my companion with the story of when my family spent the night sleeping in O’Hare airport after returning from Colorado, but she wasn’t going for it – a hotel was needed. Thanks to some quick smartphone searching, we found a Rodeway hotel for $60, only 1.5 miles away from the airport and with a free shuttle. Of course, as it was now 11 at night, the shuttle was no longer running and we had to pony up for a $22, 10 minute taxi ride by a disgruntled guy with a Carribean accent. Jordan pricing, this was not. And Spirit will never get our business again, that’s for sure – an extra $80 because of this ridiculous delay means it’s not so budget anymore. Hopefully the post title will show up in some search engines for other people thinking they’re getting a “bargain.”

It all seemed worth it, though, after getting checked in at the hotel and confirming our shuttle times for the next morning, with a bottle of wine out by the pool (“it’s closed now,” said our hostess, “but if you’re quiet no one is going to care”) and watching a few shooting stars coming in from the Perseid shower.

Hopefully tomorrow will go better.

I have no way of posting pictures from my actual camera now (and I shan’t insult people by using cameraphone pictures) but I’ll have to add them all into my posts when I get back to America.

For anyone who’s read my blog for awhile, my Iraqi translator in Jordan, Wamidh, will be a familiar name. He was successfully relocated to America with his wife Hanan in early 2011 and my parents and I were looking forward to taking a trip to meet them – and to enjoy the warmer “southern” weather after surviving yet another Wisconsin winter. In my case, after so many months spent in the always-balmy Jordan, this winter seemed particularly unfriendly – although I’m sure it was just me.

Between visits, I took my first steps onto a tiny segment of the famous Appalachian Trail - sometime I'll do the whole thing!

I can only hope that everyone in the world can someday get a chance to experience real Arab hospitality. Although neither of my parents and certainly myself are strangers to it, it was humbling to once again be treated with such absolute kindness and friendliness that you can only get from Eastern cultures. We had brought some Amish Friendship Bread along too, and after we explained what “Amish” meant to the two Iraqis, they were overjoyed to be able to add it to their piles of sweets that they already had been planning to serve us.

Eating can become an all-day affair when confronted with an Arab banquet meal like the ones Hanan had prepared for us. A trip from our hotel to their apartment on our first night, which had been intended just for some coffee, turned into a 4 hour gathering with a beaming Hanan bringing us four or five platters of sweets and drinks out of the kitchen for us. My parents and I were happy to see that they were settling in well in their new country, and Hanan’s English was coming along quite well. In fact, I had to mentally stop myself from speaking in Arabic to the two of them several times throughout our visits, reminding myself that I was no longer a stranger on their side of the world, but it was the other way around and I needed to be helping them gain more and more experience and immersion in the peculiar American way of speaking.

Wamidh had to chuckle as he told us of his experiences understanding the “southern” accent. Throughout his work with EGT and his hundreds of hours working with me as my translator, he’d become used to a midwestern dialect, or an east coast accent like what some of our other coworkers had. The drawl or twang of Virginians was like starting over again, and he admitted having to ask several people to repeat themselves when he first arrived.

I was interested to notice that Hanan no longer wore her hijab hair covering anymore, something which I had been telling my parents before we arrived I was sure wasn’t going to change. When I commented on it, and being able to see her hair, she told me with quiet determination that she wanted Americans to feel comfortable around her and want to talk with her, and learn more about her. Someday I might wear the hijab again, she told me. But first, I want others to learn about the “real Hanan.” She felt – probably with good reason – that other women in the neighborhood might be shy or unlikely to engage her in conversation if she was dressed in more stereotypical Muslim women garb, and she was willing and determined to not let that happen by being proactive with a large personal and religious choice like this.

For our final dinner with our friends, Hanan pulled out all the stops and made a meal so large that it took us almost 7 straight ours of eating and chatting to work our way through all the courses she had made. She sat across the table from my mother and jokingly wagged her finger at all of us if we ever paused for longer than a minute in our quest to reach the bottom of our bowls. “Eat…you need to be eating more!” she would cluck at us. We asked Wamidh how on earth he ever managed to ever leave the table while married to such a dynamic chef. “I don’t give her a chance to refill my plate when I’m finished!” he exclaimed with a serene smile. “I just grab my plate and run to put it in the sink before she can!” By the time we left, filled with food and delicious Turkish coffee, my mother commented that we could probably be rolled up the interstate back to Wisconsin like little barrels. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so full in my life.

Goal: to eat our way to the bottom of all those bowls and pans!

Besides our visits, we had time for a few other things while in Roanoke. The city had a thriving little farmer’s market on Saturday morning, similar in style to Madison’s, and we bought some local pottery, baked goods, and heard some local lore. I can’t speak for my parents, but like Wamidh, I found myself wishing that I had a small box that would generate small subtitles to help me understand what the old Virginian farmers were saying.

We drove up to Roanoke’s Mill Mountain to see the local treasure, a huge metal frame star that was built several decades ago to commemorate the city’s nickname, the “Star City of the South.” The views of the surrounding mountains north of the city were impressive on the clear Sunday morning, and we could see little plumes of stone being thrown high into the air many miles away, in what must have been some West Virginian coal mines. There’s a website that utilizes a small camera that they mounted on the star; it takes a little low-res snapshot every 15 seconds of the observation deck below.

In order to prove that we were indeed there! (I'm looking at the starcam website on my phone, as my parents watch me)

I think our favorite non-Arab part of our trip was visiting the Mill Mountain Zoo, another attraction only a few hundred meters away from the star. The little zoo was affordably priced and had a good selection of animals to view, and a well-trained staff of young keepers that all looked around college age and had a friendly relationship with their four-legged charges, many of whom would literally do a happy dance of joy at the sight of the staff’s green polo shirts. Although it would have been easy to see the entire park from end to end in less than hour, we stayed closer to 3, chatting with the keepers and watching the animals get fed.

A mere couple weeks later, I joined the Wisconsin 4-H Extension office as a chaperone on my first visit to NASA’s Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. I have dozens of fond memories from my own childhood in 4-H. I’ve done everything from small county-level trips to Chicago and around northern Wisconsin, to state-authorized trips to Washington D.C. and New York. As far as I know, the Space Camp trip must have been added sometime after I had already graduated from the organization, otherwise I surely would have gone.

Although my only other chaperoning experience was several years ago for the 4-H show choir in Milwaukee, I enjoyed it and thought a shorter, but much more distant trip might be a lot of fun. Interestingly enough, several other chaperones had even been chaperones on my own childhood trips, which they enjoyed pointing out to my young charges.

My group, “Casper” – so named after the Apollo 14 command module – was led by a big friendly guy from Florida named Mark, or “Ox” as he was known by the Space Camp group. We had a fun three days wandering around the museums and exhibits of the Space Camp grounds, building our own model rockets – something which might be completely new and exciting to other groups of kids, but I was proud when in response to Ox’s question of ‘has anyone built a model rocket before?’ all but one hand went up into the air. 4-Her’s are smart kids!

One of the first things we did was get divided into our “mission roles” – probably one of the most famous parts of Space Camp, made so by the 1986 movie of the same name. Although we didn’t get blasted up into space by an insane anthropomorphic robot, we were divided into three teams – one for Mission Control, one for the space station, and one for the shuttle control team. Although my team of mission control kids didn’t get the cool orange (and poorly-fitting) jumpsuits like the other two groups did, we did get to stare at computer screens a lot! Almost like real life for one person on their team…

There weren't enough kids for a full team, so Ox had me playing both the Mission Scientist and the Propulsion Officer at the same time: having two scripts to have to pay close attention to was tough!

Besides the full size exhibits of historical rockets and engines, there were the rides, which of course I think the kids might have enjoyed even more. Everyone had heard of the moon jump, which simulates the 1/6th gravity conditions of the moon, and the space shot, and the G-Force, but then there was also the Multi Axis Spinner, which was created solely to screw with astronauts as kind of an engineer’s prank at NASA.

Okay, fine, its original purpose was to help train Apollo astronauts what to do in case their command modules started to uncontrollably spin about during the re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. Since those old-style command modules only had their incredibly heat resistive layers on one side, and required precise angular placement, astronauts in one of these uncontrolled spins would have had only minutes to figure out how to right themselves again. We were dealing with a “modified” one, obviously – an actual trainer would have also had a control stick in front of me, and I would have been placed into it with the purpose of seeing how long it took me to stop the rotations. We were told that Apollo astronauts were put into this thing for hours at a time to make sure they were completely immune to sickness caused by the violent movements. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

I was very pleased with how well behaved both the small group of kids in my Casper group were, and the boys in our large, barracks-style sleeping room both were. Although I never worried about not enjoying the trip and my time as a chaperone, I came in expecting to have to be shushing kids all the time, especially when it was supposed to be sleeping time (the Space Camp administrators and Ox enforced strict rules for all attendees; kids were sent to bed at 9:30 and roused at 6:30 or so, without exception) but I was pleased to be wrong. Either the kids were just really well behaved, or exhausted each night, or they were secretly using electronic games under their sleeping bags – a problem that didn’t exist back when when I went to 4-H camp in the Wisconsin Dells area! (Game Boys existed, but they certainly didn’t have any sort of backlight on them).

Team Casper, posing in front of the Apollo 14 "Casper" command module

I had a lot of fun on both trips, and I can’t wait to see both Wamidh and Hanan and Space Camp again sometime soon, I hope!

Photo Credit: Scott Nelson for The New York Times

It’s strange, seeing Egypt again from this new angle. I was only there for three weeks, but after being in Jordan for far longer and being surrounded by Egyptian music, books, and movies all the time, I definitely feel like there is a strange new wind in the air. Egyptians I knew in Jordan, like my friend Hussein at the bike shop and Imad the Whitman janitor, all had a kind of weary, dry, long suffering amusement at the fate of their country in the corrupt hands of Mubarak. I asked them if people would fight and rise up against the dictators, like the military rose up against the Egyptian royalty almost half a century ago. They didn’t think so. A cynical laugh. “It is what it is, how God wills it. No one is going to change anything.” That what was they said now. This wind is indeed strange, because now there is a determination and nationalism I’ve personally never been alive to see. A new heart is beating in the Egyptian, and indeed all Arab, peoples.

Jordan fired their cabinet and prime minister – again. Abdullah did this around Christmas 2009 as well, I seem to recall. I don’t think he’s in nearly as much trouble as certain other Arab governments; with the exception of food and fuel prices, things are not desperate like they were in Egypt. They definitely need to revitalize their job market for their young, angry youth – so that they don’t end up like Egypt in another decade. But I think Jordan will be fine. Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and even Saudia might have more problems, though. And of course, there’s no telling what’s going to happen between Egypt and Israel now, when all the smoke clears – say what you will about Mubarak (and people will say quite a lot) but it took quite the strongman to keep the massive, sullen population of Egypt and the massive, trigger-happy military of Israel from causing a lot of problems for each other. I hope this El-Baradei guy, or whomever takes charge in the new order when Mubarak is finally ousted, is ready to do some serious maneuvering. I hope he won’t bow to Israel’s own corrupt dictatorship, either, of course – but I hope he has his doctorate in tact and smooth talking, too.

Only times is going to tell how this is going to play out, and how far the crash of thrown stones is going to reverberate through my favorite part of the extra-American world, but one thing’s for sure – the cat’s out of the bag and it’s never going to go back in again.

“Haneen lil-Wattun” means nostalgia for the nation. Besides a fitting turn of phrase for my feelings towards my homeland and my second, “adopted” country of Jordan, it’s also a famous song by the Egyptian opera singer, Um Kulthoum. Everyone over the age of 40 in the Arab world knows it instinctively and after I learned to use the phrase to describe my feeling towards both countries, I received many appreciative smiles, chuckles, and embraces.

I’m pleased to report that the usage of the Latvian airline “Air Baltic” was a success. For $530, I felt like a thief in the night compared to the typical one-way price of 900-1100 dollars. Although I had to jump flights between Amman, to Latvia, to Denmark, to Chicago over the course of 24 hours of traveling, it was worth it. The long leg was with SAS – Scandinavian Airlines, and they were anything but a budget airline. I’m still not entirely sure how my ridiculously cheap ticket translated to to flying with them.

