I was suddenly jostled awake by a firm hand on my shoulder. It was the driver of our bus from Amman to Damascus, shaking me. He dared not touch Claudia, sitting next to me, and after I was awake to some degree, he indicated that I should wake her too. In fact, it turned out, men and women were not even technically allowed to sit next to each other on this bus, and we had been inadvertently perpetrating another Gaijin Smash.

Regardless, I woke Claudia, and, in a somewhat addled state, wandered off the bus and out into Syria. It was pitch black, cool and dry outside. I looked at my watch. It was just a little after three in the morning. The bus driver had removed our bags and bikes from the belly of the bus, and they lay on the road in a puddle of streetlight. And with a rev and a squeak of the suspension, the bus was gone.

We were soon approached by a small gang of young men, who emerged from the shadowy alleyways of this highway side in Damascus, shouting about taxis. When we began to show them our bicycles and unfold them, indicating our intention to wheel into town, they began to giggle and switched from selling mode into inquisition mode.

Soon we were in the midst of an uncomfortable conversation, in which lines of communication were fraying and the topics included the war in Iraq, Barak Obama, and Obama’s relative comparison to George Bush. Here, in the middle of the night in Damascus, left on the side of a nondescript highway by a grouchy bus driver, being harassed by random cab drivers, you might think, dear reader, that we were a little on edge.

Drastically the opposite. For one reason or another, we were calm, cool, and collected.  In fact, we were feeling quite positive about being in Syria. We strapped our belongings down, climbed onto the bikes and headed out, calling out our goodbyes as we rode, though the gang of men yelled at us to stay for more parlor talk.

The road on which we traveled had been recently paved in a most absurd way, with giant piles of asphalt in some places, and huge rounded, deliberate looking potholes in others. To make matters worse, many of these obstacles were hiding in the shadows, and occasionally cars would whip by us at startling speeds, careening through the night.

Despite all this, we were in very high spirits, singing as we rode, “She’s a Lady, Oh Oh Oh, She’s a Lady!” and generally feeling good. At a large roundabout, we stopped to ask a man wandering the streets which way into the city center, but he turned out to be either very drunk, or on some other kind of drugs. Luckily, another, also slightly inebriated chap emerged out of the night, and directed us to ride subversively across a bridge toward a cluster of Gothic looking buildings.

And then we were there. It was the center of Damascus, and it was beautiful. Most of the buildings had a very old world imperial look to them, with ornate decorations, and good number of spire-like attachments. The city was also quite clean, and smelled faintly of roasting nuts. It was great to have arrived in such a comfortable and interesting place. Unfortunately, it was now about four in the morning, so we had a few choices to make. In the end, we decided that we might was well take this one all the way to Brooklyn and just stay up all night.

So we headed over to a nearby 24-hour hookah and tea café, parked our bikes outside, and to the great chagrin of all involved headed in.

“This is definitely a place where women are not normally allowed,” Claudia mentioned as we all sat down. It was true, the clientele were all men, sitting at little square felt tables, smoking hookah, playing cards and drinking little cups of sweet tea. The staff was all smiles, as were our fellow clientele, who seemed quite interested and amused by the foreigners who came out of the night on folding bicycles.

I left Scott and Claudia there to head out in search of an ATM. I found a few of them, but none appeared to support my American MasterCard. So I returned to the café empty handed. By that point, it had been ascertained that the staff was willing to accept Jordanian Dinars, so knowing that we could pay our bill, we simply relaxed into our seats, dealt the whist, and let the morning work its way around.

In Syria they use mostly a local “Arabic” system of numbers, which is coincidentally actually the Indian system of numbers, while the ones they use in India (and the U.S.) are Arabic numerals. Regardless, we needed to learn to read the new style of numbers, so Claudia, as our West Asia Cultural Liaison, insisted that we keep track of the whist in Indian numerals.

Amidst the multilingual calculus, a young man at the neighboring table leaned over and began chatting with Scott.  Clean shaven but firm, he introduced himself as Hosam.  As his friends chuckled over the smoke of hookah and the slapping of playing cards, Hosam introduced himself as a friend in the unfamiliar city of Damascus.  Son of a local sign maker, and employee of the Yellow Pages, this enterprising chap plied the market for advertising and promotion.  Exchanging phone numbers with Scott, he leaned back into his chair and carried on with his cronies, periodically bouncing his watchful eye back to our table.

As we folded up a game of three-person whist, another fellow came over to our table to take a look at my deck of M&Ms branded playing cards. He seemed to approve. We were soon to discover that Syria was perhaps the only country on the trip thus far where popular Mars products like Snickers and M&Ms were hard to find. We decided to take the opportunity to ask him if he knew of a cheap hotel around here. In fact he did, and since the sun was now beginning to spill over Damascus, we decided to take him up on the recommendation.

We paid our bill, which, in spite of the high exchange rate between the Syrian Pound and the Jordanian Dinar, was still quite affordable. Back on the cycles, we found the city to be even more beautiful in the daylight than it had been at night. It was so much cleaner than the cities in  Jordan had been, and the buildings were a delightful mix of the very new and very old. This should have come as no surprise, since Damascus was in fact the oldest city we would visit on the entire trip, having been continually occupied since about 2000 BCE.

Before riding too far from the 24-hour cafe, we were stopped by a group of Iranian tourists. They were mostly women, dressed all in black, toting fancy DSLRs and video cameras.

They were especially interested in Claudia, though being Persian language speakers, her Arabic did little to help us communicate with them. We were soon to learn that Syria is just packed with Iranian tourists since most of the Shia Muslim pilgrimage sites are to be found in Syria.

We continued to wheel on, ostensibly looking for the hotel, but mostly just loving Damascus.

Eventually, with a little help from a few pedestrians, we found the Hotel Ziad Al Kabir. The place turned out to be a Sudanese flophouse of sorts. It was nestled on the third floor of a very old building, mostly full of tailor shops and printers.

The hotel consisted of a central lobby for reception and prayer, followed by  a long, high ceilinged hall, lined with cracked wood and sanded glass doors, leading into similarly high ceilinged and crumbling rooms, outfitted with ratty steel framed beds cradling thin aging mattresses.

A small kitchen emitted the tantalizing smell of caramelizing onions and Sudanese spices. Our fellow lodgers were mostly from Sudan, and milled around the premises in flowing robes, and tending to their magnificent mustaches. The owners were all smiles and spoke bits and pieces of English.

Perhaps it was an increased romanticism induced by the lack of sleep, but we instantly fell in love with the place, especially Claudia. They claimed a fixed rate of $4.00 per person, and by then we had fallen in love with the delightfully grimy vibe of the place. So we booked a few nights.

We headed to the rooms, and flopped down onto the beds, trusting they would be clean enough to prevent any skin infections, and pondered napping.

In the end, however, with the sun shining and Damascus calling, we decided we had better head out on wheels.

Breakfast would be key. It had been some time since we had eaten anything. Luckily the city seemed full of delicious looking food. We ended up stopping at a flatbread joint, where one could select from a variety of pizza-esque flatbreads.

We were still in need of an ATM that would work with our foreign cards, but the fellow here too, seemed happy to accept Jordanian Dinars, albeit at a somewhat slanted rate. The flatbread, which might be best compared to Turkish “pide” was delightful, and the plastic chairs outside the place, were just operational enough to provide us with a place to sit and eat.  In search of a refreshing diet cola for the team, Scott headed out on a mission while we waited for the oven to warm.  In the process, he found himself in the thick of a pilgrimage troop, all haggling on the street for Chinese made garments and houseware goods.

One man even posed for a photo with his Polaroid 600 SE.  A true devotee: to the camera, to the mustache, and no doubt to the pilgramage.

So with food in our stomachs, we headed out, continuing to wheel, passing giant 1970s-looking brutalist Islamic architecture and thousand-year-old stone bath houses.

Suddenly we found ourselves in a giant outdoor used goods market, where all kinds of bizarre products were for sale.

We dismounted to walk through the area, investigating everything from old appliances, watches, and books, to wired telephones and other 1980s technologies.

Outside the market, we finally found an ATM (probably our 7^th or 8^th attempt) that accepted our foreign MasterCards. Now we had some Syrian pounds in our pockets and my goodness were they beautiful.

From there, we wheeled on, continuing to soak in this delightful town, riding past fountains and mosques, down palm tree lined streets, and impressive government buildings. We stopped for a snack at one of the many Arabic sweet shops, where we were able to load up a plate with baklava and other similarly honey-and-nut-based pastries for only a couple of dollars.

Our next goal would be to repair Scott’s Sri Lankan sandals again. The fellows in Amman had done a decent job, but the rigors of hiking through Petra had managed to tear the new stitches out. We headed into the “old city” part of Damascus to find a shoe repair shop.

The old city of Damascus is quite the hectic place, with plenty of traffic whipping around with little regard for lanes and general protocol. The streets become narrow, and pedestrian traffic intensifies. Meanwhile, the concentration of little shops selling all kinds of amazing foods and goods spikes, as does the number of people burning things, cooking in the street, yelling, making noise, carrying swords, welding in public and generally getting Syrious.

While we were wandering around, we were approached by a local chap, with a quite enviable mustache, who offered to help us get our bearings in this new and complex neighborhood. He even offered also to help us haggle with a shoe repair man to get Scott’s sandals fixed.

For the price of about $1.00, we got a full repair to both sandals, with very thick white thread, going over the ripped seams multiple times. From there, the same chap who had helped us before began insisting that we wander with him into a giant covered market, which he assured us was unmissable.  We wandered for a while inside, but finding it too crowded to safely wheel, we explained to him that we would need to revisit the spot on foot in order to properly experience it. He thanked us for letting him guide us around, and we thanked him for his kind help, bidding fond farewells. Syrian people were proving to be absolutely sweet as pie.

From there we proceeded to get hopelessly lost on the tiny and interwoven streets of Damascus’s old city. It was truly a glorious wheel. We must have passed by hundreds of structures which were over a thousand years old, many of which were covered with intricate tiling or hammered bronze accents.

Mosques, bathhouses, shops, homes… they were all so delightfully intricate and unique, yet somehow all of a cohesive overall style. Damascus was such an esthetically pleasing and intellectually tantalizing town.

Another thing that we were noticing was the pharmacy signs. Rather than the standard western move of the cross, or the mortar and pestle with “Rx” on it,  the pharmacists use this fantastic serpent looking into a goblet.

The cars in Damascus were also incredible. The streets were filled with the full spectrum, from brand new BMW SUVs to Ladas, to 1950s retro sedans, to cars that seemed to be frankensteined together from pieces of 2 or 3 different original machines.

