Passport Please!
I had planned to spend almost a week in Dahab, the Red Sea party town where I thought I could meet tons of interesting fellow travellers and lazily while away
afternoons by the beach after a daily snorkel along fabulous coral reef.
But of course that would have been too easy. With my usual luck, I got sick the night before taking a seven hour bus to Sinai, and got stuck in the town of Nuweiba, never reaching Dahab. Then came five days of nausea, fever and unruly gut functions.
So most of my time was spent lying not blissfully on the beach but deliriously on the floor of my stuffy reed hut with a wet sock on my forehead. An easy prey for the clouds of ravenous mosquitoes, I finally left the Red Sea a few frustrating days later looking like a smallpox ridden, terminal cancer victim.
So it was a thinner (lost almost 5kg) and feverish me that boarded the ferry bound to Aqaba, Jordan. My guidebook’s first shortcoming was to NOT mention that I had to buy a ticket in advance, so I showed up without one. This seemed to be a big problem and I was made to wait for all the other passengers (mostly tour groups and a minority of locals) to board until my case could be dealt with. I had to explain to half a dozen employees that I didn’t have a ticket and each one walked away shaking his head.
I was halfway through a mental draft of the insult letter I planned to send Lonely Planet when a new guy in uniform signalled me onto the boat. I paid him the fare in American dollars and with a wink, he told me: “Because you had to wait I’ll let you ride first class”. So I rode alone on the plush air-con upper deck of the ferry with a clean bathroom all to myself. Ah! Being a lone blonde girl really gets you places in this part of the world!!!
Just over an hour later we arrived in Jordan and everyone rushed to disembark in the hope of reaching customs first. I got out after a group of Brits led by their seasoned tour guide who handed a stack of red passports to the Jordanian official on the way out.
When my turn came, the official asked me for my passport and whether I was part of that tour group. So I flashed my passport just saying “no no, no tour” and bullied my way out of the crowd and away from him. As I briskly walked away, deaf to his repeated requests for my passport, he came after me.
For some wild reason I can hardly explain now, my reaction was to grab my passport and run away, screaming over my shoulder “no tour, no tour!”.
Fenced in as I was in a barbed wire border compound surrounded by armed guards,I obviously didn’t get very far. The official, never losing his cool, eventually caught up with me and calmy repeated: “Excuse me, madam, I need your passport please. Everybody needs to give me their passport. You will get it back in the next building.”
The next building? I looked at the immigration office some 500 meters away and back at the officer, and resisted some more: “But no, you can’t keep it. This is my passport, I need it!”
I don’t know if many passengers are seized by similar momentary lapses of insanity, but the officer seemed to find my hysteria quite normal. Taking my passport out of my hand, he simply asked me politely to go to the immigration office and not worry, stressing that this was standard procedure.
I sheepishly followed the herd of passengers into the immigration office still unconvinced, psyching myself up for hours of waiting around. I ended up sitting next to a bunch of young Canadians who were busy taking turns to bitch about the unprofessionalism and inefficiency of Middle Eastern bureaucracy.
The first thing I noticed was the huge picture of the new King Abdallah, having recently succeeded his deceased father King Hussein. One of the Canadian girls pointed out the King’s stunning resemblance with Billy Crystal (“but with more hair”) and the six of us all nodded in agreement.
Miraculously, it only took a few minutes for us to get our passports back. And welcome to Jordan! It was my fourth trip to the Hashemite Kingdom and after the miserable week I had just passed I was craving for some even remotely familiar surroundings. The Jordanian accent was therefore music to my ears and the pink Wadi desert felt like home.
The next day, still battling a fever, I fled the heat of Aqaba and headed North to Amman. There I met my old buddy Eyas who I hadn’t seen for years. He and his friend Malek, who had a strapped up broken shoulder, took me on a day trip to the old Roman ruins of Jerash.
In pure Jordanian fashion, they insisted on sneaking me in as a Jordanian so I could avoid paying the tourist entrance fee (1$ for Jordanians and 10$ for tourists).
Luckily, I had left my goofy tourist hat and khaki pants at home that day, and looked half decent for once. Eyas went alone to buy three Jordanian tickets and we all walked towards the gate hoping we could go in unnoticed.
But a guard stopped us to ckeck our tickets and asked for proof of our Jordanian nationality. The guys said they didn’t have any cards with them, complaining that there was no need for proof. But the guard wouldn’t hear it. I dug in my pocket and got ready to shell the extra $9. But Malek, who had until then been such a quiet and oh-so-sweet boy, wasn’t gonna let this stop us.
“Now you listen to me”, he unexpectedly told the guard in an annoyed tone, “I’m recently married and I just came back to my country, and ever since I got back toJordan I’ve had nothing but problems. Like this broken shoulder, you see it? And now I come here to spend a nice afternoon and you are giving me more problems telling me I am not Jordanian. Are you calling me a liar? Really, I cannot believe this!”
This was world class acting, Eyas and I were in shock! I tried to keep a straight face and play the supporting wife while Eyas refereed between the guard and an increasingly hysterical Malek.
Malek’s delightful performance in his best Jordanian Bedouin accent lasted several minutes, and another guard came over to see what the fuss was all about. Just when I thought Malek was gonna give up before these two guys who wouldn’t budge, he pulled a pack of Viscount cigarettes out of his back pocket, and shoved it in the first guard’s face: “Now look at this! Who but a Jordanian would smoke this?”.
It was so far-fetched, that the annoyed guards finally gave up and let us in. I took Malek’s good arm and walked in so until we were out of sight. We had a great – and cheap – afternoon touring one of Jordan’s best historical sites.
I had just learned another important lesson about the Middle East: hysteria can take you a long way if you can forgo all dignity and carry it out long enough. This, I later learned, is especially true when negotiating. Be imaginative and keep it up until you wear the other out!
Amman’s cool nights took care of my fever and a couple of days later I felt strong and brave enough for some new adventures. So against everybody’s advice, I packed my bags and hopped on a public minibus bus headed for Israel…