After being dropped off at the airport by a colleague near ten at night, I had an uneventful wait in the terminal before being queried by a worried looking young Arab man with unusually brown-colored hair. He didn’t speak any English, but he had heard me talking to the Egyptians in the airport’s McDonalds and knew that I could speak passable Arabic. He asked me about how to find out about connecting flights from Latvia; would there be signs telling him where to go? Surprised, I explained to him that airports all had screens with flight times and gates. He revealed that he’d never flown before, or left Jordan – but he was on his way to Munich to meet his German mother, who had divorced his Jordanian father soon after birth (Jordanian and typical Arab laws always give the father control of the children, if he wants it. Apparently he did). He flipped through a crisp, brand-new EU German passport with some reverent awe as he spoke. The kid had never even seen his mother before, or been out-of-country, and didn’t speak either English or German. I gave him advice for the security checkpoints, before and after our flight together to Latvia, and held him back when he attempted to peel off into the “Milan” flight security gate. He could recognize the letter “M” at least. I told him to stick to searching for his gate number, instead of for words! As I left him to search for my own gate, he pulled me into a heartfelt hug and thanked me repeatedly while invoking typical Islamic blessings, and of course several last cheek kisses, which I realized even then would probably be the last Arabic cheek kisses I’d be receiving for a long time.

In the gate for my flight to Copenhagen, I waited patiently for the last four hours with my book. I had already printed out a guide to speaking Latvian (and after hearing it spoken by the flight attendants, I discovered that it sounded like a Beatles record played backwards and at a higher pitch) but as it had been six in the morning when I arrived, I figured that many of Riga city’s famous “beer gardens” wouldn’t be open yet, and anyway, I was leery about attempting to navigate an unknown bus system in Eastern Europe.

I had no seatmate on the first flight from Amman, which was almost empty, but the flight from Riga to Copenhagen was packed, and I was squeezed into a corner next to a tall and unsmiling Russian man, who didn’t chuckle when I joked with him that I thought I’d be the tallest one on the flight. It was only an hour, and I slept for most of it. I could see fjords under me when the cloud cover briefly burst, and sparkling seas with maybe even some ice floating in it.

On the 10 hour flight with SAS to Chicago, I chatted with my seatmates, a Swedish mother and daughter who were visiting the daughter’s brother in law in California. The two of them were a pair, bantering away with me in flutey, musical English, and then in lilting Swedish tones (which, come to think of it, also sounded like a backwards record). The mother had never been to the USA before, and was excitedly gesturing at the map when we passed from Canada to the Michigan yoo-pee. The daughter was a businesswoman who had spent a lot of time in the States and spoke perfect English. She smiled at her mother’s glee, and the older woman turned to me and said proudly, “We will go to Napa Valley. Yes. Vino!”

I made it through Chicago’s security checks in record time and my single bag was the first one off the baggage carousel. No one cared that I had brought a bag of cardamom seeds with me (although I had checked it on my immigration form) so I was able to get Wamidh and Hanan’s gift through customs without a problem. They’ve tasted great with American coffee, and I think about Jordan every time I grind up the bitter little black seeds into a cup.

Grass everywhere, as I left the terminal to the bus depot. A kindly Latino couple loaned me their cell phone so I could call my family to let them know I’d arrived, but then I went and sat in the well-manicured grass near the door for the half an hour before the bus arrived. If I hadn’t seen so much of it in Germany back in May, I probably would have suffered Vegetation Overload and gone into shock. When I think about it, I realize it’s been over two years since I’ve seen America’s greenery – I’ve only come back in the late fall or winter before when the Midwest’s green season is already over. I’m smart enough to know my body’s capabilities and not attempt such foolishness, but I wanted to turn cartwheels in the lawn.

The weeks have rushed by. My father’s birthday, assisting with my mother’s class reunion, bike riding along the lake, seeing friends again, my old high school’s Homecoming game, eating at a pig roast (!!) and even trying a bit of casino gambling – I can’t believe that September’s almost over now. Colleagues and friends in Jordan email me and Skype-me, asking how things are and of course to finalize last transitional work details over. My body gets cold easily in weather I’ve never been cold in before; I thought my hands were going to freeze off at the football game. It will take some time for me to readjust back to Midwestern temperatures – although the Celsius scale, like the rest of the Metric system, I refuse to give up; I drive at 100 km/h and I like it that way!

Life returns to old patterns and sadly, the human brain forgets the nuances of life in a foreign culture. I wish I could freeze my years in Jordan in time that I could revisit them perfectly whenever I wished, from the smell of Wusam’s Turkish coffee at the EGT, the sight from my roof of the ghostly glowing green minarets on the horizon of the Amman skyline, flickering in florescent song, and the feel of Wadi Rum’s sands between my feet as I’m running down a dune, ready to leap out and take brief flight. I could walk up the street past the alley cats and olive trees up to Abu Jbara and get a falafel sandwich, with the extra spice on the top, for a few coins, and a hot mint tea or an ice cold ‘bebsi.’ The unique tastes of the sauces of falafel, schwarma or even mensaf make my stomach growl with remembered pleasure.

But I think it will be the sounds that stick in my mind the longest – like of my coworkers laughing and talking in the Iraqi dialect at EGT, or Dozan wa Awtar singing in Jordan’s churches. From the tiny old transistor radios down in the Belad playing old Um Kulthoum songs like “Haneen lil-Wattun” to the massive megaphones on the mosques calling out every day, “Allahu Akbar“…God is Great. The hills of Amman echo the joyous call, over and over, imprinting it on my consciousness, the flickering green mosque lights on the hills each a unified beacon in this common prayer.

Allahu Akbar. God is Great. In sha’Allah raah yerjia’ li-beladi muta-binna al-Urdan. God willing I will return to my adopted country of Jordan.

In sha’Allah. God willing.

Under the 2nd largest waterfall, courtesy of Nelle's waterproof camera

It’s odd, but before I came to Jordan I had no knowledge of the beautiful semi-tropical canyons and verdant palm expanses of the Dead Sea basin that are known as ‘wadis.’ A wadi, which is Arabic for ‘valley’ can be used for naming the famous Wadi Rum that is one of the prime tourist camping sites, but is used more frequently for the numerous warm rivers and springs that slowly meander their way through the sandstone crags of the mountains that descend towards the lowest point on Earth.

After the fun three-day camping experience that we had in Wadi Hasa several months ago, I’ve been anxious to get back out there again to see more of Jordan’s wadis before departing. Most of my friends that were present for that hike have since departed back to America, but Nelle and Jeff were happy to indulge my entreaties for a hike, and two weekends ago Nelle selected Wadi Himara from her dog-eared and water-smudged wadi guidebook.

Wadi Himara

Wadi Himara means “Valley of the female donkey,” but its claim to fame doesn’t tend towards braying asses but instead to the massive 80 meter waterfall that crowns the end of the journey. I couldn’t find any pictures of the waterfall online prior to the hike, but Nelle assured us that friends of hers had hiked it last year. With the addition of Liam, an English friend of a choir friend, our band of four was complete, and we started off early on Sunday morning from Amman in Nelle’s rented car.

Like my visit to the neighboring Wadi Zarqa’ Ma’in in late June with my Arab friends, we had some difficulty determining which one of the yawning, unmarked canyon entrances that strew the coastline of the shimmering Dead Sea was the one we wanted. Thankfully we had Nelle’s guidance and descriptions to assist us, and we even found a fairly wide shoulder to park the car on before leaping over the bridge wall and tumbling into the scrub brush of the wadi below us. Thick concrete shield pillars greeted us only a few meters in, with entire trees splintered and crushed into their gray teeth – a testament to the sheer awesome force of the floods these wadis see in the rainy springtime month.

However, there was nothing to fear now – a few minutes later and we found the pathetic trickle that the river is reduced to in the blazing summer months. No danger of being swept away like we had worried about in Hasa in April. Just like that wadi, we were greeted by nervously skittering little crabs, waving their claws at us angrily before they would scurry away under boulders. Small waterfalls from little streams joined our meager river as we walked eastward away from the sea.

The waterfalls got progressively larger as we continued, including one large enough to have possibly stymied our progress if not for some other kind hiker’s installation of a nylon rope. That’s not to say that we couldn’t have reached our end destination, as Nelle proved – she climbed up over a nearby mountain instead and reached the other side with only an extra five minutes expended.

She almost got up to the top, too!

And there it was, in front of us! Maybe. Although huge and impressive, it didn’t look like it was 80 meters tall, or else my knowledge of the metric system was badly flawed. We snacked on apricots, dried sweet dates, and water in the shadow of the fall as Nelle informed us that this one was only the first of two, and the other one was supposed to be larger – although none of us could imagine a taller waterfall than this in Jordan! To reach it would be much harder: we’d need to backtrack and find a path through the noontime sun, up the side of wadi, and rejoin the river on the higher plateaus above this waterfall.

From my panoramio collection (click to check it out)

The next phase of the hike was just as tiring as Nelle had predicted. Some distance back before the rope-guided smaller waterfall behind us, we found an area where the wadi’s walls sloped enough to be climbable, and slowly and cautiously scaled the 100 meters to the top across gravel and scree that threatened to toss us into the rocks below with every step. We drank from our water bottles greedily as the sun burned directly above us, but at the summit we could see much further east than before – towards a green, shadowed and gigantic rock wall still a kilometer distant. If we squinted, we could see a narrow white line flinging itself from the heights and vanishing behind some lower cliffs. It was the waterfall, we knew – and if we could see it from here, it had to be gigantic.

See that tiny shaded valley in the upper left corner? And the even tinier white line if you click to maximize? That's it!

It took another half an hour to cross the baked and shattered plateau and get back into the cooler and shaded streams of the wadi. Interestingly, I noted that most of the rocks around this area were of a pitted and lightweight volcanic variety, and recalled reading that millennia ago, there had been an active volcano in lower Jordan – secular scholars claim that it was responsible for the destruction of the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah of Biblical times, the ruins of which are supposed to be only a few kilometers from where we were now standing. Even more telling were the black rocks that jutted impudently from the regular sandstone. These rocks had the lines of magma flows, and the “popped bubble” surfaces that said they had once been subject to a heat so intense that the stones themselves had bubbled in the heat, only to have those thin stone membranes popped by the elements in the proceeding centuries.

Popped-bubble volcanic rocks trapped in the wadi, which might have been first carved by a volcano, before the water...

Back inside the wadi itself, it was exciting to see the distant waterfall growing ever-closer as we ascended and descended the cliffs, watching it appear and disappear behind the trees and stones. The warm water was clogged with green algae in every side pool, much more than what we had encountered in Hasa. It was obvious that the strength of the sun in these months was the cause. The strong-smelling glop forced us to tread carefully as we climbed trees and rock walls through the wadi; none of us relished the thought of falling into one of those stinking pits.

If the smell was strong, it was matched by the beauty and tranquility of the tallest waterfall in Jordan when we pushed through the last of the oleander bushes to reach the iridescent blue pool at its base. We could barely see the mouth of the fall from here at its base, and the August-thinned gush of water came down and struck the rocks at the base with loud and echoing force. From what I could see of the clearness of the pool before Jeff and Liam rushed across it to reach the fall, it was filled with a grayish, vertical-growing species of algae that hung motionless in the water and looked at first like miniature towers jutting from the bottom. As soon as the silent water at the shore was disturbed by our feet, though, a thick cloud of blue-gray silt and muck rose from the bottom like we were walking through the Nile delta in flood season.

al-Waterfall Akbaaaar!!

On the far side of the pool, under the waterfall itself, Jeff and Liam had already started inspecting a strange formation that had slowly grown out of centuries of mineral and sand-filled falling water. From a distance it looked like a huge pockmarked piece of pumice, but upon closer inspection, its slick surface was made out of loosely-compressed sand particles that were slowly forming stalactites from the cliff wall towards the pool below. We debated eating the rest of our lunch in the cool depths of the cave that this formation had created, but the small size and the unceasing dripping water forced us to backtrack a few dozen meters back into the wadi to relax under the shade of a huge and ancient palm tree surrounded by oleanders.

Jeff and Liam inside the sandy, silty inner chamber below the fall

On the way out, we traced the water to the top of that first waterfall we had snacked under, which no looked quite tiny in comparison. Because of some ledges blocking our full line of sight, we couldn’t see all the way down to where we had stood a few hours earlier, but Jeff’s GPS told us that it was definitely the correct spot. I could see a new-looking rappelling hook bolted into the stone next to us, and recalled that the wadi book that Nelle had brought with us mentioned that a more adventurous mode of travel than we had used was available for the wadi. As we hiked away from it, the gap in the mountain where it went over the cliff disappeared from us like an optical illusion.

Can you spot the top of the second largest waterfall in Jordan?

Now the tricky part was getting out. There were some scary moments when climbing out over the cliffs again, namely because it seemed that we were climbing across the disintegrating face of a sand castle. It wasn’t sandstone, just chunks of gravel held together with sand. I could see already that parts of this cliff had fallen to the wadi below, and was happy that there were no apparent hiker bones sticking out of those clumped piles of rubble.