The drivers were generally friendly, yielding space to the cycles, and due to the sheer number of cars on the roads, the speed, in the city at least, was generally slow. It was amazing traffic to be part of.

We continued to wheel, back through the covered market, which this time had cooled just enough to allow the cautious wheeler to make it through at slow speeds. It was about then that we realized it was high time to eat again.

We ended up selecting a rather posh Syrian Colonial style restaurant, tucked into an old building. The food was incredible, and not too expensive, at least by the standards of what we’d been paying in Jordan. We dug heartily into a giant fatush, an array of pastes and yoghurts, and some egg-roll-esque cylinders, filled with an oily and salty Syrian cheese blend.

Back on the streets, we kept wheeling, calling waypoints from time to time to investigate all kinds of interesting items that were for sale or attached to the surfaces all around us.

Not far outside the city, we stopped at a bike shop to buy Claudia a new bike bell. Hers had broken at some point during our transit from Amman. The new one we got her was a fantastic Chinese bell, with a deep rich tone, and amazing packaging.

Now armed with a new loud bell, we wheeled on, past hundreds of pictures of the Syrian president posed in all kinds of situations: as soldier, fighter pilot, statesman, or generally keeping it real with the heads of Iran and Lebanon.

We had been going for a while now, but the sun was still high it the sky. Was it time for a nap? Perhaps, but AsiaWheeling generally forsakes midday napping for midday coffee drinking. So we headed out in search of coffee. When we stopped to ask a fellow wheeler where we might find a cup, he said he knew a good place, and asked us to follow him there.

So we did, wheeling behind him through increasingly tiny alleyways, and eventually to the door of what turned out to be his own shop. The shop consisted of a small central room, with a couch, two chairs, a table with three telephones on it, and a glass cupboard full of examples of the types of hammered pots and pans, which it appeared he sold wholesale. The other room of the turned out to be a kitchen, when his wife burst out of it, with the first pot of coffee.

We were to be his guests, it seemed. He asked his wife to get started on the second pot of coffee, and, while we dug into the first, began to converse with us in Arabic. Claudia did a fantastic job of playing translator. The coffee was glorious: thick and black, just barely sweet, with cardamom pods floating in it. The man’s wife was also quite friendly, though she was asked to stay in the kitchen most of the time and was not invited to participate in the group photo.  A shame indeed, as she may well have been the least awkward character in the snap.

After spending what we felt was a respectable amount of time chatting and drinking pots of coffee with this man, we climbed back on the bikes and headed onto the road once again, riding past a giant street of watermelon sellers, which led us far from the old city out to the newer housing developments.

We eventually had wheeled out into the semi-agricultural suburban lands that surround Damascus. Many of these suburban Syrians seemed to have pretty large plots of land on which they grew fruits and vegetables, which we found quite impressive.

Many of the suburbs of Damascus are positioned in the foothills of the Ante-Lebanon mountains, which flank the city. So it was into these foothills that we rode, stopping after a particularly intense climb to try some of that amazing Syrian ice cream, which our dear Mr. Fu had so often raved about.

The ice cream was indeed fantastic, as was the graffiti on the buildings around where it was sold. Fueled by coffee and ice cream, we headed deeper into the foothills, calling a waypoint at this Islamic cemetery.

Up and up we went, higher into the Ante-Lebanese mountains. Soon the city of Damascus spilled out beneath us, and the sun began to sink low.

At this point, Scott decided to head back to the Hotel, but Claudia and I decided to keep wheeling on in search of a sunset view of the city.

We headed up a somewhat crumbling and rather empty side street. We were making very good progress getting up the mountain, and were just about to approach the perfect viewing spot, when a group of three Syrian military men began yelling, and running towards us. It appears we had accidentally taken the access road to a Syrian military base. In fact, we learned from the soldiers, the entire top of this hill was a base, so all spots that might have a view of the city were actually off-limits.

Fair enough, we thought, and wheeled back down the mountain to meet up with Scott.

Despite having slept on a ratty old pad on the browning linoleum floor of our room at the Sea View Hotel, I awoke quite rested and to find Scott and Claudia already awake and in the hotel’s lobby accessing the free wireless Internet, about which our energetic friend at the hotel cautioned us to always consult him, for it was protected by a password that changes all the time.

“Today the password is ‘123abc,’” he explained, which fell in line with all the wireless passwords that we’d encountered in the Middle East. Network security is apparently not of primary concern here.

We unlocked the cycles and dragged them out from where they had been parked underneath the stairs, hopped on, and headed out in search of breakfast, which we ended up finding in the same restaurant we had visited our first morning in Jordan. We decided that in all our excitement over the standard Middle Eastern pastes, salads, and flatbread meal, we may have missed out on some lurking delicacies. We couldn’t skip the hummus, but in addition, this time, we got a plate of lamb and potatoes in a central Uyghur-tasting tomato sauce, a plate of pilaf and lamb with a kind of cheesy, salty sauce, some kebabs, and few other lurker delicacies.

It was splendid, and as we were finishing, the owner of the place came by our table to chat with us in English and hear what brought us to Amman. He seemed puzzled but pleased by our response and explanation of the adventure. From there we headed out in search of more coffee, which we found in abundance at a nearby coffee stand. We made fast friends with the fellows who owned it, and hung around the place drinking a few cups, doing general coffee shtick, and posing for photos with our new coffee-slinging buddies, who had, for the latter cups, begun to refuse payment.

From there we headed off in search of a place to sit down and work on our pitiful backlog of correspondence for you, dear reader. And we found an amazing place. It was a coffee and hookah joint, situated in an ancient building, nestled in a tree and vine filled cul-de-sac. And they advertised Internet on a fantastically faded sign. Unlike the sign, however, the Internet was sorely out of service, with, the owners of the place assured us, no hope of repair.

Despite the lack of Internet, we barreled head long in to the giant pile of correspondence yet to relate, making great progress, halting all too soon when our laptop batteries died with no available outlets in sight.

The Middle East was proving a very hard place to get things done. So we drowned our sorrows in games of whist, cups of sweet tea, and hookah smoke, and left to head back toward the bus station in very high spirits.

With some help from a few locals, we finally found the way to our bus departure spot, which turned out to be actually a few blocks diagonally away from where our dear energetic friend at the hotel had informed us it would be. When we got there, it was beginning to get dark, and the crazed energy of those just about to board an international bus was palpable in the dry desert air.

We stood there as night fell around us and looked up at the bus. The bus was nice, shiny and adorned with plenty of LED lights and signs advertising the glorious constellation of amenities to be found inside. I’ll go ahead and say it was one of the nicest of the trip, in fact, which puts it up there with some truly luxurious Thai buses. Scott collected the entire team’s passports and headed into a kind of administrative building to get our tickets registered to our passport numbers. Meanwhile I worked to load our stuff into the belly of the beast. Claudia headed out to find us some food to eat on the bus.

With all the things loaded, and with the helper boy who had mostly sat back and watched me position the bikes heartily tipped,  I sat down on a piece of busted concrete and leaned against the side of the bus company’s administrative building and began to play the uke. No sooner had I strummed a few chords than I was approached by a number of gentlemen and a few boys, who were very interested in conversing with me despite their lack of English skills. The crowd consisted of a few bus officials, including our driver,  a smattering of general street children, and one fellow passenger wearing the Gulf-style dish dash.

It was thus that I began a great circular dance of cultural missteps and miscommunications. By the time Claudia arrived back from the restaurant, grinning and laden with falafel wraps, I was attempting to repair a terrible blunder that had indicated to the group that Claudia was both my sister and my wife. Meanwhile, I was operating a parallel and similarly dismal conversation with our bus driver about the America-Iraq war and our policies in Afghanistan. As you see, things were not going well in either conversation. The dish dashed fellow was shaking his head, frowning, and explaining in bits of English and bits of Arabic, that what I had done was frowned upon and would be a crime in the Arab world. The bus driver meanwhile was fuming and pacing.

Claudia’s arrival was none too soon, for she was quickly able to sort out my inadvertent admission of incest, which resulted in a great amount of belly laughing and back slapping with the dish dash wearing fellow who, realizing he had misunderstood me, was now quite thrilled at the experience. In the midst of the laughter, the bus driver  threw his hands in the air in disgust and disappeared, grumbling angrily. He was no fan of America or Americans, as the Syrian fellow next to me tried to explained, apologetically. I had, of course, lacked any of the delicate linguistic skills to express my own views on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and had been only able to express that I was not myself a soldier, which had involved a lot of dangerous pantomime, and possibly offensive messages.

“That guy really doesn’t like you,” Claudia commented “I hope he’s not riding on our bus.”

“He’s actually the driver,” I replied.

“Really?! Oh no.” Claudia sounded genuinely disturbed.

“What have we been learning about these ‘oh no’ statements?” I replied, feeling none too excited about climbing on the bus.

It left at 8:30 and was headed all the way to Damascus, and, as such, was probably an overnight bus, though our investigations into arrival time had all yielded “she’ll-get-there-when-she-gets-there”-esque statements. So we ate our falafel, which had come with some free salads, when the Egyptian owners of the shop realized Claudia had studied in their home country.  I have to admit, I had a bit of the heebee-jeebees at this point. The interaction I’d had with the driver was the first of all our time in the Middle East that had exhibited even a mild bit of anti-American sentiment.

Considering some of recent history, it had me unsettled. Tonight we were headed into Syria, and Syria was, at least in my own twisted perceptions, one of the most hostile places we would visit. What would it be like? Would we be welcome? Our great helmsman, David Campbell, had assured us that we would be welcomed there, so I continued to attempt to relax and take things as they come.

Then we were suddenly at the border. We all climbed off and filed into a giant hall. The entire rest of our bus was populated by Middle Easterners,  and the Middle Easterners were ruthlessly efficient in their rush to get through customs. By the time we had even identified which line was ours, many of them had already gotten stamped and were on their way back to the bus. We lingered in what we thought was our line, and watched as all the people from our bus climbed back on, and the engine started.

Then I was up to the window. The fellow took a few looks at me, frowning behind his mustache ,and then asked me in a kind of a sneer: “What happened on the 16^th of July?” It was still June. So I stuttered an incoherent babble of words ending in “16^th of July? … I’m sorry?”  Then the fellow coughed out a bit of laughter, twitched his mustache around like a bunnies whiskers, and stamped my passport.

Scott and Claudia got through with even less hassle. Soon the driver began running out after us, scolding us for taking so long in line. We apologized, and climbed on the bus. The bus drove for a few meters past what was to be the first of hundreds of portraits of the Syrian President.

Inside of the Syrian passport hall, we were shown directly to the diplomatic line, where we were very politely and courteously admitted into Syria by a slick-haired fellow, sporting the exact same well-trimmed mustache as the Syrian president.

