Greetings on a Thursday. Here I am, smiling this morning, high in the mountains that tower above the landscape of southern Jordan. As always, to create the analogy, picture being in the Rockies outside of Denver, with a more precipitous drop down to the valley floor.
It very well could have been the last picture ever taken of me, alive.
No, no wars nearby or terroristic events. Relatively calm and peaceful everywhere at this time. So, where is the peril?
Look down and to the left of my picture. This is the Wadi Musa or “Snake Road” that leads out of the interior of Jordan, west toward the valley, eventually meeting the highway north to the Dead Sea. Take a look at that road, and try clicking on it to see if it might enlarge it.
The section you see is only a small representation of the entire road. It goes for miles, and is filled with turns that I wouldn’t even refer to as “hairpin”. Some of them simply stop and double-back at a 180 degree angle. I don’t know if there is a Jordanian Highway Safety Administration. I rather doubt it. There are no guardrails, no gravel runaway safety ramps, no shoulders. Just narrow roads that can hardly fit two cars, winding their way down and through valleys in the craggy mountain range.
Next, see the picture below. The gentleman on the left is our bus driver whose name I can’t pronounce. All I know about him is that he is crazy. No, insane. He drives our bus (see picture below) as if it was his own personal Valleyfair amusement ride. Switching sides of the road, coasting at speeds I’d prefer not to reach on flat land, let alone roads that hug cliffs of high mountains with not much of a space separating bus from rock strewn canyons hundreds of yards below.
For almost an hour, I hung on to the seat in front of me white-knuckled, coaxing the bus to stay on firm ground, looking ahead to make sure we were not suddenly going to greet a car coming at us from the other direction.
We finally made it to the valley, but it was a draining experience. With that, no need to go to Valleyfair this year. I’ve already gone on my one death-defying ride for 2009, and lived to tell about it.
By the way, the young man in the middle is our official Jordanian police escort. Every foreign group in the country is required to have an armed policeman on their bus, for safety purposes. Not to watch us, but to make sure we don’t run into any danger. His name is Uday (like one of Saddam Hussein’s sons, for what it’s worth), and he can’t be a day over 19. When we stop, he always seems to be wandering off talking to whatever young Jordanian females are in the immediate vicinity. I am wondering what kind of protection he would offer the group in any heated situation. We could be hijacked by militants and I think he’d still be leaning over a fence or table, staring longingly at the latest female he has been smitten by. Today, I wish he would have been more valuable to us. He should have held his gun on the bus driver and told him to drive like a rational, sane person. That would have prevented the “terrorism” we lived though on the way down the Wadi Musa.
It very well could have been the last picture ever taken of me, alive.
No, no wars nearby or terroristic events. Relatively calm and peaceful everywhere at this time. So, where is the peril?
Look down and to the left of my picture. This is the Wadi Musa or “Snake Road” that leads out of the interior of Jordan, west toward the valley, eventually meeting the highway north to the Dead Sea. Take a look at that road, and try clicking on it to see if it might enlarge it.
The section you see is only a small representation of the entire road. It goes for miles, and is filled with turns that I wouldn’t even refer to as “hairpin”. Some of them simply stop and double-back at a 180 degree angle. I don’t know if there is a Jordanian Highway Safety Administration. I rather doubt it. There are no guardrails, no gravel runaway safety ramps, no shoulders. Just narrow roads that can hardly fit two cars, winding their way down and through valleys in the craggy mountain range.
Next, see the picture below. The gentleman on the left is our bus driver whose name I can’t pronounce. All I know about him is that he is crazy. No, insane. He drives our bus (see picture below) as if it was his own personal Valleyfair amusement ride. Switching sides of the road, coasting at speeds I’d prefer not to reach on flat land, let alone roads that hug cliffs of high mountains with not much of a space separating bus from rock strewn canyons hundreds of yards below.
For almost an hour, I hung on to the seat in front of me white-knuckled, coaxing the bus to stay on firm ground, looking ahead to make sure we were not suddenly going to greet a car coming at us from the other direction.
We finally made it to the valley, but it was a draining experience. With that, no need to go to Valleyfair this year. I’ve already gone on my one death-defying ride for 2009, and lived to tell about it.
By the way, the young man in the middle is our official Jordanian police escort. Every foreign group in the country is required to have an armed policeman on their bus, for safety purposes. Not to watch us, but to make sure we don’t run into any danger. His name is Uday (like one of Saddam Hussein’s sons, for what it’s worth), and he can’t be a day over 19. When we stop, he always seems to be wandering off talking to whatever young Jordanian females are in the immediate vicinity. I am wondering what kind of protection he would offer the group in any heated situation. We could be hijacked by militants and I think he’d still be leaning over a fence or table, staring longingly at the latest female he has been smitten by. Today, I wish he would have been more valuable to us. He should have held his gun on the bus driver and told him to drive like a rational, sane person. That would have prevented the “terrorism” we lived though on the way down the Wadi Musa.
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