Liam and I naively decided not to follow the wadi guide from this point on, and take a second wadi offshoot back to the car, instead of climbing back down the slippery, shale-covered mountain like we had come up. As we discovered only five minutes later when we followed the dried stream bed to a series of massive waterfalls, there was a reason why the book didn’t mention another way out besides rappelling or climbing over the mountain. However, now we were alone and Jeff and Nelle were no longer to be found. I grinned wryly over at Liam. “Remember, it’s impossible to get lost in a wadi hike – there are only two directions to go.” With that in mind, we climbed up onto the mountain plateau again and headed due west towards the car along the top, instead of dropping back down again beyond the waterfalls.

We actually ended up making it back to the car 50 minutes before Nelle and Jeff, who had left their mobiles behind in the car. I (correctly) figured that Nelle was worried about us, and was hanging back in the foothills waiting for us, even though we had long since passed them by on the easy path along the summit, before dropping down next to the bridge by the highway. With our water exhausted and the car keys with Nelle, Liam and I slumped in the slowly elongating shadow of the rental car and swapped theories on Arabic dialects and accents, and then comparing varieties of British and American accents.

The car was, of course, blisteringly hot when we climbed back inside, but thankfully we were only 10 minutes away from the Dead Sea mini-mart near the hotels that could sell us bottles of ice cold water. I explained apologetically to the tired and thirsty looking shopkeeper why we looked so odd, and we all made sure to duck down low in the car to slurp our precious water, as there was another hour still to go before sunset and the fast breaking.

Wadi ibn Hammad

We had so much fun that we made rapid plans to repeat the hiking experience a week later, this time to the distant Wadi Ibn Hammad in South Jordan, only a little ways off from Karak and its Crusader castle. Although we could have chosen to take one of the city buses to Wadi Himara thanks to its popular location on a major highway, I elected to rent another car for this week, using the company that Nelle recommended to me. After a delicious Ramadan Iftaar feast on Saturday night (the name means ‘opening’ or the breaking of the fast) at the home of my translator, Wamidh, and his wife, I was ready to take everyone south for another hike.

Joanna, returned from summer vacation in America, took Liam’s place in my rented car. Whitman’s first day of school was on Saturday as well, and I was there to check the computers and greet everyone before picking up the car and visiting Wamidh. Together, the four of us sped southward along the familiar Desert Highway, leading towards the familiar borders of Karak. Nelle with her book and memory from a previous visit, guided me from there down poorly marked country roads that led to poor concrete-block homes, then farms, then nothing but steeply descending mountain passes.

The rented Hyundai bumped over the drainage ditch for a lithe little stream at the bottom of the wadi, and I parked next to a squat little concrete building advertising bathrooms and tea. As we unloaded our bags and lunch from the trunk, a slender and dark man with a neatly trimmed goatee emerged from the building’s shadows. Introducing himself as Aqubda, he was obviously unprepared for our Arabic rendition as to why we shouldn’t have to pay 5 JD per person for entry into the Wadi. We’d all lived here for years, the famous Karak castle was only 1 JD, it was Ramadan, the month of Generosity – we laid it all out on him (or at least Nelle and I did). Aqubda gestured helplessly at the entrance tickets in his hand, marked ‘five dinar’ on one side, and ‘واحد دينار’ (one dinar) on the other. He knew we could all read it. He relented eventually and gave us the discounted admission of all of us for 11 JD. From what I’m told, Wadi Mujib – the most famous of Jordan’s water-filled wadis – is charging 16 JD per foreigner these days, so expats living in Jordan should enjoy the remaining unspoiled and free wadis while they can. Ah Jordan – I’m going to miss never paying full price for anything!

Just beyond the building, a flight of crumbling concrete steps led us down into the wadi bed itself, and after a minutes and curves in the deep canyon, the building was lost from view behind curtains of ferns, palm trees, and stones. Ibn Hammad is called by Nelle – and several guidebooks and websites – the “most beautiful” wadi in Jordan, and we were about to find out why.

Just a moment after stepping into the wadi, and Jeff is already dancing in the water

Only a few minutes in, I was agreeing with Nelle’s assertion that this tropical wadi had to be one of the most beautiful in the country. She smiled and said that we hadn’t even seen the amazing part yet. Thanks to the long car ride, it was already one in the afternoon and we stopped for lunch by the river once we were safely out of offending-range from building. Already, the wadi walls had crept up around us to five or six meters to shadow us, and a large boulder in the creek provided a helpful back rest. As we were eating, I examined the dripping moss and ferns coating the walls, probably never touched by direct sunlight and growing mightily thanks to water oozing out of the stones themselves. I believe the entire area must be honeycombed with hot springs and wells, much more than what we could see in the river next to us. The volume of water rushing past was far greater than anything we had seen in Himara last week.

Lunchtime in Ibn Hammad

Not far along the easy path downstream (the small stones and climbs were nothing compared to what we had encountered in Wadi Hasa), we passed into a strange, shaded area and I felt water striking my face. The chance of rain in August was unlikely, so I gazed upwards to see a pockmarked, mineral-encrusted stone ledge extended above us, in such a way that it almost formed an arch from one bank of the canyon to the other. Warm, salty water was streaming gently from somewhere within the monolith, cascading down rough stalactites and ferns to create an unceasing drizzle onto the river below. Nelle still smiled secretively as the other three of us commented on the spectacular sight – there had to be something somehow more lovely further down.

A few minutes more led us to the “tunnel,” a dark crease in the rock of rare golden pillars sunbeams and for a hundred meters, mineral shelves like the early solitary one ruled like grizzled sultans, towering above our heads. The palm trees growing out of the walls above us had soggy bark stained black from years of water exposure, and the air became moist and humid in a way I’ve never before experienced in Jordan. The walls were painted creamy red from quietly burbling jets of water, spitting water rich in iron and thermophilic bacteria which painted sunsets on the stones before mixing and vanishing into the tumult. Everywhere, water dripped onto us from the rocks above, and sometimes in particularly bright cracks in this moist underworld I could catch glimpses of the roots and lower extremities of dusty dry trees growing on the wadi banks 10 meters above our heads.

The four of us posing in front of the shadowed cleft into the amazing tropical tunnel

The roaring in the distance was magnified by this shaped tunnel we journeyed through, but finally we found ourselves on the edge of a small but energetic waterfall, where the colors changed from reds to greens of all hues, encrusting layers of minerals onto the sandstone. I scratched at one with a fingernail, breaking of millimeter-thick layer of this green shellac to expose the damp sand underneath. Above us, mingled with the throaty voice of the waterfall, I could hear faint squeaks and saw dim shadows moving in caves of the shelves – a bat colony, although I never saw one exit.

In my distraction, the other three had already slowly lowered themselves over the rocky edge of the 2.5 meter fall and were waiting for me. I tossed my bag with my camera down to Jeff, and thus unencumbered by weight and electronics, flung myself over the waterfall edge instead, landing in the waist-deep pit carved out by the water’s patient knife. The others were already ahead, playing with a cold sprinkle coming from one of the shelves, laughing and dodging as they tried to catch the cool drops on their faces.

Now THAT's using your face!

In another five minutes, the wadi began to widen again and brighten, and we emerged from the humid tunnel back into the regular wadi. Glancing at my watch, I couldn’t believe we’d only been in that incredible place for 20 minutes from end to end! Squinting into the new sunlight, we continued along a few last bends in the canyon before we exited the deep wadi, finding ourselves on a wide delta with the river, now small-looking compared to this openness, continuing on through the underbrush of oleanders and bamboo.

It had only been two hours since we started our journey, and Nelle told us that when she had come last year, they’d turned back soon after this point to head back up the trail. However, Walkingjordan.com had told me that there was a waterfall worth seeing another kilometer downstream, so with my encouragement, we continued, sticking close to the high left wall’s shade. It wasn’t long afterward that we came across almost a dozen thick black pipes snaking their way over the high wall and coming down to drink greedily from the stream. The Bedouin farmers who had presumably brought them in had rigged up ingenious wire and rope systems to hold them in place, and it had apparently worked because some of the pipes looked positively ancient, faded to almost white and caked over with years of seasonable algae grime. Regardless of the pipe’s age, each one of them was punctured in many places, sending gouts and streamers dancing into the air like a child’s sprinkler toy. All around us they hissed and gurgled, sounding for all the world like real snakes instead of lookalikes, and finally around one corner their bulks vanished over the hill again and we were left alone with the river again.

Pipe snakes winding through the lower wadi

We weren’t entirely alone, unfortunately. Jeff suddenly gave a shout of surprise, and as we crowded around him, he hurriedly yanked off his shoe and sock, taking with them a writhing gray segmented worm that he told us had apparently bit him a moment earlier. Sure enough, a small red mark was rising up from his ankle, and we all anxiously checked our own feet, ankles, and calves for unwanted passengers. I horrified my companions by describing some of my mother’s animal patients; dogs that have had parasites gnaw pockets under the fur and skin to create an abscess-cocoon. It definitely wasn’t a leech, but a parasitic worm that could burrow into your skin was much more probable – and worrisome. Leeches sounded great by comparison; I mean, they couldn’t be that bad if they had been used by doctors for centuries!

It might be small, but those little suckers are mean

After another half hour of walking – now avoiding the water a little bit more, after Jeff’s worm removal – we came to the waterfall, set among huge bleached white stones that were too large to climb down anywhere but a dozen meters beyond the waterfall, requiring us to double back to reach the falls. While not even in the same league as the two behemoths we had seen in Himara last week, the volume of water was many times greater. Like inside the tropical tunnel earlier in the day, the rocks around us created and echoing chamber that made the roar of the falls almost deafening. We took turns braving a short and slippery climb to a rock outcropping inside the waterfall, listening to our voices broken and refracted by the tons of water crashing around us so that it sounded like we were speaking through an oscillating fan. It was easy to leave the perch: a quick slip forward and the water rocketed me out of the ledge on the soaked algae to land with a semi-painful splash a good four meters away. I winced, got up, and felt a sudden sharp pain in my ankle. For one agonized moment I thought it was broken, then glanced down and grimly pulled off the gray worm that was tightly attached to my skin.

It was time to head back out and back home. After being thoroughly and relaxingly pounded by the crashing waterfall to our hearts’ content, we quickly ventured back across the pipes, the wide delta, and back into the wadi and the tunnel. The sun had begun to set by this time, and the wadi was pleasantly cool and the colors were muted by the coming darkness. After reaching the other end of the tunnel, Jeff motioned back to us that men were coming down the path. Nelle and Joanna fretted a little bit about the fact that they were wearing somewhat revealing clothing – we didn’t expect to see any Arabs here in Ramadan – but surprisingly enough, the dark skinned group had a woman. Then we saw why – the last man in the group was wearing a yarmulke skullcap on his head. It was a Jewish travel group! More and more, it was obvious to me why the Fidel Castro lookalike in Wadi Hasa had casually asked me if we were Israelis – they love to come over to this side of the border and hike. Nelle’s travel book is written by an Israeli, in fact.

Back at the parking lot, the now-shirtless Aqubda was waiting for us with a smile and a pot of sugary black tea. You’re not fasting for Ramadan? I asked him, and he gave me a look like I was a little slow and said “in this heat? Do you think I want to die out here?” He explained that he and a fellow Karaki partner took 4-day/night shifts out here to guard the place. He liked the work, but it was boring – especially in Ramadan. He was very happy to chat with us for fifteen minutes! As the five us sat drinking our tea around a beat up card table at the edge of the wadi, a vanload of young men pulled up. Aqubda told us his friends had come from Karak to have iftaar with him – even though technically there was nothing to ‘break’ in his case!

The cool night air on the drive back to Amman was aided only slightly by the old car’s air conditioning, and we were all still so energized and excited from the trip that no one napped (not even me, the driver!) and we just chatted about friends and family back in America. I still had the car for another day, until mid-afternoon, so I suggested that if anyone wanted to join me for a last trip to the Dead Sea, we should do that tomorrow morning.

———

That was almost a week ago now, and my skin has still not recovered from the drubbing it received from the sun. I’m sitting at Whitman now, putting the finishing touches on this post, and whenever I shift or shuffle in my chair in front of this lab computer I’m running tests on, I feel like my skin is crackling like seared bacon on a grill. And now I’ve gone and made myself hungry. It’s tough to get these blog posts out in time when you don’t have internet at home anymore – it’s been gone for almost a month now – but Wajih told me yesterday that he’ll let me borrow his 3G cell modem USB device until I return to America in a week.