He stamped our passports with the official Syrian entry, which proudly explains that “When staying for more than 15 days, he must register with branch of indication.” Women apparently did not travel much, or were of little consequence here.

Happy to be back on the bus and safely into Syria, I fell promptly into a deep sleep.

Our second day in Aqaba, we woke up, grabbed our bathing suites, a bottle of sunscreen, and the ukulele, climbed on the bikes and, tired of the usual Aqaba restaurants, headed out in a new direction. Claudia’s tire patch job appeared to be holding well as we pedaled toward the bus terminal, a neighborhood in which we thought we might find a good value on breakfast. I am quite pleased to report that we did. We sat down at a small local shop and ordered a delightfully affordable and quite succulent feast of fried eggplant and cauliflower, an array of pastes, and a pile of flatbread.

It was basically the standard AsiaWheeling Middle East edition meal, which we did not seem to grow tired of. It did take a while to arrive, however, so we spent the time working on better figuring out a number of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros tunes that we had been working on arranging for the ukulele.

There was plenty of good strong coffee and sticky sweet tea for Claudia. The owners of the shop also seemed quite thrilled to have us as customers: Claudia with her blond hair and formidable Arabic skills, me clowning around on the ukulele, and Scott with his ever more awe-inspiring facial hair.

From there we wheeled down to the public beach where we spent the next few hours, hanging out in the sun, singing songs on the uke, and taking turns watching our collective belongings while the others headed out to the sea to wade. The water here, though not as terrible as yesterday’s beach, was quite filthy. You would never know, though, unless you ventured in, for even at a relatively close distance, it looked a pristine sapphire blue.

We were soon joined by some very drunk Jordanian guys who were just full of lies, among which was that they were Turkish. They hung around for quite a while, smoking our hookah and singing along with us. It was a strange experience, strung up somewhere between a pleasant social interaction and being ridiculed. Needless to say, we were glad to see them stumble off.

We climbed back on the cycles from there, and thinking of our dear friend Mr. Jackson Fu, we began to hatch a plan in his honor. You see, dear reader, our whole time in the Gulf, the illustrious Mr. Fu had been talking about how much he wanted to fry an egg on the hood of the car. Fearing that it might damage the rental Previa’s paint, we had voted against it. But here in Aqaba it was startlingly hot and sunny, and we thought we might be able to fry on egg on the pavement, or perhaps a manhole cover.

So we headed down the street, and stopped at a restaurant to ask the proprietor for a raw egg. The owner turned out to be a very good English speaker, educated somewhere in the midwest, and more than happy to provide us with a complimentary egg.

In high spirits, we headed off in search of a place to fry the egg.

As you can see, dear reader, the “frying” produced not a sunny side up egg, but a lone yoke estranged from its once comfortable home of a shell.

Well, with that done, we headed out to buy some strange sports drinks. We found a little spot, and haggled for some 15 minutes over the price before sitting down triumphantly, diluting the drinks with water, and salting them. From there we headed back to the hotel, where we indulged in a quick jaunt around the corner to an Internet café.

Scott purchased a half hour’s worth of connection, and used Internet sharing to broadcast it via wifi to our computers. Claudia and I then logged on and we all spent a little while scanning our overflowing in-boxes for fires that needed putting out.

We slammed closed our Macs, and headed back to the hotel, where our bags were waiting for us. We strapped everything onto the bikes, and headed for the bus station.

Halfway there, Claudia got another flat tire, this time in her front wheel. The Knog bike porn patch was still holding well. That was good, but my faith in the D7’s tires’ ability to put up with the savage hazard-strewn roads of Jordan was quickly waning. Rather than fix it right there and then, we just rolled it the last couple of blocks to the station, and began to await our bus.

It arrived in no time, and we promptly loaded our things on. I then sat down on the pavement to watch our carry-on stuff and wait for the ticket taker to begin admitting passengers, while Claudia ran over to the same restaurant at which we’d eaten breakfast to purchase some food for the bus ride. I had just taken out the ukulele and begun to entertain myself when we noticed the bus pulling away.

No ticket taker had ever appeared. And now it was not only about the time our bus was scheduled to leave, but it was also actually leaving… with all our stuff on board. Scott sprinted off after the thing. Meanwhile Claudia and I waited back, talking with the other people around trying ascertain whether they were our fellow passengers or not, trying to stay calm.

Scott reappeared some minutes later, explaining that the bus driver had just left to refuel. The bus was just leaving late, and all was well. Soon our food was done, the bus returned, and the ticket taker showed up. He was a burly and stern man, who explained to us that food was not allowed on the bus, so we ran around the back of the bus and hid it in Claudia’s bag to sneak it on. There was certainly no way we could make it back to Amman on empty stomachs.

We headed straight to the back of the bus, where we could be secretive. As soon as the lumbering vehicle pulled out of the station, we opened up the bag to find that the food had exploded from its packaging to soak many of Claudia’s belongings. She seemed unfazed, pointing to some previous similar experiences that had occurred with chocolate, and we began to salvage the remaining food and feast.

The bus stopped at an interesting border zone, presumably between Jordanian provinces (though the exciting thought did cross our minds that we might have, in fact, boarded an incorrect bus, bound for Saudi Arabia). At the crossing, everyone was asked to get off the bus and unload their stuff, to be screened and ID-checked by a group of officers. That is, everyone except us. We were told by the driver to just stand by the vehicle and wait. So we did.

Soon everyone emerged, loaded their things back aboard, and sat back in their seats. Strange.

We began chatting with the fellow in front of us on the bus, who turned out to be in the bicycle business. He spoke very little English, but was thrilled to learn about AsiaWheeling. He twice called a friend and put Scott on the phone with him. Each time this friend welcomed Scott and AsiaWheeling warmly to Jordon, and offered to help us in any way we required. Scott was quite courteous and thanked him each time.

When we finally arrived back in Amman, we unloaded our stuff only to remember that Claudia’s tire was still flat. Seeing this, our new bike-related friend sprang into action, changing the tire with a kind of speed, precision and agility that we had not seen since China. It seemed no more than five minutes and we were back in action. He was particularly impressed by the in-seat pump on the Speed TRs. The pump on Claudia’s D7 never quite worked right.

With bikes fixed and fully loaded, we prepared to head back toward the Asia Hotel, where our ex-U.S.-military-translator friend would no doubt have a place for us to lay our heads. Just then, a young and excitable fellow came out of the night, and began chatting with us. We asked him about catching a bus to Syria, and he explained that we were in luck, he owned a hotel just next to the bus station, which, we were also in luck, was right here, and which could provide a room for all three of us for only $4.00 a night.

It’s tough to beat that, so we followed him back to the “seafront” hotel. While Scott and Claudia checked out the rooms, I waited outside and endured a bunch of harassment from tiny children. Finally I capitulated, removed the bags from my bike and Claudia’s, and allowed them to take the Dahons out for a spin. While the kids disappeared on our cycles, I looked up at the glaring yellow sign of our place. Seaside…  Amman was nowhere near the sea, and the hotel was one of the shabbiest and filthiest of the whole trip. But the price was right, and soon we locked up the bikes underneath the staircase, and headed upstairs. I had to sleep on the floor that night, where tiny beetles mostly left me alone. But man oh man was it cheap.

Aqaba waited patiently, growing hotter and sunnier as we slept in. We had gotten the air conditioner working, and bathed in cool air, had fallen into a very deep and sound slumber. Soon, however, the call of the road became loud enough to rouse us, and we headed off in search of breakfast.

We selected the place mostly because its tables were made from intricately patterned hammered copper. The coffee came with milk, which was an interesting new occurrence. Other than that, the food was the normal delicious Jordanian fare: flatbread, pastes, and salad.

The tables and the food were so delightful that they almost made up for the shameless addition of items to and inflation of prices which occurred on the bill. We haggled a bit over the bill, making some insignificant progress, and eventually paid, leaving with a quickly healing chip on our shoulders.

Nothing is better for healing chipped shoulders than wheeling, of course, and today proved no different. We headed onto Aqaba’s main street and wheeled hard and fast through the town. Traffic was reasonably dense, but our fellows seemed very excited to see us on the road, slowing down from time to time to pump fists out the window, and honk horns in recognition of either our fine folding cycle and daring maneuvers or our insanity.

We headed on, past a giant Abu Dhabi-funded housing development, toward the ferry terminal. Our plan was to investigate the option of taking a quick ferry hop over to Egypt. The road skirted along the region where the rocky desert met the coast, weaving its way through a steady band of industrial operations. We rode by factories, chemical refineries, and the like, all nestled between jagged lifeless desert and impossibly blue and sparkling sea.

The traffic speed began to increase as we ventured further from Aqaba, and soon we felt compelled to take to the sidewalk. The sidewalk was even more covered in sharp pieces of broken glass than the one from the Amman airport had been. It was startling. For a culture that generally shuns drinking, it seemed that almost every car on the road would have to have been drinking bottles of liquor and throwing them out onto the sidewalk in order to maintain this level of sharp detritus. There were plenty of scraps of label as well, advertising vodkas, rums, and beers, so it was not that we had misidentified a vicious soda bottle littering habit.

But on we rode, figuring careening trucks were at least slightly more dangerous than piles of jagged glass, trusting in the Kevlar lining of our tires, and stopping from time to time to investigate giant churning industrial operations.  We rode up and over a cliff to skirt a cliff-side overlooking the container port, where we paused for some time investigating the operation of the cranes loading and unloading all kinds of goods from all over the world. The shipping industry has always been a particular fascination of AsiaWheeling, and we are always happy to indulge in a little port viewing whenever the opportunity presents itself.

We rode on past the port. There was a large police van on the side of the road ahead of us, full of cops looking at us. As we rode by, they got on the van’s loudspeaker and blasted “It is very hot” at us. We giggled and kept riding.

Then we hit the passenger ferry terminal. It was a ghost town, populated only by a few old man clustered in the shade of  the large concrete building. Just as we pulled in, Claudia’s tire popped. Our spirits briefly fell as we crouched down to investigate the damage. It was certainly quite flat. We looked down at it in disbelief. We had hitherto had no problems with flats in all our wheeling. We had even come to think ourselves made invincible against such things by the fine Kevlar linings of our Schwalbe Big Apples.

These tires on Claudia’s Speed D7, however, were no Schwalbes, and were looking pretty flat. So now we were 20 miles or so outside of town, somewhere near the Saudi border, with a flat tire. Luckily, Jordanians are pretty friendly, and we figured we could likely hitch a ride back into town, especially with a flat tire and a blond girl.

