Travel in the time of Corona: making do with mirages

It may not seem the best time to be telling travel stories, but as with all things it all depends on your perspective.

Our perspective is from the balcony of a five star hotel in the Jordanian city of Aqaba. Aqaba sits on Jordan’s 26 kilometres of  Red Sea coast, with the Israeli port of Eilat visible across the water to the west.

This is a first for us. In all our travels, stretching back to the late seventies and early eighties and beginning again in 2018, neither Kay nor I have ever gone higher than three stars — and rarely even three. We are unrepentent old-style, long-distance, slow-travelling backpackers, without the backpacks anymore

We arrived in Aqaba a few nights ago, about 12 hours after our host in Wadi Musa let us know our days of waiting to see the ancient city of Petra were over, at least for the time being. He had just had a call from a government official.

We’d arrived in Wadi Musa, the service town for Petra, a few days earlier, in a local mini-bus from Amman’s southern bus terminal, on a cold wet Saturday afternoon.

  It had rained so much that Petra had been closed all day, flash flooding creating instant rivers in some of its narrower chasms. But our weather app told us the rain would be followed by three days of relatively warm and sunny weather for us to explore Petra.

Storm clouds of another kind were rolling in, however. Surfing the net, I was shocked to discover that while were happily enjoying our bus ride to Wadi Musa, the Jordanian cabinet had announced it was shutting all of Jordan’s tourist attractions for a week, in the wake of the Coronavirus.

Our perspective was immediately egocentric. It was scarcely believable we could have such bad luck. Petra was to be one of the great attractions on our six month trip from Darwin to Warsaw and back, if not the greatest.

From our bedroom window we could see the sprawling outcrop of marbled sandstone hills that holds Petra. The rest of the panorama around Wadi Musa, which consists of steep, treeless mountains split by deep chasms, is astonishing in its own right.

The next morning we descended towards it, zig-zagging down the steep hill to spare our knees, hoping against hope that the staff would take pity on us and the other travellers who had arrived yesterday. Surprisingly the visitors centre was still open, as men in masks sprayed and polished display cases on the outside of the building. We spent an hour or two reading the displays inside, learning about the history, politics, religion and water-harvesting skills of the Nabateans, and admiring their fine, delicate  pottery, some of it still intact after more than two millennia. But its scale model of the city itself was as close as we would get to Petra for the time being.

When we returned to our lodgings, we learned that Jordan itself was to be closed in two days.

We decided to stay in Wadi Musa and wait for Petra to reopen, rather than rush back to Amman in the hope of getting a flight out. After all, we were not in a hurry, less than halfway through our journey, and they had said Petra would be closed for only a week. Our host Mohammed agreed we could stay if that was our choice. He worked at a local hotel, one of dozens in Wadi Musa, and almost the entire staff had been told to “take a long holiday”.

But plans keep changing, and few of us can any longer pretend that we are the masters of our destiny. On Thursday, a Ministry of Health car picked us up from Mohammed’s place and drove us up into the highest parts of Jordan, down through the sculpted desert of Wadi Rum and on to the Red Sea, where we are required to spend 14 nights in quarantine.

Travel must always accomodate the unexpected. Aqaba has near perfect weather at this time of year but the beaches are completely closed, and in any case we can only see the sea from a distance. Even the swimming pools at our resort hotel are out of bounds to us.

We are being treated with great care and hospitality. We are confined to our rooms, but occasionally allowed to don our masks and go down to the courtyard for one hour of exercise or to just sit in the sun. The open area is often sprayed with gallons of bleach by men in anti-viral armour. Once a day a doctor and two witnesses take our temperatures and three times a day masked staff greet us as they deliver our meals. We practice our few words of Arabic, which we are trying to increase in number. Marhaba … Shukran! Apart from on-line, our only other social contact is with each other and a young Hungarian woman who was “captured” in the same sweep as we were. She is in the room next door and we can chat balcony to balcony, or in the courtyard during exercise times.

It is the perfect environment to sit at a desk, and sort through unedited travel pictures, films and notes from India, Singapore and South East Asia. Already I find myself dipping into far flung, half-forgotten places so deeply that when I re-emerge from my revery I am surprised to find myself in comfortable captivity in a city we never planned to visit.

The Australian government’s Smart Traveller website has always been very cautious in its approach.  Reconsider your need to travel or Exercise caution when visiting, is the advice it offers for many countries. Now it simply says Do not travel anywhere.

Except, we might add, in our memories and our imagination. Feel free to join us.

Dave Richards