Jeff and I floating along. Those shoes I'm wearing, like my back, were totally destroyed from the excursion

I'm standing on the remains of the south-western guard tower, with the walls of the High Court behind me

Both of the trips were hastily planned – in fact, I had forgotten about Karak Castle for at least a year until a friend from New Zealand that I met in Nazareth last month, and then again in Amman several weeks later, mentioned that he had visited it. Hearing stories about his casual trips around the area, without even knowing either Semitic language, made me remember that I could certainly navigate Jordan’s cheap and plentiful bus system, especially to a relatively large city like Karak.

What I didn’t count on was how long I’d spend waiting for buses! The combination of it being early, being the Friday holy day, and Ramadan fasting having started on the 10^th, meant that I almost spent as much time waiting for buses to leave, as sight-seeing! Notice that I say waiting to leave, as opposed to arrive. Not for the first time, I’ve realized that the reason why a two hour, 90-km journey from Amman to Karak costs less than $2.50 is because they will simply refuse to leave the bus stop if they’re not at 95% capacity – at least! When I pay $50 for a one-way ticket from Beloit to Chicago O’Hare, I’m paying for all those empty seats, too. Money is one thing that most bus-riding Jordanians do not have a lot of…but time to burn, waiting in these dark, musty buses, is plentiful.

I arrived at Karak at 9:30 AM, having left my home at 7. My neighbor Marwan warned me to get to the bus early, because there might not be a second one ‘til the afternoon! He was almost certainly correct – I shudder in sympathy to think of the poor souls who arrived at the station mere moments after we left at 8:15 – the driver estimated nonchalantly to me that between empty and departure, he’d been waiting for passengers for almost three hours.

It amuses me to think that the first and only previous time I’d been in Karak was over two and a half months ago, when our band of eight foreigners passed through briefly on our way to Wadi Hasa. I remember drowsily wondering where the famous castle was in the quiet city, and then getting distracted by something else. We stopped at the same station, and the driver pointed up…and up…to where worn stones palely shimmered in the morning light. The castle had been directly above my head some 150 meters, had I bothered to look up! Download this Google Earth KMZ file to see Karak from my perspective.

I strolled leisurely up the quiet hill, listening to the sound of sheep calling to each other in the valleys surrounding the city. The call to prayer had been hours ago, and the next one would be in another few hours. During these sleepy times when no smoking, eating, or drinking were allowed, many Muslims stay indoors as much as possible, parked in front of fans and trying to keep as much moisture and calories within. I saw some laborers building a shed in the shade of a taller apartment, looking like it was about to topple off of the edge of the hill, and caught the slightly nasal-sounding accent of Egyptian slang. It seems that nothing keeps them from working, Ramadan or not!

The admission was only a single dinar, the same as what my guidebook from 2006 told me. The ticket seller informed me that in his twenty years of working in Karak, he’d never heard a foreigner speak such good Arabic, to which I replied “praise God for curing your deafness,” but I probably messed up the wording on this complicated phrase and I don’t think he caught the joke. I promised myself I’d write it in the blog later so at least someone would.

For my first few hours in the castle, it was only me, the twittering birds, and a few grumpy-looking old Bedouins who looked as if they’d rather be sleeping instead of adding to the castle’s authenticity as a post-Crusader outpost. Apparently, after the glorious Salah al-Din (better known as Saladin to us Westerners) conquered the castle in 1187, it was re-used by governors and even by visiting Sultans during the Mamluk period. The more I read about the chivalrous and noble Kurdish warrior whose name means “the Righteousness of the Faith,” the more I’m impressed by him and his impeccable manners and character, especially compared to how embarrassing underhanded and foul the European invaders often were. In fact, it was the overseer of Karak Castle, the traitorous and sadistic Reynaulds, that earned Salah’s greatest ire by violating a treaty and attacking peaceful caravans trying to pilgrimage to Mecca, and after the castle’s capitulation, Salah personally decapitated the Frenchman – the only time in the Crusades that the Islamic leader executed a surrendered foe. Legend says that several years earlier, during a failed assault of the castle by Muslim forces, Reynauld’s heir was celebrating his wedding night in one of the towers, and after Salah inquired as to which tower contained the nuptials, he forbade his men to attack it.

This 2x2 meter model of Karak and its high-ground castle are prominently featured in the small museum

The wedge-shaped castle is situated on the southernmost corner of the fan-shaped city, and after walking all around it, both inside and out, I could see why attack was almost impossible with medieval weaponry and a patient siege was the only way that the Arabs eventually won. Arrow slits line every wall, and the small but tidy museum inside the castle walls showed pictures of the various defensive weaponry the Crusaders had at their disposal. After making the rounds through the museum and around the “lower court,” I went up some steps to the castle’s “high court,” a long, dusty plateau on which I could still see the lumpy remains of rocks and air pipes into the warrens below. Those rooms themselves were as dusty, dim, and rough-looking as I’m sure they were a millennium ago, and it was lucky that it was a sunny day or I probably would have been banging into more of the walls and possibly causing the whole structure to collapse on me. I could dimly make out ancient torch-niches on the walls, and sincerely wished they were still in use!

After climbing up to the high point of the Mamluk fortress on the southern edge of the castle, I called my friend from choir, Yanal, whose ancestors are originally from Karak. “Guess where I am?” I cheerfully told him as I looked out over his city. “My beautiful Karak!” he gasped to me over the phone. “If only you had told me you were going, I would have driven with you down there!” He extolled to me the virtues of Karak and Karaki people as proudly as ever, as I chuckled and agreed with him on every point.

I wasn’t alone all the time. As I was leaving the sunny stones of the high point of the Mamluk fortress on the southern edge of the castle, I came across a busload of Italian tourists who were loudly commenting on the place and chain-smoking; a forbidden activity during Ramadan which I’m sure didn’t do anything to improve the tourism Bedouins’ mood. I ducked down into the open-air court of the  Mamluk palace under the defensive fortress quite literally – they had apparently been rather height-impaired sultans, and I whapped my forehead on the archway stones here several times – and examined the mosque and gathering rooms that the Sultan would have employed during his visits here from the Cairo capitol of the Mamluk empire in peacetime after the Crusades. Another advantage of these numerous hidden underground passageways is that I felt I could safely withdraw my hidden bottle of water and take a few quick drinks without being rude!

The interior of the Mamluk palace, from the regular stones of the High Court above

Before I left the castle, I found the tourist police chief in his office just inside the gate before the moat, and asked him about the mysterious “underground passageways” beneath the lower court that I’d read on a sign in the museum. That’s all locked up right now, he said. Well, is it possible to get the man with the key to open it for tourists? I asked. He looked at me like I was a little slow and gently reminded me that it was Friday afternoon in the first week of Ramadan. He’s probably home sleeping, like I wish I was, he snorted. So, I left satisfied that I had seen almost all of what was available in the castle, but of course as with all historic sites in the country, wishing that there were more signs and descriptions on placards throughout the building – there had only been four in the entire place outside of the museum. Most of the information which I’ve repeated for you here came from the two Jordan guidebooks I brought with me.

The mostly-crumbled north-western corner of the palace has had some fairly obvious reconstructions made...

I took a roundabout trip through the center of town to snap a few pictures of the bronze statue of Salah al-Din that sits in the square, and then meandered back down to the bus stop to play the waiting game again. It really is impossible to get lost in Karak; just keep walking until you are about to fall off a cliff, and then just walk around the hill! The waiting game this time around was in a large tour-sized bus, and it was for almost an hour and a half before we started the trek back to Amman. And when we returned, there was only an hour left before the evening’s Iftaar, or fast-breaking, and I knew I was lucky to find a taxi driver. A tall glass of ice cold water back at my apartment never tasted so good after a day of Ramadan touring, and there’ll hopefully be a lot more to come over the next few weeks!

The book I’m describing was written in 2002 by an aspiring young American Jew, during the uncertain times between September 11th and the beginning of the Iraq war. My parents got it for me for Christmas, and I started reading it after finishing “Three Cups of Tea” while I was in Europe. I finished it while in Nazareth, and it definitely will be on my list of books to recommend for anyone who’s interested in viewing this most varied of Arab countries. Ben Orbach stayed for almost a year in Jordan, although it was cut short by the embassy’s request in March 2003 that all American civilians get the heck out of Dodge because of the start of the war. I got a chuckle out of every chapter in his book, mostly because I could nod my head and say, “brother I’ve been there and you’re preaching to the choir.” However, as Orbach was here in Jordan to study Arabic formally and on a research grant, the other half of his chapters, which are written in a format of letters back home to his family and friends, are packed with useful insights on culture, the separation I’ve oft-noticed between the “club life” of West Amman and the “sell you a chicken through your car window” of East Amman (it’s happened to me before). He has some especially good thoughts on the Palestine/Israel conflict, made all the more poignant because of his religion, upbringing, and family living in Israel. Lastly for me, it’s a jaw-dropping moment to realize that in the space of seven years since he wrote these letters home, prices for most common services and goods have doubled in price. Now that I’ve finished it, I’m going to be leaving my copy here in this apartment in Jordan, in the hopes that whatever foreigner (and Philip, God willing) that follows me will enjoy it just as much and for similar reasons. Here it is on Amazon.

When I left on the “Trust Bus” early on Saturday morning, I paid 30 dinars for a one-way ticket to Nazareth, which seemed like a good deal to not have to deal with negotiating other transport once crossing over the Sheikh Hussein river border in the north. I was the only passenger on the bus for three hours; only me, the driver, and the luscious air conditioning. I didn’t know yet that Amman was about to be suffering the worst heat wave of the year at 41 degrees – but I’d be enjoying downright chilly climates at 38 degrees instead, ha ha! At the Jordan side of the border, the bus was loaded up with another dozen Arab travelers and I discovered that this wasn’t just a tourist transport, it was the actual ‘general transport’ bus for people waiting to cross the border.

With more people to entertain than a single drowsy foreigner, the driver switched on Arabic dance music and the mood turned downright festive. Teenage Arab girls in typical western capris and t-shirts splashed duty-free perfume on each other, and four plump middle-aged women in the full conservative black dresses and head scarves took turns yelling “Ohguhd. OHGUHD YALLA!!!” futilely at their hyperactive young children, trying to get to them to sit down. The Jordan River was much wider up here, closer to the Sea of Galilee that is its main source of water. When I saw it last year at the King Hussein border crossing, and at Jesus’ baptismal site even farther south, there was basically no water to speak of in the ditch that used to be a river.

Once over, our bus sat and idled in the shade for another 40 minutes before a bored-looking Israeli woman wandered over, shined under the bus for anything explosive with a long mirror, and waved us over before returning to stand in the shade. The customs and scanning procedure for me was the same as last time – I was immediately singled out for being the only Caucasian on the bus, brought to the head of the line, and then questioned as to my purpose in Israel, purpose in Jordan, what all these weird Central Asian visas in my passport were, and my father and grandfather’s name. I was tempted to add, “and my great-grandfather’s name was Ali bin Saddam bin Usama” but managed to restrain myself. The process took about fifteen minutes for me; longer than it had taken with my parents last time. I guess a single young male traveler coming through the “irregular” northern border was grounds for suspicion.

On the other side of the fence outside, I found the second transport system that the bus driver had arranged for me, an elderly Arab Christian man from Nazareth named Abu Hattem. He didn’t speak English, but was joined by his droop-mustached and dry-humored friend Riyath, a Muslim Nazarene. The former was generally quiet and easygoing, but Riyath introduced himself to me in English by saying, “You’re American? The Arabs in Israel don’t like Americans; you won’t find any that do. Not here or anywhere else. Not after what they’ve done.” I chose not to disagree with him from my own experience but explained my work in Jordan to him and Abu Hattem, who smiled encouragingly at me in the rear-view mirror. As we talked, Riyath seemed to warm to me and admitted that like most Arabs, it was our government that he disliked but he had no problem with Americans who wanted peace and justice for the Arab people.

As we drove past Bet She'an, the Israeli community, Riyath pointed out at these roofless wrecked ruins of houses. "That used to be the Palestinian village of Beisan. But not too many people know its name anymore."

When I asked the two of them what their religions were (not considered a rude question in the Arab world; I’m constantly asked it all the time), Abu Hattem quickly responded that he was a Christian, but Riyath seemed to take offense and instead told me to ask whether someone was Arab or Israeli and whether they wanted peace for all people or only for some. He seemed to get wistful for a moment, then as we pulled into Nazareth’s crowded city market, he looked back at me over the seat and said, “Zakariya, you must remember that for us, Israel is our father and Palestine is our mother. They are all we know and they are both in our blood now. This is not the West Bank or Gaza. I love both my father and my mother. What else can I do? But I wish that my father took better care of all his children.”