So we locked the bikes and headed out to investigate ferries. On our way over we passed this Saudi truck, which sported a “no women” sign, which we found alarming, but also quite interesting.  Was it to ensure that no Jordanian female drivers got behind the wheel before crossing the border of Saudia Arabia where they would meet trouble?  Was it to remind the drivers to exercise willpower on long missions through the desert?  Your guesses, dear reader, are welcome in the comments.

We were able to discover very little, and not having our passports with us, were firmly forbidden from entering the passenger boarding zone. So we put the ferry plan on ice and headed out on foot, thinking we might find a beach. We had even brought bathing suits with us, just in case. So we grabbed the suits from the bikes, and headed out along a barbed wire-lined drive, past an oceanography institute. We briefly considered breaking into the institute, which had a nice looking beach, but thought better.

Some ways down the road, we did break the law, though, crawling under a fence and down to the seaside. Some difficult to interpret signage produced almost conclusive indication that it was illegal to be down here, but we were also in the middle of nowhere now, and doing nothing but wading. Or at least wading had been the plan, until we realized how filthy the place was.

It was a unique kind of filth though, for the water remained crystal clear and blue, though it was filled with floating trash. The beach too was strewn with all kinds of trash. We dared not remove our shoes for here too we found nearly the same level of broken glass strewn in the sand.

We spent a great deal of time investigating and eventually dissecting a desiccated puffer fish that had washed ashore. We climbed back up onto the road just in time to have a cop car full to the brim with Jordanian officers drive by, slow down, and roll down the window. Inside, the officers were all smiles, and were delighted to hear that we were Americans, that we were riding bicycles, and that we thought Aqaba and Jordan we beautiful. They drove off, and we waved.

Back at the cycles, we did not walk more than 30 feet before a large white van pulled over and insisted on giving us a ride. The fellows who drove the van were on their way into Aqaba anyway, and even spoke a bit of English. They were thrilled to hear all the same things that the cops had heard, and we relaxed into the ride.

Back at the Hotel Amira, we dropped off our wounded cycle and, discovering that our Indonesian wrench had disappeared at some point during the journey, headed out on foot in search of the right sized wrench. We walked for a while, asking at various places. Eventually, after getting another authoritative and resounding “no” followed with a similarly toned “and I have no idea where you can in this city,” we walked right next door and bought an adjustable wrench and a few allen keys while we were at it. Back at the Amira, we flipped Claudia’s D7 over and I began dismantling the thing. Her bike has no rear derailleur, relying on just the seven-speed internal transmission, so the chain is quite tight. It took a bit of raging to get the thing off, but off it came. When we went to investigate what had given her the puncture, I was surprised to find that it was not the glass, but a random bit of wire, with a sharp end. Fair enough.

The fellow at the front desk was more than happy to give us a bucket, which I filled with water while Scott re-inflated the tire. We took the inflated tire and plunged it into the bucket, moving it around and looking for the bubbles. We found them coming out in two places. I put my finger over them to remember where they were, and pulled the tire out of the water.

Scott was ready with our Knog patch kits, which feature ready-to-go, self-adhesive patches with cool semi-pornographic hipster cartoons on them.

We stuck a couple on the tire, waited a few minutes, and put the thing back in.

Good as new.

We woke up that morning and headed downstairs to the lobby of our scummy hotel in Wadi Musa, Jordon. It was a place by the name of The Valantine Inn. Rough place. Despite the scummy nature of the joint, we had slept decently. That is at least after the machine gun fire ended. The celebratory shooting had continued until perhaps 1:00 or 2:00 am, but died off after that, allowing us some reasonable hours of slumber.

Meanwhile in the lobby, a couple of the guests were engaged in a noisy argument with the proprietor. It seemed the in-house breakfast is advertised at one price, scrawled in Magic Marker on the wall, but only if booked in advance. These poor travelers had inadvertently sat down to a breakfast that turned out to be double what was marked on the wall, and now were claiming false advertising.

The osmotic pressure of the travelers’ stress was intense, so we headed out to where we’d locked our bikes to an air-conditioning unit, and down into the city. It was the first time we had seen the place in the light of day. It was an interesting looking town, spread out over a section of rolling hills and valleys. It was not a big place, and very few of the buildings were over a few stories.  In the distance, we could see the complex immensity of the geologic formation into which Petra is carved. It’s a kind of bulbous rocky maze, full of spires and crevasses, all in the shadow of a great mesa.

We had been researching how to best explore Petra the night before, since sleeping was initially not an option, due to all the gunfire. Our research had been a disappointing story of expensive rates and restrictive rules. Wheeling, it seemed, was not allowed at all in the park. To make matters worse, we would also be charged at least $40.00 per person to enter, plus be forced into working with the monopolistic bus companies and water vendors therein. How were we to choose freedom?

That was a question too large for pondering on empty stomachs, so we climbed on the cycles and began the slippery slope downhill past the core of the tourist zone into what we hoped would be more of “the people’s” city. We selected a roadside restaurant for breakfast. We ordered some hummus with meat sauce, cucumber yoghurt,  a plate of fries, “special rise,” and an onion and tomato salad. This was all to accompany the central dish, which they most accurately dubbed “chicken from the machine.” These rotisserie chickens were to become a staple of our travel in the Middle East.

We drank the coffee and did “Chicken from the Machine” B-horror-movie shtick until our food arrived.  The food was good, and after haggling a bit over some dubious fees that had been added to our bill, I paid the man, and we hopped back on the cycles. We wheeled on past this tethered horse, and began to explore.

We stopped when a man wandered out of his house to flag us down. He asked us where we were from, and whether he could take one of the Dahons for a quick spin. We were more than happy to indulge him. He then invited us to come into his house for tea. We had just eaten and caffeinated ourselves, and were all set for wheeling, so we politely declined his offer, heading off in search of the Wadi Musa that was for “the people”, not just tourists.

We found ourselves on a hilltop, in the parking lot of a cinder block government building . We were staring out over the city and into the tangled rock that made up Petra beyond. Just then, the call to prayer was sounded, and the city began to fill with the voices of one hundred imams, all singing at once, in different keys. The cacophony became a bittersweet, dissonant symphony of rising and falling prayers, all carried up to us on the dry desert wind.  It was magical.

That was when it occurred to us. The way to choose freedom was to not go to Petra… at least not through the main entrance. We would ride out on a road that we could see from this hilltop, which skirted  around the park. From there we would be able to park the cycles and head in on foot. We’d see what we could see, experience the geology, and see whether or not we got in trouble with the authorities. It was an attractive plan: cheap, exciting, and proactive.

So off we went, tearing downhill, across Wadi Musa and back onto the main road toward Petra. We soared right past the turn-off to the main gate, heading back uphill and into the rocks. Eventually, we found the perfect turn-off and parked the cycles there, eventually folding them up, and locking them in a great pile, tucked behind a rock, and barely visible from the road.

And off we headed, into the desert.

Some call Petra an archeological site, but people also definitely still lived out here. Some of them we could even see, crouched in homes dug out of the rock, napping in the midday heat. Others we knew of only by what they had left behind. Even significantly far from the road, the rocks were strewn with water bottles and the bones of dead sheep.  Many, many sheep had been killed and eaten out here.

Off we went, deeper and deeper into the site. The farther we went, the more intense the carvings became. Soon the homes were not just holes in the rock face, but full on caverns with windows, cupboards and the like. Also, the farther we got in, the less occupied the place became.

As we drew farther from the road, the local population diminished. After a while, we had not seen anyone for a few kilometers. That was when Scott began to feel sick. As you many have already guessed, dear reader, this was not the best place to fall ill. But it was also not the worst. Scott needed to drink some water and rest. He needed to get out of the sun and into somewhere cool.

Luckily, there were plenty of options, and we had brought two liters of water each. So we continued up a set of stairs that had been carved into the rock, through a natural stone arch, and scrambled up to a kind of penthouse carved into an outcropping, perched, unsettlingly skull-like, atop a nearby cliff.  We half walked, half slid down the gravelly entryway and into the space.  It was a shocking 15 to 20 degrees cooler inside. We crawled in and Scott pulled himself up against a stone wall; he was soon snoring.

Claudia and I spent the next hour and a half wandering deeper into the archeological site, scrambling over worn stone walkways carved into the rock, and exploring the living spaces and remnants of what must have been a very interesting city.

We could see the places where the steps that had been carved into the stone would have connected to a bridge across a crevasse. The bridges were, of course, long gone, so we needed to find ways to skirt them and scramble over these obstacles.

After we felt like we’d gone far enough in the blazing sun, we turned around and made our way back to find Scott still snoozing. We ran over to collect all our stores of water and returned to the cave. As we entered, my dear friend began to stir, soon rising, looking much refreshed. After we all spent some time sitting and drinking water, we headed back to the bikes, which were as we had left them, just out of sight on the side of the road.

Back on the cycles, we pulled onto the road. We paused for a moment at the shoulder, though, discussing the best plan of action. We could see the next town over, perched on a mesa overlooking Petra.  After some discussion, we decided the pull of wheeling it was too strong to ignore.

So we began to ride now, through the heat of the midday desert, along the side of a cliff, slowly climbing up  toward the mesa. The longer we rode, the more spectacular the view became.

Soon we reached the nearby hamlet. It was certainly a slightly more down home town than Wadi Musa had been. It too, however, seemed to be mostly fueled, in one way or another, by its proximity to this tourist Mecca.

We continued to wheel slowly into this town, rolling down the street, and attracting plenty of stares from the locals. All around us children ran around with few clothes, goats munched garbage from dumpsters, and old men and women looked on from patches of shade with mild looks of disgust.

Near the end of the town’s main (and only) street, we passed a handful of men, all struggling to clean a couple of camels. The cleaning process, it seemed, was producing a fair amount of camel hair, which now was piled in frothing wads in the street.

At the end of the road, we found ourselves facing a protected back entrance to Petra. We paused for a moment to look out over the delightful geology, and the clusters of parked police vehicles parked by the entrance.

Then we turned around and rode back out of the city. Before we had completely made our way out, though, we decided to stop at a large trinkets shop to buy some cool drinks from their humming, and rather beaten up Coca-Cola branded fridge.

We struggled the last bit of the way up and out of the city, and then relaxed into a few kilometers of luscious downhill riding. Whipping along toward Wadi Musa, we rode with a savage upward stretching cliff to our left and the immensity of Petra spilling beneath to our right.

Back in town, we pulled over at a roadside café, and ordered some drinks and hookah.

We spent a while relaxing from the intensity of wheel and the hike, as Claudia did her best to explain Islamic women’s dress to us.

Refueled slightly, we decided to wheel the rest of the way into town and find food. While we were pausing at what was now becoming our favorite water vendor, the van driver from our exceedingly mediocre hotel rolled up. He asked us in English what we were doing, and we explained the story of our day and that we were looking for a restaurant. He told us of a certain restaurant that his friend ran, and where we might get a discount if we mentioned his name.

