In November I led a week-long tour in Jordan, so here's my Jordan Good List:
1. Covering yourself in mineral-rich mud and then scrubbing it away while floating on your back in the Dead Sea (just don't get the water in your eyes!).
2. Wandering among the many columns of Jerash, one of the few Ancient Roman sites I've visited where you don't need to use your imagination to understand what the city would have looked like. You half expect men in togas to wander out from among the columns...
3. Slowing down and taking in a spectacular sunset in Wadi Rum, once the setting of Lawrence of Arabia's adventures. Bonus points if you arrange for wine and live music from a famous local lute player.
4. Enjoying a night out in the capital, Amman. The New York Times recently claimed that "newly stylish Amman" is "perhaps the most pleasant city in the Middle East."
5. After walking one kilometer down a winding narrow path set between rose colored canyon walls, catching your first glimpse of Petra's Treasury.
These are members of my group reacting to seeing the Treasury after our guide had them close their eyes until the last minute...
And this is the Treasury itself.
Yes indeed, Jordan has many sites to satisfy a curious traveler. What I find most impressive about the country, however, is not the wealth of places to see but the seemingly limitless capacity of the people of modern-day Jordan to act as good neighbors in a troubled region.
In 1990, for example, Jordan (which was already home to a significant Palestinian refugee population) took in an estimated quarter million Palestinians. The Palestinians had been displaced by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and subsequent Desert Storm because Kuwait kicked them out for siding with Saddam. Less than 15 years later Jordan again acted as a safe haven after the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is estimated that in the last five years some 750,000 Iraqis have fled to Jordan; this in a country with a total population of only 6 million inhabitants. Today Iraqis make up about 10% of the total population of Jordan, and Jordan now hosts the highest number of refugees per capita of any country in the world.
Imagine for a moment if the equivalent number of people sought refuge in Canada or the United States over the same period of time. It would be as if, over the course of 5 years, about 4 million people arrived in Canada, or 40 million in the United States.* Would we be as accommodating as the Jordanians?