I was left standing there at the base of the famous Catholic basilica, not entirely sure where to go next. Thankfully, as I was wandering through the market, avoiding being sold anything (I only had my backpack with me; no room to really take anything back to Jordan), I overheard a family chatting nearby in Arabic that sounded touristic in nature. I asked them if they knew where the Fouzi Azar Inn was, and the adult woman in the group said to me in flawless English, “Where are you from? We’re from Canada, but Nazareth is my hometown. I’m Ieeyan.” She introduced her kids, niece and nephew to me and told me it was great to see another North American traveler visiting the less-traveled parts of Israel.

This is the first sign I saw after stepping off the bus near the towering basilica. From what I'm told, it used to be 70% Christian, 30% Muslim in Nazareth but now those numbers have been reversed and the Muslims are making a strong effort towards further conversions

With Ieeyan’s advice (and her Nazareth-smart knowledge that it was Azar with an aiyn letter, not an A-sounding letter) I was able to easily find the hostel, get checked in, and get a desperately needed shower. Interestingly enough, I ran into Ieeyan’s clan again just an hour later at the Orthodox Church of St Gabriel, just a few blocks away from the hostel, where they were debating sampling the holy water from the spring that by Orthodox legend, Mary was drawing water from when she first heard the angel speak to her to give her the Good News. Before the Orthodox bishop kicked us all out for Saturday mass, I had a chance to sample the water, collected for sampling purposes near the door. Lukewarm and not very appetizing for sure; I guess it’s the spiritual thought that counts.

As we exited the church, squeezing past a couple bearded and droning priests swinging incense, Ieeyan asked what I’d seen so far in the city, and recommended that I see the Salizian Hill on the western side of the city, to get a view out over the city. In fact, why don’t you just join us; my niece and nephew still live here in Nazareth and we’re taking their car up there now; we can fit you if we squeeze, she suggested. So, that’s how I ended up squeezing into the front of their tiny hatchback and being taken up the narrow streets of Nazareth in grand tourist style, up to the top of the hill, where we could see all the way across the valley into the nearby town of Natserat Illit, which was easy to pick out from the several skyscrapers and shining towers of glass. “That’s where all the Jews choose to live,” one of the kids said, gazing across the two-kilometer span between the hills to the other city. “The Arabs stay where they’ve always stayed in their old homes in Nazareth.” They explained to me that although it was an ironic coincidence, “Illit” is pronounced like “Elite” in English but in Hebrew merely means geographically higher, as opposed to higher status. I mused out loud whether it was intended to have the double meaning in English and Hebrew, and there was a wry chuckle of knowing agreement from the group.

As it was Saturday, the Jewish holy day, shops were closing up early and as the sun went down, there wasn’t too much available to do in the city. I went back to the hostel and napped in the dorm room bed I had acquired a few hours earlier, enjoying the cool stone around me. The Inn is named after its last male owner, Mister Fouzi Azar, who died in 1980. The Azar family used to be quite wealthy before 1948, when most of their vast land holdings in the area were liberated from Arab possession by the new Israeli government. Fouzi later could have gone to court over it to ask for recompense (it wasn’t offered up at the time) but ended up being too proud to accept any money for it and refused to say that he had “sold” his land to anyone. After his death the Azar house fell into disrepair for fifteen years, until an Israeli hiker, Maoz Inon, asked Fouzi’s five daughters and grandchildren for permission to turn it into a hostel, which they gave on the condition that it would bear their father’s name, because there had been no male heirs for the Azar name and it had died out with Fouzi. It was a neat story, related to me and some other spellbound tourists in the sunny main sitting room by Fouzi’s granddaughter, who now acts as the day manager for the hostel. Maoz Inon was also there too, and he and the Arabs chatted together in cheerful English about how things were going and doing some cleanup procedures together. If only the West – and Jordan! – could hear more about such amazing stories of benevolent cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians like this to create new businesses like this.

Suraida Nasser, Fouzi Azar's granddaughter (back to wall, closest to picture) tells her family history to guests

I didn’t nap through straight to the next morning, but got up and wandered a bit around the lively borders between the Old and New cities with a New Zealand tourist that was also staying in the hostel. I taught him a little Arabic and we sampled the incredibly delicious and expensive Palestinian schwarmas being sold on the street corners. In Jordan, a little schwarma-wrap sandwich is usually about the equivalent of 84 USD cents, and is 2 centimeters in diameter. In Arab communities here though, they are massive, meat-stuffed spheres the size of my two fists balled together and you can choose a variety of delicious toppings to put on them, like onions with sumac powder, cabbages, red beets, olives, pickles, tahini sauce, and even some stalls will have a zingy mango chutney sauce. Of course, they’re also about eight times more expensive, but I made sure to eat at least one per day. I wish I could find a shop that sold schwarma like that here in Jordan, but I guess it’s just one of those things that will stay on the other side of the river. I wondered the same thing after I came back from Egypt in regards to koshri, and I’ve heard there’s one restaurant on Gardens Street that sells it, but I have yet to find this mythical place.

Besides the meat and some "starter onions" everything else on the counter is basically there for the stuffing. Delicious!

The most famous and eye-catching structure on the Nazareth skyline is the Basilica of the Annunciation. Like so many things in the Holy Land’s religious armada, there are two of them. I had visited the Orthodox Church’s small church the previous day, but the Catholic church is obviously the more well-known of the two. I was taken on a tour of the old city that morning by Julian, an American volunteer who’d been living in Nazareth for a month, working at the hostel and giving tours. In fact, with the exception of Suraida and a few others, almost the entire staff of the Fouzi Azar is volunteers. He pointed out the dozens of internationally-donated mosaics and artwork from countries all over the world. Notably absent were any other Arab countries, but the USA had one of the largest donations, a three meter tall fresco of a steel-wrapped Madonna in a solar wreath of light and fire. Because it was Sunday, there were Arab church services going on in both locations, and although we were able to stand in the back of the huge basilica hall (seriously; it was like one of those southern American mega-churches, except attractively designed) when we came to the door of the Orthodox church, we were shooed out by a priest. The basilica actually had two layers; one for the church and another for the “grotto” where the Catholics believe Mary’s home was.

Julian snapped this shot in the dim sunken chamber housing the shrine of Mary's grotto. Directly above us was an opening in the ceiling from which we could hear the hymns clearly.

After Julian finished the tour, he returned to the hostel and I prepared to take a trip to the north and visit Lake Tiberius, better known in the west as the Sea of Galilee. The hostel had a list of bus routes and times, and although I thought I was sitting in the  right place, I was worried because all of the times and locations were written in Hebrew, which everyone seems to be able to read except for me.

The bus stop I sat in was across the street from the Orthodox church, and when I entered the only other waiter was an elderly Arab man wearing a ski cap and a faded blue dress suit who pantomimed asking for a cigarette. I sat down at another bench, and he got up and walked shyly towards me. “My name is Saleem. Everybody love me,” he muttered. And then again. And again. I nodded politely and agreed with him that yes, I’m sure everyone did love him. A young Middle Eastern woman with long curly black hair sat down on the other side of me and watched this exchange with some curiosity. Saleem returned to his original position and muttered quietly to himself. I watched the traffic honking and waving to Saleem. “Ya Abu Beeb!” several of them cried. “Yalla ya Abu Beeb!” called young men in a car with a blaring stereo. A lot of drivers of both cars and buses greeted him in some way, and he returned each one with a wave and murmured “Ahlan, ahlan,” which means “welcome.”

It was obvious that Saleem/Abu Beeb wasn’t going to be entirely helpful in determining bus schedules; he asked me where I was staying and I told him “Fouzi Azar’s house,” and he stared off into space and commented that he hadn’t seen Fouzi in a long time; and where had he gone? When the girl next to me took a phone call and chatted with a friend in Arabic, I took a chance and asked her in English if she knew about the bus schedule. She stared at me, wide-eyed, and said she didn’t speak English. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to get rid of me, but I figured she couldn’t be too conservative if she didn’t have a headscarf and had sat down next to a foreign man. In any case, she was talking to the wrong foreigner if she was trying to dissuade me from talking to her, because of course I then asked her the same question in Arabic.

The woman turned out to be quite helpful in fact. She said the schedule to the city of Tiberius wasn’t written, but she took the time to call a friend to see if she knew, and told me that it would be coming in twenty minutes. We chatted, and she told me her name was Tarneem, an Arabic word that means “hymn” and usually implies Christianity. When she asked me what my religion was, I took it as an opportunity to ask her the same. “I used to be Christian, but I converted to Islam a few years ago,” she replied. I was surprised, but didn’t press the issue further and she said that she was happy with the choice. “It didn’t use to matter what you were,” she commented. “The Israelis building Illit up there makes everyone’s tensions higher.” Before my bus came, she left me with a last wry joke. “You see how the Star of David for Israel is made of two triangles together. The triangle pointing upwards is for the Jews, and the one falling downwards is for the rest of us.”

On the hour-long bus ride to Tiberius, the only other people on the bus before me were two women, one from Taiwan and one from America. The American introduced herself as Lillian and joked with me that she recognized me as a Midwestern person right away by my accent. A classical Hebrew teacher back in the states, Lillian was a very interesting Jewish woman for me to talk to. I learned a lot about Israel and Judaism through her and the questions that she had about it to, picked up during her month-long visit to family. It was great to find someone so open-minded towards Arab and Israeli communication, and she was even talking about trying to find future ways to visit the West Bank area to see it for herself. Even though she told me, “I’m probably one of the worst people to ask about Judaism!” I found her to be quite educated; asking a fellow tourist and information-hunter is always one of the best conversations you can have.

I only had a few hours in Tiberius, and I was lucky to have Lillian because almost everything was solely in Hebrew; there was no English or Arabic written anywhere that I could see except some safety signs in English near the sea. We jumped a fence near a burnt-out ruin of an old mosque, and we were on the rocky beach of the Sea of Galilee. I was still badly burned from my bike ride on Friday, and hadn’t brought my swimming trunks with me. The two of us rolled up our jeans and waded out knee-deep into the water, as silvery-brown little fish flitted away from our feet into the darker shadows of larger rocks, just out of reach.

Then they came back and started sucking on our toes. It was amusing.

I wish I could have chatted for longer about politics and religion with Lillian, but it was rapidly getting dark and the last bus was leaving in only a half hour. We grabbed an Israeli beer at a “deck pub” sticking out into the sea, and then I literally had to sprint, stomach sloshing slightly, back in the general direction of the bus stop, keeping my eyes open for the familiar green-colored Egged buses. I made it back with only seconds to spare before the driver pulled out, and I thanked him in Arabic, and then in Hebrew for good measure just in case, thanks to a few key words that Lillian had shared with me.

And that was supposed to be the end of my last full day on the other side of the river. But it wasn’t. Abu Hattem, my original driver from Saturday morning, had told me that he’d take me back to Jordan on Monday afternoon for 180 shekels, or about 33 dinar. However, thanks to the hostel and a travel guide I’d met, I discovered that there was a national bus leaving every morning at 8:30, for the cost of 75 shekels. So, instead of leaving on Monday like I had planned, I paid 70 shekels for a third night at the Fouzi, canceled my ride back with Abu Hattem, and made a reservation for 75 shekels for Tuesday morning. I ended up saving 35 shekels, too.

As I  mentioned at the beginning of this article, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to do with my extra full day in the city. Some of my coworkers at Whitman had recommended the “Nazareth Village,” exhibit near the south end of the old city, so I thought I’d walk over and give that a look. The village is a modern reproduction of what esteemed archeologists think 1st century Nazareth may have looked, and the land was donated by the hospital up the hill. They didn’t think there was anything special about this particular hill, but after they started digging they were reminded that in the Holy Land, everything is built on something when they dug into a thousand-year-old terrace system for a vineyard. That’s where our guide started our little group off, showing off a cross-section of rocks and soil depicting how the ancient Israelites used buried limestone “steps” to guide irrigation water down to each lower step so that none was wasted, a method that Palestinian farmers had also been using for centuries. People don’t realize how these agrarian peoples like Palestinians were connected to the land that was taken from them; after a family sets up a hugely complicated network of buried irrigation channels, covers them with soil, just being told “Okay, just go somewhere else to farm; no big deal,” is just about the worse thing imaginable.

I noticed that our guide seemed to be speaking in fluent Arabic to the various older actors working the looms, carpentry shop, and fields, and that he had a small wooden crucifix swinging from his neck. I was surprised he was speaking Arabic, because in his cargo shorts, t-shirt, and crew cut, I figured he was another American volunteer like at the Fouzi Azar Inn. As everyone else trooped out of the weaving building, I paused and asked the elderly woman at the loom whether our guide was an Arab. Oh yes, of course, she answered. His name is Majad (which means glory). He’s Christian then? I asked, pointing at my own crucifix on my neck. The old lady smiled as she worked, glancing up at me. “Sweetie,” she said to me Arabic, “all of the people at this village are Christians. Hurry and catch the group and Jesus be with you.”