As he drove off, it occurred to us that the restaurant he mentioned was in fact the same tourist joint we had visited the night before, with that strange kid. So we decided to wheel on, moving intuitively.

Eventually, we found a good looking joint, and immediately pulled up to one of the outside tables and plopped down. We ordered a feast. It was the usual suspects: hummus, flatbread, babaganouj, yoghurt with garlic, fresh chopped tomatoes and onions,  and fowl.

Just as we were about to dig in, our van driver friend rolled by. He seemed a bit taken aback by the fact that we had not honored his offer. He made some awkward remarks from the driver’s seat of his van, and we attempted meekly to explain ourselves. Eventually he just drove off, and we turned our focus back to eating.

When the bill came, we paid and got back on the bikes.  As we were heading back, Scott spotted a barber and decided to walk in for a little trim. We did our best to haggle, but the fellow was insistent on charging an arm and a leg. So we moved on to the next place. This fellow wanted only an arm and a bit of an ear so we left Scott there, to go under the razor, while Claudia and I rode back to the hotel to off-gas.

Scott returned while Claudia was in the shower and I was shaving. I strolled over wrapped in a towel, and opened the room door to find this guy staring back at me.

The Extremes of Experience Indeed.

We awoke the next morning in Amman, Jordon and promptly hopped on the cycles. We parked our Dahons down the block at the same outdoor coffee place that we had discovered the morning before, now more properly ordering unsweetened coffee, which is in Arabic “Kahuah Sadah.”

We sat down on a low-lying wall near a lower story alley, and began to drink our coffee. A group of fellows who were working below us to move some furniture and rugs around waved up to us, asking us to come down and interact. Scott obliged them, and soon the interaction evolved into a kind of comedic photo shoot. Here are the results.

We climbed back onto the road and started wheeling. We struck out in the opposite direction than we had the previous day.

We had another meeting, this time with a Finnish friend of Claudia’s. We met her in a large touristy market, which we discovered was one of the few places that was still operational, as it was run by Christians, of which there are many in Amman. It was Friday again, you see, and many of the Muslim-owned businesses had halted operation in observance of the sabbath.

We ate street food at the market: more hummus and pita, and falafel, and some shawarma wraps.

We spent the rest of the morning wandering around town with Claudia’s friend and learning about her unending frustrations with the administrative and bureaucratic hassles of trying to comply with the ridged requirements of the western powers that be. It turns out that in the face of no Jordanian ethical controls on studies, western researchers were required to jump through all manner of hoops to prove the ethical nature of their work. This is, in principal, good. But if it keeps people from getting any work done at all, are they not throwing the baby out with the bathwater? In the end it looked like our new friend would be spending the summer in Amman, but would not be able to do any research due to foot dragging.

As we were bidding goodbye, she taught us our new favorite Finn joke:

Q: “How do you tell a social Finn?”

A: “She’s staring at your shoes.”

We continued to crack up all the way back down the hill toward the city center. We loaded up on water, and after a quick session of furious work on correspondence for you, dear reader, we checked out and climbed onto the cycles. It seemed wise to put something more in our stomachs before heading to the bus station.

So we wheeled our fully loaded cycles over to a nearby falafel house and indulged in some of the house specialty and greasy cardboard containers of deep fried cauliflower. Outside the stand, a man peddled fan blades.

The meal was scrumptious in a most oily way, and feeling refueled, if somewhat laden with grease, we began to lean into the long climb out of the crater of Amman, back up to the bus station.

It was a long wheel up and plenty of climbing for three fully loaded wheelers. We stopped many times to make sure that we were on the correct route, to drink water, and to rest. Claudia was quite generous with her Arabic skills, stopping repeatedly to chat with large crowds of men outside of cafes, most of which she returned from with reports of thorough, though somewhat subdued, sexual harassment. Sometimes the sexual harassment would become slightly less subdued, and Claudia would find herself batting away stray hands. “This would be so much worse if I were not traveling with you two,” Claudia explained in exasperation. Scott and I continued to be flabbergasted at the behavior of Jordanian men, uncertain of how we could best protect her, and in total awe of Claudia’s ability to endure it.

At the bus station, we were soon surrounded by fellows offering to drive us to our next destination for unreasonable prices. Finally, we were able to find the fellow who ran the bus. He took one look at the cycles, and began a drawn out and tedious bargaining process. Finally, we were able to agree to a price to get us and all our stuff onto the bus. There was no luggage compartment, so we would need to pile our things onto the seats.

Once we finally got on, the driver pulled a last ditch attempt to get Scott and me to cram into the seat-and-a-half -sized space between our cycles and our luggage. Here again, Claudia came to the rescue. She was already hard at work making friends with our fellow passengers, who turned out to all be recent graduates of the Amman police academy.  She asked them how much they had paid for their tickets, and once we found out how drastically overcharged we had been, we found a more solid basis for an argument that our things might take up the back seats of the bus, with us occupying the following row.

In the face of our knowledge, the fellow began to exhibit what we would find to be a common Jordanian trait: rather than make any attempt to repair bridges or laugh it off (which would be the Indian, Indonesian, Cambodian, or Vietnamese style), the man simply became cold as ice, and refused to treat us with an ounce of respect for the rest of the journey.

This was fine, however, for he was at the other end of the bus, driving, and we were in the back with a whole crowd of new police friends. They asked about my ukulele, and I took it out, beginning to play. The driver of the bus promptly turned the radio onto a local pop channel and cranked the volume up.  Fair enough. I put the uke away.

With that the bus pulled out of the station and began its long crawl across the desert toward Wadi Musa. The bus ride was about four hours, enough to get comfortable, but not so much that we began to tire of the journey.

Meanwhile the desert landscape was beautiful in a completely unique way, compared to the desert we had seen in Oman and the UAE. It was a place of large flat lands, mesas, and south-western-U.S.-style rock formations. As we drove on, we continued to chat with our newly christened police officer friends.  It turns out they were all coming back to Wadi Musa for a kind of graduation party.

They had been proudly showing us their newly printed diplomas,which they all proudly carried with them. Unfortunately, when we stopped to stretch our legs, one of them left his diploma somewhere in the middle of the desert rest stop. He began to dissolve into madness, searching the bus wildly. We attempted be be helpful by moving our stuff around as well, engaging with him in the doomed mission to manifest the lost diploma. Then, just as quickly as the madness had set in, it passed. The fellow became relaxed and cheerful once again, and we continued the ride as if nothing had happened.

When we finally arrived in town, the sun was just setting. Our new friend who had lost the diploma got on his mobile phone. He knew of a good cheap hotel, he explained, and soon a driver from the hotel had arrived in a van to take our stuff. We ended up loading our larger bags into the van, and wheeling up behind him.

The party was already well under way in this city. People were driving around in over stuffed cars, and all around us we could hear the unnerving sound of automatic weapons fire. It seems the new grads were firing their machine guns into the air in celebration.

This was a hilly place, some of the steepest wheeling of the entire trip to date, in fact. The roads were also polished to an unnatural slickness, perhaps by sand, or wind, I have no idea. But I found my back tire slipping and loosing traction on the steepest sections. Once we reached the hotel, we were somewhat disappointed to find it to be your classic backpacker-type joint. The clientele were almost exclusively foreigners, and the interior of the place was so cluttered with a mixture of advertisements for touring services to the surrounding sites,  old faded posters of the most beautiful places in Jordon, or large advertisements for Petra brand beer. Needless to say, we were already a little wary upon entrance.

The initial asking price was monumental by AsiaWheeling’s and most Asian backpacker’s standards. Further inspection of the room confirmed that this was no Chinese business hotel either. The place was grimy to be sure, and expensive. But it was late, there was gunfire all around us, and we were hungry.

So we started bargaining. It was the most drawn out, energy intensive and multifaceted bit of bargaining we had yet experienced. In the hotel’s corner there were two chaps, one good cop, friend-of-the-owner-just-trying-to-help-us-out-type guy and then the grumpy and predatory owner. One was a short portly smiley fellow. The other was a rail thin chap, with sunken eyes and a jagged scowl.  His teeth, blackened and disintegrating with decay, sat like sharp stones in his small mouth. In our corner, there was one Arabic speaking blond girl and two weathered fellows in Panama hats and mustaches. It was going to be a close one.

We dithered back and forth, frowning, stroking our facial hair, making clicking noises, and generally play-acting. Finally we settle on a price that was still quite high, but doable. We asked to have a moment to chat, and after a quiet word outside returned in to seal the deal. During the chat, however, it seemed that the price that had been offered had been either repealed, or never was valid to begin with.

So in frustration we continued the assault. Finally, when the two fellows continued to refuse to return to the aforementioned price, we began to prepare, as much as we did not want to, to leave. Just as were turning our backs, the wiry, scowly front desk attendant called out to Claudia in Arabic, “Where did you learn Arabic?”

“Egypt,” she replied.

They then began to ask her a series of questions aimed at confirming that indeed she had lived in Egypt. And Claudia seemed to pass this test.

“I am an Egyptian,” he replied, Gitanes cigarette bouncing in his mouth, and stuck out his hand.  He revealed a tattoo proving that he was a Coptic Christian, hailing from a particularly poor neighborhood of Cairo.

Finally it was over. We paid the man; relieved to be on to the next task, we headed up to our room and threw down our stuff.

From there, we climbed back on the cycles. Barely able to keep from sliding on the steep, slick pavement, we ventured downhill toward the city center to find a little dinner and an ATM. The ATM was easy, and while Claudia was “WarBucks-ing” as we had come to irreverently refer to the replenishing of the steady trickle of money which is AsiaWheeling’s lifeblood, a child appeared from the dark street. He pulled up on his bicycle, and hopped off, flicking down his kickstand with a sickening rusty squeak. He was very interested in our Speed Series Dahons, and we decided to let him take a little ride. He did not seem 100% trustworthy, though, so I headed off next to him on Claudia’s bike to accompany him for the wheel.

While I was wheeling next to this kid, making sure that he didn’t disappear into the desert night with the Speed TR, another round of nearby machine gun fire sprang up. It was a startling kind of noise. I knew it was all in good fun, but something about mixing the sounds of war with those of celebration, was making getting used to this particular piece of culture harder than usual. By the time I returned back from my little wheel with this kid, Scott and Claudia had already asked a fellow for directions to a restaurant recommendation.

We followed his advice, and found ourselves wheeling not more than a block up the street to an pricey tourist-filled joint.  We sat down, taking our seats next to a bunch of British 17-year-olds, who were traveling in Jordon after graduating from high school. This place was way too touristy for AsiaWheeling… but we were hungry and tired, so we capitulated. We gave our order to a somewhat grumpy and overly costumed waiter, who spoke perfect English.

