Haywire in the Hashemite
Mac arrived to a bottle of the sleaziest Jordanian bootleg spirits I had ever laid eyes on.
I had spent the morning dramatically scouring Amman in the rain to locate a bottle shop, finally being led down a nefarious alley where my Oliver-twist-like chaperone knocked on a filthy, anonymous door to reveal a wonderland of illegal, liquid delights.
The usual suspects were absent. In their place, an assortment of mysterious bottles covered with Arabic script, each new introduction looking as thoroughly poisonous as the last. I picked one that looked like it came in an all-inclusive lawnmower fuel kit and bounced.
Procuring booze in old Amman was like acquiring whiskey in Manhattan in the 20s. Everyone knew what you were asking for, but no one wanted to admit they knew where to find it. A prohibition fostered by a devout yet curiously contradictory religious sentiment:
Tobacco: acceptable, alcohol: bad, Hashish: of course, akhi!
We'd downed half the bottle in our hotel room before taking to the streets to find Mac an identical Don-Johnson-style leather jacket in the bazaar, gulping down the remainder of our curious serum as we sheepishly greeted the downtown date vendors and the mid-morning mosque-goers, stopping for two lashings of Bedouin coffee boiled over hot sand and two more lashings from Allah as he omnipotently watched our morning revelry.
I'd been in Amman for weeks now, and I had divided my energy between working, writing, exploring and developing a love affair with the numerous falafel joints that peppered that harsh, stifling city. The hummus was unfathomably good, a bag of 10 fresh falafels cost a euro, and tourists avoided my battered streetside dens like the plague. Heaven.
As all self-respecting cartographers know, Jordan is as close as you can get to Arabia without entering Saudi. You can just taste the patriarchy, the absolute, feverish power of religious zeal, a society held firmly in the grip of a state inextricably woven in with archaic dogma and conservatism.
Jordan is like Saudi's less polarising brother who has a better PR manager.
With postcard wonders like Petra, Wadi Rum and the Dead Sea, it's a country perpetually caught between modernisation and relegation to religious conservatism. Situated at the crossroads of Asia, Africa, and Europe, it is an amalgamation of socio, religious and cultural differences, all living under the same constitutional Hashemite Monarchy.
In the weeks preceding Mac's arrival, I'd felt like an extraterrestrial arriving from months in Istanbul as I strolled the streets in my flair jeans and boots, earphones in, smiling at anybody who had a mouth.
If the women (when their eyes could actually be detected) didn't know what to make of me, their husbands certainly didn't. Yet I was forever greeted with the well-mannered kindness and hospitality I've now come to see typify the Arab world.
On our first night, Mac and I wound up at a rooftop bar in the infamous 'Rainbow Street' - the surest sign that Amman was slowly freeing itself from its conservative chains. The place was a dive, one of those mysteriously plush and mysteriously vacant venues that reek of laundering, but we stayed just long enough for me to witheringly attempt to charm an undercover hooker at the bar before being rejected and laughed at by the waiter.
Whatever self-constructed, quaint image of Amman I'd constructed in the preceding weeks evaporated after that interaction.
Between Rainbow St, the Roman ruins and the endless hole-in-the-wall coffee hovels, Mac and I wandered the streets for days, looking like a D-grade Starsky and Hutch.
We bumbled through a series of drunken escapades that culminated in a bizarre night at a Jordanian 'nightclub' where my date arrived with her entourage and catfished me, and we had our ears chewed off by US Army fly-ins on a four-day holiday before they blindly embarked on the greatest-country-on-earths' next great geopolitical middle eastern crusade.
We woke up to a pair of mind-numbing hangovers and the phone number of a Bedouin guy living with his tribe in the Wadi Rum desert. A wonderfully absurd connection, but when they come your way, you just run with it.
The following afternoon, we were speeding across the red sand in the back of a beaten-up Toyota with a bunch of 20-something-year-old guys who, at a superficial glance, looked like they'd been sucked through a wormhole while transporting caravans of dates through the Arabian desert in the Middle-Ages.
We stopped for a shisha at the foot of the dunes as the sun set over that sublime and enthrallingly other-worldly terrain, feeling language dripping off us as we laughed at the eternal joy of the universality of human emotion and experience. Perhaps Mac and I had been the benefactors of a few more dental excursions sitting in that circle, but we were all just young men curiously seeking to share and understand our world - and our intoxicants.
The desert was something else, and I was left with the peculiar longing for the night sky that has been slowly robbed from us since that coal started burning in Manchester. It was captivating on a level that only nature can deliver. A humility garnered by the realisation that we are but visitors here - night guests on this timeless mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam, as Carl Sagan so wonderfully put it.
Our final journey together was to the Dead Sea, where we lavishly splurged on a five-star hotel by the water, flirtingly insisting to the concierge that it was our honeymoon and receiving a room upgrade for being potentially a new generation of 'gay' couples travelling to the increasingly more open-minded kingdom.
We spent Valentine's Day the following morning having a bottomless champagne buffet as we stared out over that Esscene refuge, the mythological stage of the Old and New Testament.
I kicked around Amman for another three weeks, caught between exploring every inch of a city that was becoming more curious with every fresh interaction and waiting for my Indian visa - that notorious, endlessly agonising dance with one of the world's most convoluted bureaucracies.
My days in Jordan opened my mind to a world that was in flux.
After spending a lifetime in Turkey, I figured I knew the drill regarding The Middle East. Jordan showed me how little I knew and how easily I had allowed myself to rest on assumptions and clouded, half-baked intellectualisms about life in a sphere I really knew nothing about.
I sat with the curious, the conservative, those aching for change, and those happy to see their world become an Ayatollan wonderland.
In the end, my voyage through the Hashemite Kingdom proved to me that, despite what our media insists on vomiting out every minute, our shared similarities are far greater than our differences.
That between a hot mint tea, a shisha, and a basket of warm bread, most of our divisions can, at least momentarily, be abated.