I had a chance to chat with Majad after the tour; he took me out to see the tomb exhibit that I had missed seeing before. He explained that he’d been going to school at university in Arizona for several years and had a lot of family in America, which explained his almost complete lack of recognizable accent. As an Orthodox, he was curious about some Lutheran traditions, which I explained to him as we stood in the shade of a large oak tree shading the small cave door of the faux tomb. It’s interesting; it seems that no matter what, I end up engaging every person I’ve met in Palestine/Israel in a religion discussion, whether I meant to or not!

That evening, Julian took myself and some of the other newer volunteers out on a hike out to the city limits, for the purpose of showing the route of the Jesus Trail to the other volunteers so that they in turn could assist tourists with the hike, which begins in Nazareth. The Jesus Trail is another project of the aforementioned Maoz Inon who created the Fouzi hostel, and there’s a lot of crossover between hostel guests and trail hikers. I had a chance to check out the website and some of the large, detailed maps of it they had pinned to a wall in the hostel; it looks and sounds like a beautiful way to spend four days hiking through the north wilderness and retracing some of Jesus’ best known visits around his homeland.

The three other people that went out were a Jewish girl visiting Israel on the Birthright tour, a tall and lanky Dutch guy with a lot of tattoos, and a friendly Mexican girl that had checked me into the hostel on Saturday afternoon. Because of her darker skin and hair, combined with my tiredness, I had figured that she was an Arab and repeatedly tried to speak with her in Arabic to be polite while she was showing me around the hostel. It wasn’t until hours later that I discovered that we were from the same continent and she had no idea what I was saying, just nodding politely. Maybe she thought I was an Arab. Anyway, the five of us clambered up the 400 stairs that lead up the Salizian Hill just behind the hostel, with me doing my best to not ask too many questions of my Nazareth-savvy companions and just enjoy their conversation and the cool ambiance of the early evening.

We stopped for 1-shekel popsicles at the top of the hill, which in the heat and humidity, seemed to end up more on my hands and face than anything else

It took about forty-five minutes for us to reach the edge of the city, and the same to return. As we descended back down the hill the way we had come, dogs barked at us from inside the jumbled houses piled on top of each other on the hill, and I could hear the sound of children playing in the darkness behind the walls and the sound of old men talking and most likely smoking argeilleh or playing cards. In the darkness, we all needed to be careful to watch our footing on the steps and not step into the half-meter wide gash running down a lot of the stairs, where a century ago donkeys had been walking up and down this hill carrying heavy bags of goods.

After we returned, I watched a movie with my hostel friends before calling it a night around midnight. I was quite drowsy when I stumbled up out of the Old City the next morning at 7:45, but thankfully I had scouted out the bus station after leaving the Nazareth Village yesterday and the traffic wasn’t so bad that early in the morning. I had coordinated my last few shekels perfectly, down to my tenth of a shekel coins (about 3 cents USD) to be able to pay for the bus, and the Israeli exit tax. The ticket office refused to take my small shekel coins though and only wanted banknotes instead. The bespectacled little man flatly handed them back to me, explaining that he didn’t like them, and then reached into a drawer and dumped another handful of small change into my hands. “Give that to the border guards; they’ll have a use for it I imagine.”

It’s probably a good thing he gave me that change because an hour and a half later, I stood incredulously in front of a smirking twerp who had just told me that it would be another 4.5 shekels to leave Israel. “I just checked the government website yesterday!” I protested. “It says it’s 94 shekels for the exit tax, not 98.5!” The extra is for our commission, he smiled at me. “What commission,” I growled; “there’s a sign over your desk right in front of me that says in big green letters, ‘no commission’.” His smile seemed to get wider. “Well, now we take a commission.” So much for my shekel-perfect planning, even with the extra ~2 shekels from the ticket seller. I was about to tell this guy where he could insert his extra shekels when a young German guy next to me in line nudged me and said “Here man, take these extras I have.” Thank goodness for his random kindness; otherwise I would have had needed to pay with my credit card and I’d have 96 worthless shekels still with me now back in Jordan. But sometimes, it’s not about the places you’re visiting – it’s about the people – Israeli, Arab, and everyone else I met this weekend. It was a great trip, and I learned a lot – definitely more than I thought I would and from many different sources! It’s the kind of trip that I think Benjamin Orbach would be proud of.

One final note: I didn’t find much information about it on the internet (possibly because of their horrible, flash-based website that couldn’t be searched by Google properly) but if you’re in Jordan and want to take advantage of the lowest priced round-trip ride to Nazareth and back, it’s only 30 JD with Nazarene Tours. I got the business card of the contact on the Jordanian Side, it’s Ahmad al-Musri and you can reach him at +962-79-692-7455.

Standing on the hill behind the Schönbrunn Palace and concert stage on the first evening

First, I have to say shame on you Vienna for not offering the ‘City Name’ Card the same way that Innsbruck and Salzburg do. Although I’ve enjoyed my time in the city and the weather has been at Jordan-levels of lovely, it’s been a lot more difficult for me to see things within the city because of the comparatively high prices. I spent the first day, poised with umbrella in hand (the forecast said rain, although it didn’t, and after being caught unaware in Salzburg, I don’t get fooled again) searching for sights to see.

Daniel was right about being over-castled, museumed, and churched in Vienna (several new words I’ve invented, I see). My hostel was only about a 10 minute walk from the edge of the old section of town, and when I reached the large main street separating the official “old” from the new, a huge statue of either Brahms or Beethoven was there to greet me. I could see several church steeples poking up through the trees and buildings ahead of me, each one of them more ornately coated with carvings than the previous, like monstrous upside down ice cream cones. I didn’t know what to see yet, or where to go, so I basically tried to find the tourist information center, just like the previous two cities, and take it from there.

Inside the center, my somewhat cross-eyed desk clerk handed me a packet of information describing the “Vienna Card.” He asked me how long I was staying in the city, and I told him it would only be for two days. “You don’t want one of these cards then,” he said. “They’ll only save you a euro per exhibit you visit. You won’t recover the cost on them unless you are visiting a lot of places.” I pondered it a moment, and told him I wanted to buy the 18 euro card because of the free transport services too. He looked at me severely (or he may have been looking behind me severely; I couldn’t quite tell). “Listen to me son, if that’s all you want, just get the Transport card for 10 euros and you can ride wherever you want.” His advice seemed sound, and it sounded like he was bored enough that he was willing to keep arguing if I objected, so I bought the Transport card and for the first time, let the city keep its odious tourist card.

With my new and extremely detailed street map in hand, I laid out my plans for the next days. There was a place called the Prater that looked interesting, an Islamic Center on the other side of the Danube river, and of course the two massive castles, the Hofburg Palace and the Schönbrunn Palace. Other than that, I figured I would play it by ear and see what I could find!

I used my new transport card to navigate the clean and well-labeled metro system northward from the old city to the Prater, in what was originally a hunt to find an open grocery store but when I saw a massive Ferris wheel over the trees, I figured that since I was in the area I would visit it (as you can probably tell, I was much more relaxed in my sightseeing now that I didn’t have a card granting me automatic free entrance everywhere). The small park linked to above is home to the world’s oldest Ferris wheel, the Riesenrad, which was built in 1897 and rebuilt after its almost total destruction during WWII. For eight euros I took a ride on it, looking out over the old city to the south and the modern skyscrapers on the north side of the Danube to the other side. The afternoon sunset was catching the glass on the Milennium City tower, almost blinding as our conglomeration of ancient spokes and hub rotated slowly for 20 minutes. I shared the cabin with an amorous young Italian couple and a half dozen American women who seemed to be quite concerned about the safety of the wheel (the Italian couple had more important things to think about, such as making out as much as possible in one corner and completely ignoring the scenery).

The Prater's eldest attraction rises above the garish entry gate

Grocery store not yet found, I settled for an expensive slice of pizza in the amusement park before heading back to the metro station and going to the Schönbrunn Palace. The station was close to the palace, but after taking a couple hours that evening touring the massive and free public gardens behind the Palace, I’m surprised the city didn’t just bite the bullet and build the station directly into the massive grounds. The palace itself had been closed for hours, but I was surrounded by tourists, joggers, and mothers with strollers enjoying the perfect weather and neatly manicured lawns of the grounds.

To my joy, the Wiener Philharmonic Orchestra was setting up on stage a couple hundred meters behind the church, and although tickets weren’t free to get into the seats, the speakers were large and I wasn’t the only casual tourist leaning against the fence watching the activities. It looked like only a half dozen people had actually purchased tickets and were sitting in the first ten rows, but I’m sure they were having the time of their lives. Cameras zoomed about on cables suspended over my head, and the setup crew for the stage sat on boxes near me and chatted amicably with the Austrian joggers (I assume it was amicably although of course I had no idea). The show started a few minutes after I arrived, and I stayed for 15 minutes leaning against that fence and watching them warm up, and even as I journeyed on to continue walking up the hill pictured at the top of this post, small hidden speakers all over the grounds carried their beautiful chords to my ears, iPod-less for one of the rare times in the trip.

The Gloria secondary hall looms high above as the Orchestra warms up. The music was great but their PR needs to work on attendance!

I knew that I would be coming back again to tour the palace itself, so I made my exit via a side route from the grounds, and spent another hour trying to find a working metro line that would get me back to my hostel. It’s interesting to note that while I was in Vienna, the metro line I was using happened to break both days I was there, but while I was in Cairo two months earlier, there was nary a hitch in metro operation. I sat there in the thankfully well-ventilated train cars with dozens of other bored-looking commuters, wishing that I understood what the voices on the speakers were saying and relying on momentary descriptive kindnesses from the other passengers who saw my bafflement and explained to me that something was broken, again.

Another interesting thing I’ve noticed about all the buses and metro lines throughout Austria (and it was the same in Bavaria, too) is that all of the ticket lines are entirely unmonitored. The turnstiles at the metro entrances have had their ticket collectors removed, and the ticket boxes are just credit card/euro-handling machines that makes it very easy to go for hours of travel without ever interacting with a person. There are signs up that state that to use the metro without a ticket is subject to the choice of an 80 euro fine or an immediate arrest, but they don’t mention that this is only if they catch you. Throughout my 10 days in Austria, using buses everywhere else but the metro in Vienna, I didn’t see a single ticket checker. It was the same way on the short-ride train on the first day to go from the small Munich station to the large one – and that was the one I bought 3 extra tickets for it because I thought I had accidentally stamped the first ones too early! Waste of 7.50 euro, but oh well. I never risked it myself; leery about 80 euros or arrest and with too tight a schedule to risk either of them, but I know that other people had less qualms and got away with minor lawbreaking without a problem. I couldn’t imagine the same system being enforceable in Cairo or New York City, could you? It makes me curious as to what Austria’s mindset about this was when this idea was brought up; as it’s obvious there used to be ticket collecting machines.

I want to give my approval to the hostel I stayed at both nights, the Believe-It-Or-Not. Although I was initially (quite) worried about what I was paying 50 euro for as I climbed cracked and crumbling stone steps inside an unmarked old apartment building, the good reviews on Hostelworld.com proofed correct when Michalis the Greek attendant buzzed me and I saw how the apartment had been completely renovated in a very modern style. Frankly, it looked more like your suave buddy’s apartment in Upper Manhattan than a hostel. Like most of the Europeans I had met so far, Michalis enthusiastically inquired about life working in Jordan, especially when he found I had connections to refugee programs. It’s very interesting but there’s just general public-service wish with many of the people that I ran into, who apparently view refugee work as a high calling. I handed out some business cards and website names, and hopefully they can find some interesting information.

The Believe-It-Or-Not was a great place to stay for 2 nights. It’s one of the rare “all inclusive” hostels that provide you with every necessity as part of the regular price. The Yoho had like most hostels charged me for shampoo, but here there were just dispensers for it in the bathrooms. Free laptops, a big flatscreen, and wifi were in the sunny open central room. Free coffee, uncooked pasta, cookware, juice, milk, and even a bottle of wine were all there to greet the 12 of us – and that number is fully booked. There are only two rooms, an 8 person and a 4 person. I was staying on the “second level” of the 8 person room, an obvious new edition reached by a spiral staircase. But the Believe-it-or-Not got it right: plenty of power outlets. It seems to be a mental plague throughout all hostels I’ve stayed in previously that don’t realize that the formula is # of people X 2 for the minimum number of outlets. We have to charge our cameras and mobiles, after all.

A hostel so good, even Edward Norton stays there! Jesse, a fellow American tourist, displays the breakfast spread.