Soon the young kid who had ridden our bicycle showed up and sat down with us. He immediately ordered a Coke and began to chat us up. He took out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, and began smoking. Then he made a faux attempt to light my mustache on fire with his lighter. Pulling his hand back at the last minute and blowing out the flame, he proceeded to roll back into his chair consumed with laughter; we looked on confused.

The more time we spent with him, the more uncomfortable I became. Something was off about this guy. We couldn’t quite put our fingers on it. His English was okay, but not quite good enough to communicate consistently. He was likely not really dangerous in any way. He certainly wanted to get some free Cokes out of the relationship. But there was a strange performance aspect to the way he interacted with us that was really unsettling. Picking up his mobile phone, he fabricated conversations of business deals in an attempt to impress us.  In the end we hustled through our  mix-plates of falafel and pastes, and headed out the door.

Back on the cycles, we decided to indulge in a quick spot of night wheeling, letting the physical activity calm our somewhat frazzled minds. Wadi Musa… it was quite a place. It was the gateway to the splendorous world of Petra, an ancient city carved into the desert rocks. But had the beauty of its surroundings somehow turned its people into tourism-fueled predators?

We woke up to a sunny Jordanian morning, light pouring into the somewhat squalid confines of our room at the Hotel Asia.

The first task was, of course, to find coffee. Luckily, we quickly discovered that Amman is a fantastic place to find coffee. All hours of the day and night, the streets of Amman are lined with street coffee stands, sporting giant ornate coffee pots, filled with boiling hot thick black Middle Eastern coffee. Little plastic cups of the stuff can be had for anywhere between 15 to 50 cents.  Not knowing the ins and outs of the coffee ordering system yet, we simply ordered the default brew, which was just this side of undrinkably sweet.

From there we continued to head out on foot in search of breakfast, stopping from time to time to enjoy some of the more unique signage in this city.

We eventually settled on a restaurant a few blocks down from the Hotel Asia. We walked in and were shown upstairs to the “family” dining section.  The downstairs, Claudia explained, we could assume was for men only.

The ceiling in the upstairs dining room was rather, low, but no obstacle is too large to keep AsiaWheeling away from its hummus.

We sat down and ordered what was becoming our standard Middle Eastern meal: salad, hummus, bread, and some type of meat or exotic paste.

The food was fabulous though the fattush salad that we had been eating recently was replaced here by a plate of salty pickled vegetables. For the meat, we chose a plate of pressed ground meat kebabs, all accompanied by more Middle Eastern coffee.

With bellies full, we headed back out into the crowded and sun-soaked streets of Amman. The next waypoint was a repair-job for Scott’s Sri Lankan sandals. They had become rather torn and tattered in the months since we had purchased them in Colombo. Luckily, on our walk back from the hotel we passed an outdoor shoe repair stand. It was run by some serious village elder-types, who quickly took interest in AsiaWheeling.

Tea was ordered and we were asked to sit down while one of the owner’s sons went to town on Scott’s sandal.

The tea was delicious, and served in the classic Jordanian style, plenty sweet and with mint leaves in it.

We sat around chatting, attracting a large and larger crowd, chatting about our take on Jordan, about life in America, about business opportunities in China, and about the relative merit of learning different languages. Soon the shoes were done, but it seemed there was still plenty more chatting that needed to be done. It turns out that another one of the local dons who had arrived to witness the strange Americans ran a bus company. He offered to charter us a free ride on one of his buses to tour the city.

We tried our best to explain that we were all about wheeling, and only mildly about busing, but it was at first misinterpreted as the Middle Eastern practice of refusing any offer two to 13 times before accepting. Eventually, though vehemence and redundancy, we were able to actually communicate that we were cyclists, intending to explore the city by bicycle. This was met with awe and confusion.

We promised to return later to show off the cycles, then excused ourselves. Back at the Hotel Asia, we grabbed the cycles and some bottles of water, and hit the streets. It was hot in Amman, but not nearly as bad as it had been in the Gulf, and we were excited to wheel in this new, more approachable weather.

First thing was first: we needed to replace those bells that the Omani kids had stolen. This city had much too gnarly a flavor of traffic to attempt to wheel with no bell. Since the dastardly theft of our bells and lights, I had been wheeling and ringing a kind of phantom bell, brushing my finger by the empty bit of air where my ringer used to be, and cursing myself and those little scoundrels each time my phantom bell failed to ring.

Luckily, though we saw few wheelers on the road, this city was quite full of bike shops, mostly focused on cheap Chinese-made children’s cycles.

We wheeled over to one near our hotel, and inquired about bells and lights. Lights he did not have, but bells were available. I picked up a Chinese rotary-telephone-style bicycle bell and began to play with it. The owner of the shop came over and explained to me in Arabic and pantomime that this bell was a piece of crap, but that he would give me a very good price. “For you,” he continued in words I did not know, “I would recommend this bell.” It was really an electronic buzzer that attached to the bike and required batteries. The noise it made was frighteningly loud and hair raising. Such a violent alert seemed very unlike AsiaWheeling to me, so we decided to purchase three of the cheap rotary-telephone-style bells. “Fair enough,” the man seemed to say, and lighting a cigarette, he began to help us attach the new bells to the handlebars of our Dahons.

As an added bonus, he insisted on giving us a large plastic bag filled with cucumbers, at no charge. The cukes were delicious, and as evidenced by the giant cardboard box of them that he showed us in the back of the shop, in great supply.

With many thanks and a hearty shaking of hands, we wheeled off, ringing the bells with joy. We continued to wheel downhill, through the thick traffic. We must have been quite a sight, for multiple times cars would pull up alongside us and offer their support with whoops and shrieks, pumping of fists, or sticking of heads out the window.

We pulled off this road onto a nearby one, climbing now up into the hills, onto narrow and ever more crumbling roads, many with very steep inclines. Most of the locals just stared dumbfounded at us, some of them called out offering assistance, or letting us know that we were probably getting lost. Little did they know this was our goal. At the top of the hill, we were rewarded with a splendid view of this neighborhood of Amman. Also at the crest of the hill was a section of railroad that we needed to cross. We were just about to lift up the cycles and portage across the tracks when an old man and a young boy arrived.

They began chatting with us, asking where we were from and what we were doing here. The old man spoke only Arabic, but the young boy spoke a bit of English. We gave them both chances to try out the bikes, and hung out for a while enjoying the view and each other’s company. Eventually the pull of the open road started calling our names, so we headed off. This tiny road connected back onto a more central road near a large mosque. We decided to pull over at a local shop to have a drink and a little snack. We left the bikes outside, unlocked and headed in.

We purchased a few bags of “Mr. Chips” and a small package of hummus to dip them in. While we were snacking, a crowd of children between the ages of five and 18 gathered around us and began to barrage us with questions, and demands to be photographed.

We indulged them, but soon the competition to be in photographs became so great, that some of the larger children started beating the smaller ones with their fists. When one of them picked another up by the neck, kicking and screaming, we decided that this whole experience was getting a little too raw, and we climbed back on the cycles, scolding the older kids, refusing to take any more pictures, and wheeling off.

We started to loop back toward our part of town, wheeling along a street filled with busted cars, most of which seemed to have just been parked and abandoned there, now apparently homes to vagrants. It was then that Claudia got a call from a friend of hers. It looked like we had dinner plans.

Now we needed to get across town. So we cut through a giant bus depot, and headed toward an overpass. We needed to figure out exactly where we were, so we stopped to ask a well dressed, strolling bloke for directions. The fellow turned out to speak passable English and was overwhelmingly helpful. He gave us very articulate directions, followed by a heartfelt invite back to his house for tea. We explained that we needed to wheel to a dinner date. He was understanding. As we left, he put his hand on his heart and bowed slightly. He then raised a finger up to his eyeball, pointing. “My eyes,” he said to us. Then, bowing again, and tapping his finger against his face, he repeated, “My eyes.” Anyone who knows more about what this saying means, and where it comes from is invited to share in the comments.

We pulled from there onto the large uphill highway known as King Hussein highway. We rode on for a while, but soon the traffic whipping by us became too unnerving, and we decided that taking the glass-littered sidewalk would be better.  As we rode, the three of us became somewhat spatially separated. During a moment when Claudia was neither particularly proximate to either Scott or I, a gang of young Jordanian youth appeared from the gravelly fall-off to our right. They grabbed at her water bottle, eventually tearing it off her rear rack, then began grabbing at her body, eventually running off with the water. I was in the front, and hearing some commotion, stopped, turning around. By this point I could see Scott and Claudia riding together, some ways behind me. I waited for them to catch up.

When I heard the story I was flabbergasted. “This is, unfortunately, quite common,” Claudia explained, startlingly cool and collected after such an occurrence, “especially for western women.” Scott and I were significantly more taken aback. What is one to do in such a situation, as a respectful traveler? Is it acceptable now to run back and grab the kids by the scruffs of their necks, lifting them off the ground and scolding them, pouring the remainder of the stolen water down the back of their shirts? Your guess is as good as ours, and most welcomed in the comments.

In any event, that was not what we did. Instead we kept wheeling, sticking more closely together. Soon we reached the top of the hill, and quite thankfully turned off the giant King Hussein Road, onto a more manageable side road. There we asked once more for directions, this time from a group of loitering youth. They too spoke passable English and directed us onward in sometimes hilariously compiled sentences, indicating a few directives simultaneously. In the end, being only slightly surer of where we were headed, we wheeled on, down a steep hill , and back up the other side, where we found ourselves at a large hospital complex.

The sun was now beginning to sink low behind a nearby mosque, and the temperature was falling to a cooler and quite comfortable dry Arabian night. Claudia was feeling winded and exhausted from previous events, and decided to take a break on a shady bench in the vicinity of the hospital, while Scott and I headed in to check it out.

We were soon accosted by a yelling and grumpy security guard, who seemed mostly interested in keeping us off the sidewalks. We apologized and headed back to collect Claudia. As we wheeled back toward the gate, another security guard came running up to us. “Uh-oh,” I thought, “now we’re in for it.” But it turned out this fellow was simply running out to direct us to where we had left our white woman alone, giving us a quick tongue-in-cheek scolding.

We continued to wheel upward, cresting the hill, just as the sun was setting. The uniform beige buildings all around us began to glow orange with the sunset.

From the top of the hill we wheeled down, flying through the cool wind into the night, and  into a new part of town.  Part way down the hill, Claudia’s phone rang again. It was our dinner date, calling to modify our plans from dinner to a mere after-dinner sheesha hour. This was fine by us. We refined our plans, beginning to scan the area for restaurants.

