After Bashar Al Assad, you must come to Homs, said Abu Talal, the man who came 100 miles to give me my lost iPhone, the one I dropped in the mountains of Petra. I love the way Abu Talal says this, in the sure knowledge that Syria’s time of trouble will end. Petra had wowed me, swept me up in its breathtaking grandeur, both natural and man-made. Only at the end of the day back at the hotel did I realise I no longer had my cherished iPhone. The hotel staff made some calls to the restaurants in the heart of Petra – two are located at the end of the Roman road that completes the world’s Seventh wonder. The 2300-year-old Nabatean metropolis is set amid majestically slung gorges and mountains, sculpted and layered in implausible forms and colours, a trade hub of the ancient world lost for a millennium.
Tanushka had extolled to me tirelessly the hospitality and grace of her Jordanian parentage. Since arriving here, I have experienced this on enough occasions to know it is something undeniably real. We are talking cab drivers who, when asked how much, shrug and say ‘No problem.’ And mean it - until you insist on paying. Shopkeepers who give you water for lack of the right change. Our daughter is showered with gifts – jewellery, drinks, kisses. A little Arabic and an adorable toddler help to endear, but the Jordanians are always sincere in their generosity. Almost never have we suffered from the harsh sales tactics and double dealing that are part of the tourist package elsewhere in the world.
Abu Talal topped anything I had so far experienced in Jordan, or could reasonably expect – even if he was Syrian. My phone could have fetched a fair sum on the open market if someone wished to sell it. I left Petra with a shrug. C’est la vie. You get to see the Seventh Wonder of the World, climb to the top of a valley and see a mad man in a Bob Marley T-shirt climb up an 80 foot Nabatean temple carved from the mountain. You watch this cracked Bedouin jump from ancient stone roof to hanging buttress, and pirouette from the highest pinnacle to the nervous awe of the tourists and Bedouin traders below. All it needed was a New Yorker to shout ‘Go on, buddy, jump!” He didn’t. In fact he risks his life to wow the crowd once an hour, before descending into the empty chamber of the temple where he listens to reggae and smokes the stuff that numbs his fear. I climbed the final stretch to the summit where a Bedouin tent overlooks the Arabian desert far below. The horizon is lost in infinite dunes. A Bedouin with intense blue eyes framed by a black headscarf plays a mean Arabian blues on his oud. He tells me he sleeps here most nights because here you can only hear silence and the wind. He has travelled all over the Arab world but always comes back. He loves this place because of the history, he says. People have been here since the stone age, leaving their tools amid the more elaborate encryptions of the peoples that came after. Nomads from the Arabian desert, the forefathers of today’s Bedouin, arrived 25 centuries ago. Later as their wealth grew, they added their magnificent tombs to the very rock that is the meaning of the word ‘Petra’. There has always been water and this has always been a place of refuge, trade and pilgrimage. Before earthquakes and changing trade patterns ended Petra’s golden age in the Seventh century, all wanted a piece of its riches. Now its wealth is in tourism. Its £50 to get in, up massively in recent years, but how can you price something that surpasses all superlatives for an ancient wonder?
Next to Wadi Rum, an earthscape of crenelated rocks and high-walled valleys that rise from the desert as if carved from the very mind of God, declaring forever the miracle of creation. In the valley of Rum, the camels stand motionless in the dry mid-afternoon heat beneath a sculpted cliff of sandstone split by a gorge, while black vultures circle in the indigo sky to the ethereal imploring of the muezzin. David Lean eat your heart out.
Aqaba, by contrast, is a bustling Arabian port and burgeoning tourist hub, taking on its rival Eilat only a stone throw away in Israel across the bay. Here the top of the Red Sea joins the southernmost tip of Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to Israel. At our borrowed apartment on the hill we receive a call from Amman. I have some good news, says Nabil, our celebrated host in the capital. Nabil is a true household name here in Jordan. Say to almost any Jordanian – like our taxi driver – ‘Nabil Sawalha’ – and they will exclaim his name back to you. Nabil Sawalha, I love him, they say. He is a satirist, TV and film star, and much loved radio raconteur. We watched his home videos of his Ramadan sketch show which he performed at the Amman Sheraton last month. Nabil as Gamel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, Syria’s Hafez al Assad (the late father of current Bashar), Saddam Hussein and last but not least Brother leader Muammar Gadaffi. And the late King Hussein of Jordan of course. After his whirwind tour of recent Arab big men, Nabil comes on stage as himself, lamenting the lack of such characters in the Arab world today. This one is not for broadcast, Nabil explains from his sofa.
Back to that call. Someone’s found your phone. He was on the mountain climbing up to the temple when his son saw it and gave it to his dad. Abu Talal took it to a phone shop, charged it up, went through the numbers and found Nabil, a Jordanian name. He rang it, and hey presto. I was amazed that this considerate and resourceful man had bothered to track me down. Nabil explains that Abu Talal lives in Ma-an, 100 miles up the Desert Highway. He gives me the number. Tanushka calls him and in her basic Arabic thanks him and says we will call back tomorrow. We mull over how to retrieve the phone. Next morning Hassan, our ever helpful taxi driver, says he will get it back ‘No problem’. The same day, mid afternoon, he calls us at our flat in Aqaba. In Arabic he tells us he is with Abu Talal and they want to come round with the phone. Abu Talal here? In Aqaba? They’ll be round in two minutes. Suddenly, they are here. Hassan, and two other guys – one large-framed with a moustache and wearing a traditional white dishdash. Abu Talal. Hassan says he has seen the pictures I took on the phone and wanted to see our faces to be sure that it is indeed us. Abu Talal leaves nothing to chance. We are effusive in our thanks. Tanushka rushes inside and grabs whatever she can find – her favourite pashmina for his wife, some dates and bananas. After the expected refusals, my saviour accepts our meagre gifts. He tells us he is from Homs, heart of the Syrian revolt, the city that has suffered more than any from Assad’s brutal crackdown. You must come to Syria, says Abu Talal. Well, yes, we had planned to go there before the uprising erupted. We promise we will come to Homs, after Basher al Assad is gone. He gives me my phone and Hassan drives them away. I check the phone is working. It’s now connected to an Arab network. Even better, the keyboard is now in Arabic. I also discover that he has left me a video of him eating lunch with his friends, a little memento to remember him by. Thank you Abu Talal.
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