Valley of the Dead Sea

Amman is a city in the hills, which lends a feeling of claustrophobia to those used to grand boulevards and spacious midans (plazas). I felt it would be easy to get lost as a newcomer, with all the roads winding up and down hill and very little constancy of direction.

Upon leaving the city for the Dead Sea, I soon understood why Amman seemed so jagged. We wound down hillsides, and as soon as we were out of the city we found ourselves on a mountain road paralleling a drop-off, with nothing but and endless topographical orgy beyond it. High hills, deep valleys, and endless plains all merged to form what instantly reminded me of the Great Rift Valley in Kenya, outside of Nairobi. Then I remembered that this was the Great Rift Valley.

The Great Rift Valley, depending on how geologically specific you want to be, starts in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon and descends through the Holy Land, separating Galilee from the Golan Heights. The Jordan River runs through it and the valley continues through the Dead Sea, the Jordan Valley, the Gulf of Aqaba on the eastern side of the Sinai Peninsula, then southward through the Red Sea. The valley meets Africa somewhere near Somalia and continues southward, to where I first saw it in Kenya, before terminating in Mozambique.

Sunset over the Dead Sea was beautiful. The previously sandy, dun colored hills on the opposite bank came alive at dusk with the twinkling lights of hamlets and traffic. The sky above became a watercolor of pastel blues, pinks, and purples intersected by fingers of stringy white cloud before finally giving way to night.

We took a different route on a different day to reach the Karama region near the Dead Sea. The road followed a number of switchbacks which reminded me of West Virginia, without the trees. The landscape in Western Jordan was quite stunning and not one easily forgotten. I had not at all expected to see such beautiful country; I had always been told that Jordan was an artificial kingdom made of lines draw in blank, uninhabited dessert, filling the political void described as somewhere south of Syria, north of Arabia, west of Iraq, and east of Palestine.