We were having trouble locating one that seemed a good fit, when Claudia spotted an old and rather well dressed man walking on the side of the road. She pulled over and began to chat with him. He turned out to be an Iraqi gentleman, and was just bubbling with restaurant recommendations. At the top of the list, of course, was a local Iraqi joint. It sounded good to us, so we followed his directions there, and locked out cycles outside.

The Iraqi restaurant was obviously a local institution, and was fantastically crowded, with a long line of people. They appeared to do mostly take out business, but we were able to locate a few plastic tables in a kind of side lot, where we threw down our helmets to reserve a spot.

We ordered a huge pile of pastes, a whole chicken, a large plate of salad, and some fried appetizers.  While Scott and Claudia executed the ordering process, I headed out in search of a place to wash my hands and use the restroom. I pulled back a piece of curtain and popped my head into a room where about 10 people were all lined up, standing on small carpets, and praying towards Mecca. I decided to wait to ask where I could find the loo.

The food was unsurprisingly incredible, and we feasted hungrily. It had been a long day of wheeling.

Soon Claudia’s friend, a Jordanian Brown University student arrived in a large Chevy SUV, thumping pop music. We loaded our cycles into the back, and drove off.

The Extremes of Experience Indeed.

We awoke the next morning, bid Sid a very fond farewell, heaving our packs onto our backs, the cycles, folded in their bags on our shoulders, and teetered our way downstairs.

There was no problem finding a large van-taxi to load all our stuff into, and with one last tip of the Panama hat to our dear friend Sid, we were off. Our driver was, of course, Pakistani, and he made small talk with us in very entertaining English as we raced along the brand new highways of Dubai, toward an airport-shaped shadow that loomed in the distance, enshrouded in dust.

Our cab dropped us off outside the Jazeera Airways terminal, and we headed to check-in for our flight. Jazeera Airways is a low-cost Kuwaiti airline. As a low-cost airline, they have a reduced luggage limit. We had encountered such things in the past. We consider reduced luggage limits to be one of the main enemies of AsiaWheeling Global Enterprises, but generally a little bit of sweet talking paired with perhaps a small fee gets us through, and gets the bikes onto the airplane.

Unfortunately, it seemed this time would be different. We were a fair bit over the (dare I say skimpy) 15 kg per person luggage limit, and the charge for the extra luggage was going to be huge. I’m talking hundreds of dollars. So we began pleading, begging, presenting business cards, explaining AsiaWheeling and our mission of peace, complimenting the airline’s graphic identity, the check-in counter attendant’s uniform, and Kuwait in general. Eventually, the attendant got on the phone with her manager and, low and behold, all extra luggage fees were forgiven.

“You are very lucky, you know that?” she said to us in English.  We know. We thanked her again and again, praising the glory of Jazeera Airways, in their infinite mercy. And with the bags and cycles headed down the conveyor toward Kuwait, we strolled on through security, and got our passports stamped by men in flowing robes who earned hundreds of thousands of dollars a year; we were leaving the UAE.

With this stamp, Scott and I would be retiring our passports for a while, switching over to our second passports, which we had begun to affectionately refer to as the “moon” passports. So I took my slightly fatter 10-year “sun” passport out of my Hong Kong fake leather cover and replaced it with our totally blank “moon” book.

The departures terminal of the Dubai airport was just as expansive and luxurious as our arrivals terminal had been. In particular, we were impressed with the duty free time planner they had posted.  It let the duty free shopper time his or her shopping adventures down to the minute, while still ensuring an on-time departure. Why doesn’t every airport have this?

We purchased a couple of drastically overpriced cups of coffee and falafel sandwiches from a Starbucks clone in the terminal and climbed on the flight.

The flight to Kuwait was all too short, but we were able to make good use of it, oscillating between looking out the window, and getting a little work done in the AsiaWheeling mobile offices, Jazeera Airways edition.

Soon the sprawling capital of Kuwait City began to loom below us, a uniform dust colored grid-work, smack dab in the middle of the uniform dust colored desert. As the plane flew lower, the city began to take on slightly more color, and we felt an almost uncontrollable urge to wheel it.

While hard at work in Sid’s apartment, we had already tried to convince Jazeera airways to let us spend a night or two in Kuwait, but it had proven dreadfully expensive to change the ticket. So in the end we had to resign ourselves to spend just a few hours in the international terminal of the Kuwait International Airport. When we finally unloaded into the airport, we found we had even less than the two hours we had coveted. We were quickly ushered by Jazeera staff through the airport to the ticket counter, where our connecting tickets were issued to us by a man who looked uncannily like a friend of mine named Max Strasser. We moved on toward our gate, just bubbling with curiosity about this place.

The flowing dishdash robe was definitely alive and well here, as was the female Islamic outfit, in all iterations from simple hijab to full burka. There also were a fair number of white and Arab fellows in military fatigues roaming around as well. We wanted so badly to learn more about this place, to wheel its streets, but we could not. So we reluctantly joined the line to board our flight.

We landed in Jordon and filed off the airplane and into the customs room. We changed our Omani Reils and UAE Dirhams into Jordanian Dinars at a large glass booth and then got in line to purchase visa’s upon entry.  The Jordanian Dinar is actually linked one-to-one with the British Pound, so calculating prices would be slightly easier than usual.

I must admit, part of me was worried that my entering this country on a completely virgin two-year passport might cause a red flag, even encourage some detainment or interrogation. Luckily this was quite far from the case. The man who sold me the 10-pound visa barely even looked at me or my passport. His counterpart asked me a number of questions in a very thickly accented English including whether or not I had a Jordanian phone number. I explained to him that I did not, but he just stared blankly back at me, made a face like he had just discovered a bit of sand in his mouth, puffed out his cheeks and lips, making an noise like a mare, and stamped my passport violently.

Claudia and Scott got through with even less hassle.

We collected our cycles, and headed outside the airport, where we unwrapped and began to re-assemble them.  There we attracted the usual crowd of baggage handlers, fellow travelers, and security personnel, all interested in witnessing the majesty of a Dahon folding cycle. We indulged them happily.

From our previous research, the airport should have been positioned about 25 kilometers outside the capital city of Amman. This seemed doable. So after some discussion, we decided to wheel into the city fully loaded. Armed with some directions from members of the crowd, we hit the road.

The countryside was beautiful. It was arid, but not as striking a desert as we had found in the Gulf. The farther we rode, the more we began to notice quite a large amount of agricultural activity. Also, for much of the way, there was a wide sidewalk that ran next to the road. This was especially nice, since it saved us from having to ride in the fast and sometimes reckless Jordanian highway traffic.

Unfortunately, the sidewalk was also littered with a hitherto unprecedented amount of broken glass. It seems the practice of throwing glass bottles out of your moving vehicle is quite common in Jordan, though I don’t know if we ever spotted someone in the act… it could also be that for one reason or another all the broken glass from the surrounding area is swept by some municipal team over to the sidewalk. Stranger things have certainly happened.

After riding for what must have been 25 kilometers, we reached an exit indicating it was headed toward Amman. Amman was, however, far from visible from our current junction. So we flagged down a cab and Claudia asked in Arabic how far we were. The man said 20 or 25 more kilometers. This was perplexing, but the day was relatively young, so we kept on. A few kilometers later, with still no signs of increasing urbanity, the hunger hit and we pulled over to a roadside shop to buy some shapes.

As we were purchasing food, the call to prayer began to sound from all the surrounding mosques. The owner of the shop kindly asked us to hurry up so he could close down the operation and go pray. We quickly threw some bottles of water, a couple bags of potato chips, and a jar of halva onto the counter, purchasing them with haste, and heading out to sit on the curb and feast.

While we were eating, we noticed a particularly haunting child, portrayed on the sign above us. Any speculation as to its relevance is welcomed in the comments. Just as everyone was arriving back from praying, we climbed back on the cycles.

We were riding now on a smaller road, running parallel to the highway. It had been quite a while since we’d stopped to snack, and there was still no sign of Amman. What had we done wrong? We must have arrived in a different (perhaps low-cost carrier related?) airport. Regardless, we had been riding for a while and there was no sign of Amman, though we did continue to be reassured by signs and traffic obviously directed toward the capital. Eventually, we came upon a restaurant, poised on hill in the middle of semi-arid agricultural Jordan.

We decided to head in and ask why we seemed unable to reach the capital. Scott and Claudia headed in while I watched the cycles. They were taking quite some time, so I took out the ukulele and began to play. Soon a group of restaurant employees emerged from the kitchen to investigate what I was doing. They were all jovial fellows, and by the time Scott emerged with news of our location, we had a little dance party going.

It turns out that we were at least another 30 or 40 kilometers away from the capital, and that we would probably need to get a cab. Luckily, the owner of the restaurant knew of an unlicensed cab driver, who drove a large car or truck, easily able to fit our three cycles and all our bags. We decided to pull the trigger on the cab, even though the price was high enough that it would use most of our remaining money. We took stock of our remaining cash and decided that, though we were hungry, we did not have quite enough to eat at the restaurant. When we explained this to the owner, he insisted that we eat there for free, bringing out three pizzas and three bottles of water.

This unexpected generosity was going to be a theme of our travels in the Middle East, but especially then, it being so new, the action made me uncomfortable. What was the man looking for in return? What was the catch? Of course, there was none. I was just unprepared for Arab culture. We thanked him again and again, and hungrily enjoyed the pizzas.

The restaurant was nice, filled with flat screen TVs, sporting a large hard wood walled and floored interior, full of solid oak tables. How could this essentially depopulated bit of irrigation-dependent Jordanian farmland support such a swinging place? Thoughts of money laundering did cross our minds…

When the cab finally came, we were able to establish a price that was 30% lower than what had been quoted, allowing us to pay the man after all. In what Claudia assured us would be a “very Arab” way to do it, we thanked him again for the food and hid the full amount of the bill been under a napkin on the table, being sure to let the waiter see us doing it.

We climbed into the cab, which turned out to be one of those half-pickup/half-SUV  vehicles. There was indeed plenty of room for us and all the stuff, and with a few more goodbyes and waves out the back window, we drove off toward Amman. The sky was already becoming orange with sunset by the time we arrived. We felt giddy with our good fortune, and enjoyed the ride,  chatting with our driver in pantomime and through Claudia’s Arabic, and speculating as to what kind of illegal business might be laundering money through the pizza joint where we had just eaten.

Our man had quite the driving style. I felt surprisingly safe in the car, given that he drifted between lanes without signaling, chain-smoked cigarettes, and had wedged his phone in between the prongs of the steering wheel in order to better text while driving.

