Under the early morning sun, we bid farewell to Jerusalem bound for the Jordanian desert and the Dead Sea. Still accompanied by Lior in our comfy motor coach, we made our way through the Judean desert on a quiet two lane highway that snaked its way through the impossibly dry, rocky landscape, signs of life few and far between. 

An occasional spot of green dots the hillside, often giving way to what we call tumbleweeds, that tell a silent tale of the time since it last rained. Life here must be incredibly difficult, for flora and fauna and humans alike, and yet over this hill and around that corner, there are camps of bedouins. They are a nomadic people who for centuries – millennia – live their lives in this desert. It is not the romanticized version of luxurious bedouin tents that Hollywood imagines, but rather low slung tents and make-shift fences that corral the goats. 

We arrived at the Jordanian border (at what turned out to be the first of many check points). And we waited. And waited, most of us thinking that this was it – an easy “wave them through” in our bus of 14 American tourists, one Canadian, and an Israeli guide and driver – and we’d be on our way. The day before a story circulated among our group that the border crossing would involve us dragging our luggage for an hour through some sort of DMZ/no-man’s land. What if that was indeed about to happen?! We expected it to be challenging – it is the border of Israel and Jordan, after all – but Lior assured us that the rumor was just that. We would not be dragging our luggage through the dust, unaccompanied. He was permitted to stay with us further into the process, although not fully into Jordan. Not to worry.

And wave us through they did – but there was more to come. Not a few minutes later, we stopped for passport control and what felt like entry into Jordan, but no (we were sort of half-in Jordan, but had exited Israel). We had another checkpoint, and as we waited in the bus, I had my phone’s Google Translate pointed out the window at the security checkpoint sign…and about two seconds later, a guard was on the bus “no photos! Come here!” Yikes. Was I about to end up in a scene from Midnight Express?! I showed him my phone and he watched me delete the image. I could feel his anger boiling up but then he let us go on our way…only after collecting all of our passports. When would we get these back? There were no explanations; we had to simply trust that we would. We then drive further, stop in what appears to be a random parking lot that might be related to something official, and our Jordanian guide Fadi joined us. He handed us back our passports, and we are – finally – in Jordan.

Our two lane highway turned into a single one, taking its twists and turns through the Jordanian hills and valleys, a headless concrete snake showing us the way to the red desert. We made brief a stop in Madaba, Jordan (which we all agreed could have been skipped), and continued along the winding road until we arrived early evening at our beautiful hotel on the shore of the Dead Sea. 

The Dead Sea. So called because nothing can live in it. There’s an ancient mosaic depicting a dead fish swimming upstream in the River Jordan warning the fish who are coming down. “Death ahead!” it seems to say…

The Dead Sea was formed when a massive earthquake split a mountain range in two, and because it is the lowest place on the planet (~1,300 feet below sea level), the water has nowhere to go but to evaporate. And thus, it is 10 times saltier than the ocean. 

And of course, we swam in it! The sensation is so odd – you instantly float. To the point where you really can’t do anything but float. If you try to tread water, your legs are pulled back up above the surface by some unseen alien force. Don’t put your head underwater, and be prepared for even the slightest scrape on your skin (don’t shave in the morning!) to burn like you wouldn’t believe. The water feels sort of slimy, and along the shore are puddles of salt and minerals that have dried in the heat of the Jordanian sun, reminding you what is invisibly present in the calm, murky water.

The mud along the sea floor is therapeutic, so we indulged. We slathered ourselves with black sticky slimy goo, head to toe, and let it dry in the desert heat. It grayed and cracked and peeled and made us look like some gruesome creature conjured up by computer animators…but when washed away, our skin felt smooth and moisturized like never before.

The earth has given us some of her treasures in this far flung locale, in the depths of salt and sand older than time itself, and while it can’t sustain life, it nonetheless nourishes.