We woke up around seven and quickly packed without having breakfast. Outside it was gray, chilly, and dank—as much as this Baltic word applies to a country where it rains a couple of times a year. The sky was overcast with a gray blanket, it felt like a couple of drops might even fall on us. Of course, this was an illusion: during our entire stay in Jordan, we never did see any rain, although rumor had it there had even been floods in Amman shortly before our arrival.
They suggested we park our bikes right in the lobby, good thing it gets locked for the night
The hotel lobby is beautifully decorated
Our hotel was located near the intersection where the road from Karak meets the widely known “King’s Highway”. The thing is, Jordan has as many as three highways running from north to south: the road along the Dead Sea, which we rolled along in the previous parts, the new high-speed “Desert Highway”, and a scenic road winding through the mountains that is over two thousand years old and was used back in the day by camel caravans to transport spices. It’s called the “King’s Highway”, and is highly recommended to tourists for its beauty and winding curves. A fairly large chunk of our route (borrowed, let me remind you, with minor tweaks from the KE Adventure Travel website) lay along this road, numbered 35, but it was exactly from Karak that we turned onto it. Jumping ahead, I’ll say that while the highway truly wows with its landscapes, the traffic on many of its sections is quite brisk, and an excess of cars and exhaust fumes by no means leads to harmony in a cyclist’s heart. Luckily, the wise folks who put our track together took care of this, and a good part of it ran off-road, which is always a joy to our souls.
Funnily enough, it's absolutely impossible to talk Google into routing from Amman to Aqaba along this highway; I had to use Bing, and even then, drag the waypoints manually.
Coasting down from the hotel to the busy intersection with the King’s Highway, we found that life there was already in full swing: a shop and a cafe were open, and the place was packed with people. We didn't stick around, knowing another heroic feat awaited us ahead, and immediately pushed upward, into the suburbs of Karak. When I was analyzing the map at home, the population density along our path wasn't always really clear, but it turned out that 30 kilometers out of Karak are quite densely built up, and the amount of trash on the shoulders exceeds all possible limits altogether. In places it piles up into a layer 30-40 centimeters deep.
The cunning folks from KE Adventure don't pedal this section but use the help of a support vehicle, but we didn't have a choice (we haven't mastered hiring pickups yet, but it's all ahead of us).
A few kilometers later, we decided to have breakfast after all; I simply shook up some Joylent, and Sasha bought a falafel hotdog at an eatery for 50 piastres. Surrounded by mountains of trash and the stench of chickens being sold right there, we watched teenagers waiting for a bus. A rare occasion when you can see Jordanian girls unescorted: usually they're not to be found on the streets, and they tried not to make eye contact with us. At first, women and girls in dressy burqas, often with elements of green (the signature color of Islam), sparked our interest and a pleasant sense of the exotic, but pretty soon we got sick of all that, and craved our own, normal European chicks, with exposed skin, varied hairstyles, uncovered by headscarves, even if not in a miniskirt, but at least in jeans. Especially since with them, thanks to the onslaught of equality and feminism, you can not only talk, but argue.
Pretty? What about the photo below?
The street featuring a bunch of illegal dumps is called Environment Street. I hope the irony isn't lost on the Jordanians themselves
In Jordan, compared to Israel, there are quite a lot of water sources, so greenery is sometimes found “just because”
Furniture is sold like this
Often, for some reason, together with electronics, apparently Samsung doesn't mind shelling out some dough for a sign
But at the roundabout there are these pleasant little pyramids with sutras
For a few hours we climbed three hundred meters up through the noise, din, and dust of Karak, from 933 meters to 1242. Along the way I punctured a tire, the only time in the country, patched it up without incident. Experience shows that it's enough to bring along patches and one spare tube: almost always a hole can be patched, and the spare is needed for those ultra-rare cases when, say, the valve stem is torn off, or the gash is so long that a patch won't cover it.
At the top point, a huge mosque awaited us. Interestingly enough, for several blocks around it — absolutely no trash.
After the mosque, the city ended, and an almost endless descent began — from 1242 meters to 485! It wouldn't be a big deal, but then we'd have to slog all those meters back up. Were we not such seasoned bike-maniacs, our morale would have seriously plummeted at the thought of such a hellish climb awaiting us. Still, we signed up for this ourselves. Before starting the descent, we stopped to catch our breath and prepare for the thrilling rollercoaster ride, when the bike just rolls downhill on its own at 40-50 kilometers per hour. Unfortunately, Sasha's sunglasses had broken, which at such speed are a very crucial accessory, because something hard can fly into your eye, and at a speed of 50 km per hour even a tiny gnat becomes exactly that.
While we were hanging around on the shoulder, a somewhat fairy-tale-like, albeit primitive, music could be heard. I had already heard it a couple of times in Jordan before, and kept racking my brain as to how it could be that the exact same melody is played at different times and in different parts of the country. Fortunately, the mystery was soon solved: it turned out to be a truck selling gas cylinders. As it turns out, for several decades now, Jordan has had a curious procedure for selling liquefied gas. You buy a truck, make a deal with a gas company about where you'll be cruising, install loudspeakers on it, and from 7 AM to seven PM you slowly drive around your little neighborhood, getting on its residents' nerves. If any of them wants to buy gas (and they have no way out, because cooking stoves and heating systems run on it), they have to quickly run out of the house, catch up with your truck, and hoist a huge cylinder onto themselves. How the melody eats into the poor driver's and his partner's brains over those hours, I am terrified to even imagine. The melody, by the way, has several variations, so that competing little trucks can drive through the same neighborhood.
The tradition of such trade, by the way, is a modern invention; people used to just order gas by phone. As an exotic quirk of Jordan, it looks and sounds delightful, but what to do if you're a local, when once every few hours this catchy melody drips on your brain (starting from seven in the morning!), is personally beyond me.
Sonic terrorism, nothing short of it.