After  a tasty breakfast of toast and cereal the next morning, I returned to the Hofburg castle that I had seen during my walking tour the previous day. Photography was allowed in the first half of it, the Royal Silver Collection, but not in the second half which was a tour through the life of the troubled Empress Sisi, the second-to-late empress of the Habsburg Empire and wife to Franz Joseph. As always, the useful and ever-present audio guides were interesting and informative, and the Silver Collection was a unique and powerful message to the size and age of the Imperial court, with sets of hundreds of silver and gold table sets, a 30-foot long center table spread, and beautifully painted porcelain tablesets (after the silver and gold had been sold to fund the battles against Napoleon), each one entirely unique. The description of the “Foot Washing Ceremony” next to a set of steins and a wooden washtub was very cool; apparently the emperor and empress chose 24 elderly paupers per year and then washed their feet and gave them a royal meal and gifts in the palace. Just as good was the story of Sisi, who apparently became world famous after her assassination for her anguished melancholy and her beauty. They even made a movie about her and spelled her name wrong! The audio guide did a good job giving what would otherwise be a regular “castle tour” into a more personal experience, talking about the good relationship between Franz and his wife, and how much he loved her, even as she slipped into deeper depression. Each room that we were walking through became more than just an old palace-turned-museum, but part of the story of Sisi and Franz…not to mention the countless generations before them, which were not neglected of course!

Apparently, this method of napkin folding is a "Secret of the Austrian State" and only five people in the whole world know how to do it. It's still used for state dinners even now.

I used my metro card to cross the Danube river after the castle, because I had read about an “Islamic Center” in Vienna that I thought would be neat to visit. The stations here on this side of the city on a Tuesday before the end of the workday were basically empty, and I was able to easily find the Islamic Center/mosque from its shining white minaret , visible from the other side of the river even as we were crossing over. In front of the quiet building, I found three Arab gardeners, chatting with each other and planting marigolds. From their carefree, jovial conversation and laughter, I (correctly) deduced they were Egyptians before I introduced myself to them in Arabic. “An American that speaks Arabic, here in Austria?” one of them chuckled. “What a strange journey for you!” They didn’t know too much about the center itself, but they told me to go ahead and go inside; no one would mind. Like always, I removed my shoes as I stepped into the prayer area, and sat on the rich carpeting thinking for awhile and staring at the river, visible through the trees to the southwest. There was an Islamic lesson taking place; a covered muhijabeh woman speaking German to a group of young girls and boys seated on the carpet in front of her. They were just finishing up, and as they all rose and the children scattered to play outside, I hailed the woman with a “Salaamu Alayki” which she returned with a smile. She was Turkish, not Arab, like Daniel’s neighbors in Innsbruck, and we couldn’t really communicate, but I expressed my pleasure to her as best I could about seeing girls and boys studying in the mosque together, something that would never happen in Jordan. She knew a bit of Classical Arabic from prayers, but couldn’t have a conversation in it, so I dug deep in my memory to attempt to express myself in the most common Classical phrases I knew. She of course thought I was German and kept trying to talk to me in her second language, although I tried to explain I was an American, like I had with the Egyptians outside. It’s been such a long time since I couldn’t speak Arabic two years ago that I had forgotten how frustrating it is to not be able to communicate when there’s no one bilingual there to help you.

The three Egyptians, hard at work. It must be great for them to be surrounded by so much water and green; they told me they'd been here for 14 years.

Outside again, I asked the Egyptians who the administrator, the sheikh of the building was. They pointed to a well dressed man in a business suit and dark shades, walking towards a large Mercedes. “He’s a Saudi; just came a few months ago to run this place. No one knows much about him; he keeps to himself.” I walked up to the man, who was unlocking his car, and stuck out my hand in a friendly manner and told him, in Arabic, that it was good to see that Muslims living in Austria had a place to go for worship, and asked him how many Muslims there were in his mosque. He regarded me through his shades and asked me where I was from, then after hearing my response asked me in perfect English, “Who wants to know, and why?” He answered my questions briskly and efficiently, then excused himself. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised at his reaction – when Americans speaking Arabic and inquiring about mosque attendance rates in Europe show up at an Austrian Islamic Center, it’s natural and in fact a bit obvious why a sheikh would be unsure of his visitor’s intentions.

After a few more hours of touring the relatively unremarkable museum housing centuries of obsoleted royal furniture (it was part of my combo ticket that included the Habsburg and Schönnbrun), I returned to the hostel. The wearies of travelers fatigue was definitely starting to catch up me after all this traveling and I was feeling a little ill. I made myself some pasta and retired to bed early.

The next day, as I packed up my suitcase to leave a European place of lodging for the last time, Michalis told me to go ahead and just leave all my bags here while I was doing my last sightseeing at Schönbrunn and he’d let me use one of the lockers (also free, but I thought it was technically for guests who were still paying money). With a lightened spring in my step and feeling better, I entered the massive tourist pack that is Schönbrunn in the morning and waited for half an hour to get into the place. No photography, of course, and although they tried to evoke Sisi and Franz’s love story like the Hofburg had, it wasn’t as effective and in the end the castle was a fancy and very, very large set of beautifully furnished rooms. The audioguide wouldn’t even let us rewind, unlike any of the other ones I’d used, which was obviously intended to hurry us through as quickly as possible. I found this annoying since I’m the kind of person that likes to catch everything the narrator is saying and because of the crowds, that was often difficult. Oh well. Most of the windows were shuttered, but occasionally as we rounded a corner we’d see the beautiful gardens that I’d visited two days ago, or the smaller private gardens that were a separate extra ticket that I didn’t have.

A look over the 'Privy Gardens' that I hastily snapped from the window before the Gendarmes carried me and my camera away

That was all there was too it, and after selecting a few last “Tastes of Austria” from the local grocery store before I left, I retrieved bag from Michalis’ care and bought the out-of-city train ticket that would take me to the Austrian airport. I had to do a bit of shuffling, as my luggage had somehow grown almost seven kilos over the twenty-kilo limit. By the time I walked back to the checkin counter a third time for a reweighing, I was wearing three pairs of pants, four shirts, and I had a sweater tied around my waist in a jaunty fashion. This is all going on with three cans of fine Austrian beer in me and it’s almost thirty degrees outside. The sympathetic check-in woman let me go with my bag still almost two kilos overweight, and I begun the return home to Jordan, heading north to Frankfurt first.

It almost became a rerouting through Israel, though, when they announced over the plane’s loudspeakers that we were going to be delayed by an hour. They read off everyone’s connecting flight and when they mentioned Amman, they said that a flight had been booked going from Germany to Tel Aviv, and then to Amman. I looked down at the black and white, Palestinian keffiyeh I was wearing around my neck and decided I really would rather not deal with the chance of being further delayed by interrogations with the child soldiers I’ve dealt with before at the Jordan/Israeli border. When we touched down, I sprinted across the entire airport and through a large underground terminal transfer line to reach my gate with 5 minutes to spare. Unfortunately for everyone else, they held the plane on my behalf (sorry everyone) because the tickets had already been rebooked going into Israel and my luggage needed to be transferred and reloaded. I sat quietly in my seat. A couple of cute Arab girls a few seats away from me were wearing keffiyehs much like mine, and they looked over at me when I sat down and smiled broadly. I decided I had made the right decision.

It was past two in the morning when our plane touched down in the familiar desert airport of Queen Alia, and I settled in with my luggage outside the terminal for what I assumed would be a long wait until the first Amman/Airport bus arrived at 6:30. I happened to fall into conversation with another man waiting for the bus, a Jordanian named Mohammad who worked with Arab refugees in Norway who was coming home to visit. He was middle aged and quite cheerful for someone non-caffeinated, and after talking for awhile, he asked a sweeper nearby where we could find some coffee, as it was probably obvious that I was quite sleepy. The sweeper said, “Well, there’s shops inside, but those are for the tourists [his eyes swept over me briefly] – if you just want coffee, there’s a little restaurant behind the terminal that has…regular prices.” Mohammad happily bought me several coffees and a Pepsi as we talked about working with refugees, his opinions on life in Europe, and of course our respective families. He even was able to hunt out a bus that was leaving at 4, and helped me load my numerous bags into the back of it.

The sun was mere minutes away over the horizon as we started to tear back towards Amman and the towers that I could see framed in the glow of the morning. The driver switched on the radio and tuned it to al-Athan Fajr, the morning call to prayer. The full bus behind me was suddenly filled with whispered and murmured sounds of people quietly repeating Bismillah al-Rahman al-Raheem…in the name of God, the Ever-merciful and All-merciful. Goats were grazing out in the scrubs of grass out in the gravel and sand a few feet away from the road. It was good to be back.

One of Dani's pictures from the top of Hafelkar, an easily-accessible mountain overlooking Innsbruck

Note: to get a birds-eye view of the city as I saw it from the top of Hafelkar, download this Google Maps .KMZ file with some extra details added in!

Using my encyclopedic knowledge of Salzburg after three days of living there, getting back to the train station with my heavy bags in hand was an easy task. My Salzburg card had expired the previous day, so unfortunately the 2 euro buses were a luxury that I didn’t feel were justified by the relatively short hike from the hostel to the station.

On the train, I shared a six-seat train car with a 30-something year old Viennese woman named Isabella, who was on her to Innsbruck to visit her Italian boyfriend who worked in a casino. She and I spent the two hour ride in animated conversation about Austrian and EU politics compared with Jordanian and American, and the always-lamentable state of American “semi-apathy,” a term that I described to a Madison newspaper several years ago as the common mindset with liberal university students where they believe that voting for Barack Obama will somehow create world peace. “I don’t need to talk about the antiwar effort,” they’d tell me apologetically over their bottles of Jack Daniels while reaching for their television remotes. “I’m voting for Obama; he’ll take care of this terrible mess in Iraq.” Isabella rolled her eyes sympathetically.

My journey to the mountain city/town of Innsbruck was in place long before I had considered visiting Salzburg. A coworker of mine at PTEE has many ties to the community of Innsbruck, and even got married there a few decades ago. Without exception, all of his children have gone to school in Austria, and two of them live in an apartment on the outskirts of the city, with the mountains pressing so close to them that it seems like the sun is actually rising later and setting earlier! After securing their permission, my coworker invited me to stay at their place and relax between my weeks of hostel-jumping, an offer I could not refuse.

I had been in communication with his son, Dani, for a few months before coming and we had thought we’d be coming into the train station at the same time from different parts of the country. But as I sat there on my bag after Isabella had directed me to the front gate, it became readily apparent that there was no one coming. I halfheartedly tried the payphones, but in this age of mobile phones, they appeared derelict and two of the three didn’t even produce a dial tone. I was too shy to ask to borrow someone’s mobile, so with Dani’s email describing how to find his house by bus (thank goodness) I set out to attempt to find my own way through the city to his residence.

The bus drivers helpfully deposited me on a street in the sunset-streaked suburbs, but I could not find any sort of house numbers. I wandered with my luggage up and down the street for half an hour before finally finding a tiny side street that appeared to lead to an apartment building with the right number on it. I rang the unnamed buzzer, but no one answered. Feeling the need to search for a bathroom, I left my luggage and ran up and down the street, hunting for any sort of public building and sticking my head into a Catholic church with some sort of choir concert going on, but once again my efforts were stymied. I curled up on the porch of the building, attempting to think of anything but liquids, and it was about then that a dark-haired teen-aged girl happened by and unlocked the door. She didn’t speak any English at all, but I knew how to say “Dani” and “handy” and apparently she understood that I wasn’t insane and wanted to use her “handy” (the German word for “mobile” or “cell phone”) to call her neighbor Dani.

He greeted me enthusiastically over the crackling connection and explained that his train had been two hours late but he’d be there in fifteen minutes or so. The girl brought her mother out, who invited me into their home (and their bathroom, thank goodness) and then started feeding me some sort of breaded fish and pastries. I learned that they were a Muslim family from Turkey, but they’d been in Austria for over a decade, speaking German to the outside world but maintaining their cozy Turkish-speaking customs within their own walls. Dani showed up a few minutes later, slapping me on the back, and was promptly handed a plate of food as well.

I immediately liked the tall, shaggy-haired young man, who has the same fast-talking, easy-going mannerisms as his father Robert. He explained that his sister was gone for the weekend, and that we’d have the place to ourselves. He showed off the apartment to me, filled with bric-a-brac from America, Jordan, and Europe. As Dani had grown up to American parents in Jordan but spent years in Austria, he spoke all three languages with fluent ease and told me he was learning Swahili at the moment. As the sun vanished over the tops of the mountains, Dani smiled slyly at me and started whipping up dinner for the two of us: Pork sausages wrapped in Pork bacon, stuffed with cheese. “I had an idea that a dinner like this might appeal to you,” he grinned.

