One of our Bedouin drivers in Wadi Rum also served us tea and dinner at the campsite and stayed there with us. Later he shared his nargile with me while we sat around the fire.
Our tour guide informed me that this young man’s grandfather is a member of Parliament.
Petra is Jordan’s most popular tourist attraction, and it’s in an area where many poor Bedouins live. So you’re never far from a vendor of some kind, though once you get into the park a ways their wares get a bit tamer. But neither Indiana Jones tote bags nor simple camel-bone beads can distract you from what you’re seeing in the ancient Nabatean city.
On Saturday I broke off from the tour group and went to Fuheis, a town of 20,000 outside Amman. Fuheis is an anomaly in Jordan: it’s almost entirely Christian, majority Orthodox with many Catholics and a smattering of evangelicals. My companions for the afternoon were from the smattering, a pair of Baptist converts.
Our first full day in Jordan was spent mostly at sites of Greco-Roman ruins: we visited two cities of the ancient Decapolis, Gadara (now Umm Qais) and Gerasa (now Jerash). (Three of the ten if you count our initial home base in Amman, site of the ancient city of Philadelphia.) While Jesus is thought to have done ministry in both cities, the morning's main attractions were pagan ones.