It's almost like he could read my mind. More likely, he was remembering what it was like to come from Jordan to Austria!

After dinner, he and I sat at the kitchen table until after midnight, discussing religion and politics of Jordan, America, and Austria. I was impressed by his straightforward ideas on spreading Christianity to a disillusioned population of Austrian youth, and doubly so by his goals of using his future degree in medicine to aid impoverished African nations. I thought back to Robert’s own efforts in Jordan over the decades and realized the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree! As we finished off the bottle of Chimay beer that I’d brought from Belgium, we consulted about what I should spend my two days in Innsbruck doing. He wrote up some maps and made some recommendations, then told me to set Sunday afternoon aside for a mountain climb! I could see the moonlight twinkling off of snow even in the darkness outside, and thought of hitting those slopes in my hiking boots was really exciting.

The next morning, we had breakfast out on the balcony, and then while Dani began studying for his final exams, I started off on my own. I visited the “Rose Chapel” (not an actual name) that I could see from my bedroom window on the hill south of the city, giving my first chance to look out over Innsbruck. After taking a few pictures and descending, I retraced my bus route from yesterday and beelined straight for the Tourist Information center to purchase the familiar-sounding “Innsbruck Card,” which would give me free access to all museums, cable cars, and public transportation – an identical list to the Salzburg card I had used a few days ago.

That church spire you see here from the steps of the Rose Chapel is two buildings away from Dani's house

Although I’d never heard of it before, the most famous landmark in the Tyrol region of Austria was only a block away from me. “The Golden Roof” is apparently featured on Austrian coinage, and is so beloved by its people that precious cement was used during World War II to build a massive silo around the front of it to protect its ornate, shimmering shingles (which are actually made of copper, not gold; I doubt they would have lasted for 500 years if that had been the case). The roof was pretty, to be sure, and there were some excellent carvings around its edges, but I found the museum in the same building much more interesting. I spent a couple hours wandering through its well-labeled halls with my audio guide, listening to the narrator describe the life of Emperor Maximilian I, who had loved Innsbruck and was known for watching sporting matches from the deck underneath the Golden Roof. His rugged looks, famous broken nose and reputation of a sportsman were part of the legacy that made him known as the “Last Chivalric Knight.”

The museum tour ended with the cryptic note that although Emperor Max wasn’t buried here in Innsbruck, his descendants wished to honor his love of the mountainous countryside and made a massive cenotaph here in Innsbruck. It was a five minute walk from the Golden Roof building to the Hofkirche that housed the large and empty tomb. The original plan had been to move the Emperor’s remains to this location so that the dozens of life-sized favorite ancestors and Max’s heroes could watch over him, but instead the tomb was kept empty, with the last statue kneeling on the top, broken-nosed face bowed toward the cross. Emperor Max, who had asked that his hair be shaved and his teeth torn out after death “in the way of the martyrs of God,” would have approved.

The left bank of bronze statues in the Hofkirche, looking towards the alter

I spent a few hours touring the Grassmayr Bell Museum in the south part of town, looking in vain for the picture I found in the Innsbruck Card information packet showing well-insulated burly fellows pouring molten bronze into chambers as sparks and fire flew off in all directions. Maybe because it was Saturday and half an hour from closing time, but the place was abandoned except for me and an Italian tourist. Even without the fire and exploding, it was an interesting little museum, displaying creation techniques and replicas of some famous bells the Grassmayr family had made in their 400 year old tradition. Attached to their darkened workshop was a little room where you could test out the bells and see some of their interesting physics properties, like the video below.

I found myself walking near the large an imposing facade of the Jesuit Church of Innsbruck when their prayer bells started going off at around six in the evening. Near the doorway, I heard two women conversing in Britain-accented in English, and turned my head in their direction as they walked into the crypt entrance near front door to the church. A sign on a hook nearby: “English Mass service held every Saturday at Six.” I figured it was providence, so I holstered my camera and followed them down through a long tunnel that opened up into the main crypt room which must have been right about under the alter, a 15 meter walk.

Interestingly enough, this was the first Catholic Mass I’ve ever attended. As I listened to the priest intone rites that I’d never heard before, I thought of the irony that I was an American Lutheran, coming from Jordan to Austria, in a German-language Catholic church, listening to an Indian priest give Mass to a congregation of British people plus me. I was by far the youngest in the group, and my middle-aged fellow congregants appeared fairly bored with the priest, and I wondered if they were tourists or British residents in Austria. The poor gentleman was definitely having some difficulty, and he read the sermon off of a series of printed notecards in what appeared to be verbatim and blinked nervously a lot. I wondered how he had managed to draw the short straw for this job of ministering to disinterested foreigners.

An interesting backdrop to an interesting church service, regardless of notecard usage

As it was Saturday evening in the extremely Catholic city, when I emerged from the church everything was closed and people looked as if they were heading home, with the exception of other tourists such as myself who were peering at maps as if trying to will something to be catering to their sightseeing needs. I contented myself with crossing the “Brucke” over the “Inn” River – that is to say, the modern interpretation of the historic Inn Bridge from which the city took its name in 1180 AD – and walking through the parks along the river’s edge and dodging bicyclists. Compared with Jordanian bicycling (basically nil outside of clubs like Cycling Jordan) any appreciation of the sport would seem large, but we collegiate Americans have nothing on Germany and Austria from what I’ve seen.

The next day was split in two; pre-Mountains and Mountains. During dinner after I got back, Dani and I had agreed to meet up near the Hofkirche at noon but I had the morning to myself. Being a sportsman, he had recommended to me that I check out the famous “Bergisel Ski Jump,” a towering structure that I had already glimpsed from the bell museum. “You can have your fill of castles and history in Vienna,” Dani told me knowingly. “But it’s out here you’ll get the mountains and the incredible sports that come with them!” The snub-nosed construction of green glass and concrete wasn’t hard to find again, and my Innsbruck Card easily got me a ticket to the short tram to the top of the jump. Taking the slow moving vehicle up the hill gave me time to think of what it must feel like to fling yourself down this thing at 90KM/h, skimming across this mountain and hoping that you don’t overshoot the landing pad near the admission booth.

Just in case, a large cemetary just beyond (and 80 meters below) the landing pad is conveniently located for those who overshoot

Being at the top afforded some great views to the north, and if I squinted, I could make out a gleaming silvery-gold dot in the middle of town that I knew was The Golden Roof. The northern mountain range dwarfed everything else, and it was exciting to know that in only a couple hours I’d be on the summit of one of them. The faux “grass” on the hill actually seemed to be made out of nylon wires or wrappings, and I wondered what it felt to land on. When I exited the lift at the bottom, a group of sporty looking young guys took my place. I noticed one of them was dressed in pads and was carrying a set of skis with him, and the others were slapping him on the back. He couldn’t possibly be making a jump in June, I mused to myself. I wanted to stick around a bit to see if he’d go soaring off the edge of the jump, but time was running out and I needed to get to our meeting point.

After our rendezvous, Dani and I were able to put the Nordkettenbahn funicular’s claims to the test. “Twenty minutes from the city center to 2256 meters above sea level!” the advertisements in English proclaimed. Dani, an avid snowboarder, already owned a year-long pass, and my Innsbruck Card worked here too. The smooth-riding cars had a unique rotational system on their bearings, allowing each one to separately swivel several degrees depending on whether the funicular was moving along level earth or up the steep mountain slopes. We had to switch cars halfway up to a less modern-looking cable car instead of the funicular, but I enjoyed peering down at the slopes underneath us, watching mountain bikers take insane leaps off of cliffs on bikes that probably cost more than my entire university education. Dani smiled as he watched them; the previous day he had been out there with them during a study break in the afternoon.

That tiny building in the picture is the final stop on Hafelkar summit. Below it are the avalanche barricades; each one is 2 meters wide. The remainder of our journey!

The air was noticeably chillier as we disembarked at the last (working) stop at Seegrube. Innsbruck was laid out below us like a glowing, poorly-exposed quilt and behind us on the mountainsides the snow was bright enough to cause retinal detachment. Even from behind my shades, it was barely viewable and I had to crank the exposure setting on my camera down to -1.7 to get anything besides white blurs on it. We stood for a moment on the edge of the cliff, watching the hang gliders and ultralite flyers buzzing around below our ankles. A few ravens wheeled above us, scanning the picnic tables of the outdoor cafe in the dropoff point for a snack. One suddenly dived around in an arc, and as I tracked it, it suddenly released an aerial attack from its rear which splattered on the concrete where I had been standing seconds earlier before leaping out of the way. “Hike up the rest of the way, then?” Dani said with amusement. “Quickly, before they rearm!” I responded.

There was technically one more cable car up to the summit of the Hafelkar mountain, but it didn’t seem to be working, which was fine by us. Above us were the cliffs, boulders, shrimpy shrub grass, mountain goats, and weather-beaten metal sculptures which Dani told me were avalanche protection systems. Our hiking path was marked by red spray paint on the rocks every couple dozen meters, which I figured probably had to be redone every year after the 3-meter deep snows on these cliffs scrambled up the rocks into entirely new locations, possibly the bottom of the mountain. After slathering ourselves in sunblock to guard against the intense UV rays, we scrambled up the trail in amicable conversation, with me following my much more experienced friend as he picked out the trail.

Dani squints up at me from our snow-creek climb. Directly over his head on the opposite side of the city, you can see the Bergisel jump

About thirty minutes into the climb, our path intersected with what would normally have been an “ice-cold” mountain stream, but thanks to the precipitation Austria had been receiving, both here and in Salzburg, it was just “ice” instead. I was already sweating from exertion and exposure, and suggested that we switch from the path, to the steep fissure of crunchy snow instead. I found that even without long spikes on the toes of my boots, it was a pleasant way to climb, and I took the lead, kicking and stabbing each boot-toe into the ice and half-climbing, half-falling into the snow. In that way we made it up to the summit in about 75 minutes, just in time to learn from the ponytailed young man attending the lift that the last one back to the start of our hike at Seegrube would be leaving in 15 minutes. “Not nearly enough time for us to eat,” Dani said. “We’ll just need to make sure we’re back down at Seegrube before 5:30. No problem, right?”

It was incredible to have lunch up there at the peak, sitting under that Summit Cross you see in the opening picture for this post. Dani had come fully equipped for the meal, with local cheese and jerky, homemade bread and a pungent spicy mustard from a toothpaste-like tube. Besides that, we had our raisins and nuts, apples and tomatoes. We feasted like kings up there, watching pinpricks of light move on the mottled surface of the city far below us as cars moved across the Inn river’s bridges. Mountain sheep with bells inexplicably around their necks grazed sleepily below us, moving from hillock to hummock with ease in their search for the tiny bits of tundra grass here above the treeline. It was hard for me to remember that in another three days I’d be back in Jordan; I was a world away from it here.

Captain Jerky Fingers shows off the mountain lunch spread

The descent down the mountain was just as interesting, although in a completely different way. It wasn’t until 5:05 that we realized that if it had taken us an hour and a quarter to get up the mountain, how long would it take us to get down? Dani grinned and said, “Well, I guess we’ll have to freerun it.” Thus began a rather terrifying 20 minute descent, gamboling down the tiny narrow trail and leaping across snowy patches at a rate of speed that, had I been safely watching instead of partaking, I would have characterized as “ridiculous.” Dani effortlessly bounced off of rocks like a mountain goat, and I did my best to keep up although I knew he was holding back for my sake. I knew that I was one fast-moving footstep away from a twisted ankle, or worse, an uncontrollable skid that would leave me bouncing and twisting into the treeline 300 meters below us. Gasping and panting, I was only 30 seconds behind him when he bounded, deer-like, into the building at 5:25. “You did awesome, man” he greeted me when we were safely back into the descending cable car, leaving the Seegrube stop behind. “Most of my friends would never have been able to keep up with me like that. I do that sort of downhill run all the time. That was really impressive.” I think I probably wheezed something along the lines of, “The incentive was not to have to walk the rest of the way back into Innsbruck.”

For my last night in Innsbruck, I shared my father’s famous burrito recipe with Dani and his sister, who had returned from her weekend getaway. Dani even showed me how to make my own tortillas, and I broadcast the result over a Skype video conference to my father back in Wisconsin. I knew that I’d be getting up quite early tomorrow – today – to take the 5 hour train ride from Innsbruck, all the way across the country to Vienna. One thing’s for sure though – so far, out of my entire past two and a half weeks of vacation, this beautiful city with its silent stone sentinels has been my favorite place to relax and take in some splendor.

Note: to get a birds-eye view of the city as I saw it from the top of Hafelkar, download this Google Maps .KMZ file with some extra details added in!