We unloaded our stuff once we had entered Amman city center, and bid our man goodbye. Amman is a city built in a kind of crater, so that entering it feels somewhat like climbing down from the nosebleed section of a stadium. The architecture and color of all the buildings is also more or less uniform, adding to the unique quality of the view. It is a very old looking city, but with decent roads, and plenty of wild drivers. Now that we were in the center, the city seemed to rise up around us, as though we were sitting right at home plate looking out into the stands.

The hotel that we had selected from our pirated copy of the Jordanian Lonely Planet PDF turned out to have been turned into a hospital of sorts, for when we arrived there, though the sign was still affixed more or less to the wall of the building, we were greeted by a large crowd of people in wheelchairs, on crutches, and sporting terrible scars and burns. They were very smiley and quite entertained by us, but also sorry to inform us that we could only stay there if we first got injured in some way.  This comment, made by one of the ringleaders, a large man of perhaps 50 years, in wheelchair and cast, was met with roaring applause and laughter by the rest of the patients. We smiled nervously and bid them adieu.

Luckily nearby we located another hotel by the name of the “Hotel Asia.” The place was only moderately filthy, not too expensive, and the owner spoke splendid English, having worked for some time with the U.S. forces in Iraq. So we decided to go with this one, paying for a few nights, and hauling our stuff upstairs.

It was certainly time to eat again, so we headed out into the Amman night, finding a large and very popular looking shawarma stand not far down the street. The owners turned out to be Egyptian and instantly took a liking to Claudia, who not only spoke their language, and had exotic and beautiful blond hair, but also had spent quite some time living and studying in Egypt.

Needless to say, she was a hit. The shawarma wraps were also delicious.

From there we wandered through the night to a rooftop café, where we wiled away a few hours playing whist. It had been some time since whist had played a role in AsiaWheeling. It was good to have it back in the mix.

It was good to be in Amman. It was a fascinating town, and despite the fact that the rooftop café charged us what we later learned was about %800 the normal price for tea, I was quickly becoming a fan of Jordanian people as well.

When Scott asked if I could write a post on Islamic Finance for the blog, I nodded with enthusiasm. To be honest I am a relative newcomer to this topic and a non-Muslim, and though while supremely curious I feel I run the risk of offending others on a subject that can be sensitive. Nevertheless, here we are.

The first thing that caught my attention about Islamic finance is its recent origins. Although religious scripts governing Sharia law have been around since Prophet Mohamed’s time, Islamic finance only emerged after the Second World War. It didn’t emerge as a result of new, groundbreaking economic principles, but as a response to a series of clashes between western and Muslim nations, which led to a rise in pan-Islamism.

Among the consequences of this movement was a change in the ways of commerce among Muslims. As Gulf nations withdrew petrodollars they held in the West and began dumping them in their own backyard, cities like Dubai and Kuwait emerged as hubs for the practice and display of Muslim financial piety. By the 1970s, Islamic scholars, economists, and intellectuals were busy studying and interpreting passages of the Quran for the creation of a framework for Islamic finance.

Theological Underpinnings

There are several factors that appear to make modern day Islamic finance different from conventional finance, the most important of which is the prohibition of interest. Wikipedia amply lists all these traits.

Al-Baqarah 2:275 Those who consume interest cannot stand [on the Day of Resurrection] except as one stands who is being beaten by Satan into insanity. That is because they say, “Trade is [just] like interest.” But Allah has permitted trade and has forbidden interest. So whoever has received an admonition from his Lord and desists may have what is past, and his affair rests with Allah . But whoever returns to [dealing in interest or usury] – those are the companions of the Fire; they will abide eternally therein.

But this prohibition isn’t unique to Islam. The Old Testament also regards the charging of interest as immoral. Exodus and Deuteronomy specifically regard lending to the poor as a sin.

Biblical Parallels

Exodus 22:25 - You shall not give him your silver at interest, nor your food for gain.

Deuteronomy 23:19 - Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of any thing that is lent upon usury

Leviticus 25:37 - Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase

It was only during the European Renaissance when Protestant reformer John Calvin changed the status quo. He argued that not all rules in the Old Testament set out for Jews (who were permitted to lend to gentiles) were applicable to Christians and that one must not interpret these passages in a literal manner. The bible should simply serve as a guide. But Calvin’s real concern was the exploitation of the poor through high interest rates. In Calvin’s letter to Oekolampadius, he writes that he is unwilling to condemn usury so long as it is practiced with equity and charity. Whoever borrows should make at least as much, if not more, than the amount borrowed, meaning that as long as one is fair and reasonable, charging interest should be allowed.

Calvin’s words were such a blow to the Church that interest became legalized across Europe. This was a major turning point in history. It is interesting that Calvin’s view, which forms a basis for modern day capitalism and bank lending, was effectively reversed by Islamic scholars in the 1970s. Is this to say that Muslims, who did business like others in corporate America up until the 1970s, were all of a sudden subject to the new rules of Islamic finance? Yes, in a sense. But there is a twist to it all.

According to Sharia scholars, a guaranteed rate of return on an interest rate is prohibited because the lender and borrower typically bear an unequal level of risk. For example, Sharia scholars prohibit the issuer of a bond to default on an interest payment and then go bankrupt, because those at the bottom of the pecking order virtually have no claim to their monies. Therefore much of Islamic finance is about creating a mechanism that reaps the benefits of bank lending with the appearance of profit sharing (Mudharabah).

Financing Structures

Consider a car loan. If I were to take out a loan in the UK, the bank lends me money and I repay the loan at a predetermined interest rate. Should I become unfit to service the loan, the bank revindicates (repossesses) the car, collects what is owed, and refunds the remainder (if any). If I were to go to an Islamic bank, the bank buys the car, and then sells it to me at a premium, also to be repaid at predetermined intervals (Murabahah). Although I end up paying the same amount under both scenarios, Islamic scholars believe that the latter scenario is only fair because should I default, the bank simply revindicates the car with no further claim on me. In the earlier scenario, the bank may further pursue me for any remaining principal if the repossession doesn’t provide enough. Thus Islamic banks do charge for the time value of money.

Another popular Islamic investment product is a sale/lease bond, aka Sukuk. Suppose I am a property developer and wish to build an apartment complex. I would sell a piece of real estate to a special purpose vehicle (SPV), which raises the funds by selling share certificates. The SPV leases the asset back to the issuer (me), thereby collecting principal plus interest and passes the proceeds back to the sukuk holders in the form of rent. At the end of the lease, the SPV sells or gives the property back to the issuer.

Other types of Islamic financial transactions exist. But to me the above examples are enough to suggest that Islamic finance is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Islamic finance uses complicated structures to achieve the same goal as conventional finance, but with added cost and decreased transparency. At the end of the day, profit and interest by any other name is still profit and interest. It is hard to imagine that this was the Prophet Mohamed’s objective.

Interest in Indonesia

Having grown up in the world’s most populous Muslim nation, I want to share my observations on Islamic finance in this part of the world. In my opinion Indonesia sees Islamic finance like a dot in the horizon. I can assure you that the majority of business done in Indonesia is definitely not Sharia compliant. Even more fundamentally, more than half the population, which lives in poverty, has probably never even heard of Islamic finance.

The problem with Islamic finance is that it has no global standardization. It emerged in the 1970s in the Middle East, which explains its varying level of demand in different Muslim countries. And as Islamic finance continues to emerge in different parts of the world, it faces the danger of generating greater differences and inconsistencies. A recent Bloomberg article calling for certification among Muslim scholars is further testament to this problem.

Don’t the Saudis own shares in Citi? Are wealthy Indonesian Muslims putting their money into Singapore or their own Sharia banks?  As the market continues to develop, time will tell how market priorities interplay with religious doctrine.

The following day, we spent most of our time working on correspondence for you, dear reader. We lounged around Sid’s place, hacking away on our computers, and doing a fair amount of schtick revolving around The Pixies’ tune “Hey.”

When Sid arrived home from work, he recommended that we visit a certain Arabic restaurant near the Dubai Creek that he was particularly fond of. Since we had hitherto not discovered anything that Sid was fond of that did not also strike our fancy, we agreed.

It was no surprise that the restaurant was incredible. And we feasted into the night on pastes, falafel, lentil soup, and a plate of mixed grilled meats. We then opened up the laptop and spent a few hours doing trivia, while we smoked Hookah.

It was Jackson’s last night with us in the Gulf, and all concerned were quite sad to see him go. As we sipped on minty lime drinks and chatted about financial depravities, I felt my heart grow heavy. It was so nice to have Jackson along on the trip. He added such a delightful spice to our daily lives.

The next morning Claudia and I awoke to find the apartment empty, and Jackson and Scott downstairs hard at work packing up his Speed TR for the journey home. For a moment, glancing down at our watches, we feared that we had overslept Jackson’s departure. So we were relieved when Jackson and Scott came back upstairs. By then, however, it was already well past time for Jackson to catch a cab. It was a hurried but heartfelt goodbye.

And then there were three.

We figured: what better way to mourn the departure of the illustrious Jackson than to go on a wheel? So we did exactly that. Claudia, Scott, and I unfolded the remaining three Dahons and headed out into Dubai.

Outside Sid’s apartment, in his general neighborhood, there were wide pedestrian ways, which made for easy wheeling. But soon they began to dissolve, and we were forced onto the road itself.

We then realized this was to be no wheel for beginners. The traffic was fast, and none too used to having cycles on the roads. All the sidewalks appeared to be only partially constructed so, Mario-Carting (as AsiaWheeling refers to cycling on the sidewalks) was not an option. So we rode fast, amidst the traffic, and trusted in our ability to signal our intent and the quality of our Vietnamese motorcycle helmets.

We were heading toward the main street of Dubai, an eight-lane, skyscraper-lined behemoth, by the name of Sheikh Zayed Road. It was an easy landmark, since it loomed, gigantic, over all the city. Once we finally made it there, the traffic was almost too intense for wheeling. We stuck to the side streets and only entered the main torrent when it was absolutely necessary.

Eventually we decided our next waypoint should be the ocean, so we hoisted the cycles up and scrambled over a large pedestrian crossover, plunking them down on the other side,  and wheeling on, now perpendicular to the Sheikh Zayed Road. We were heading toward a giant, fluttering, UAE flag that we knew was near the seaside.

Part way down the gravelly drive, we stopped to fill up our tires with the Speed TR’s in-seat pumps. When I opened mine up, a small stream of sand fell out of it. I was worried for a moment that the sand may have gone deeper as well, ruining the pump, but thankfully that was not the case.

Tires well pressurized once again, we wheeled on, into a very expatriate neighborhood. We were beginning to be able to smell the sea, so we knew we were close. We left the residential zone, and crossed a large empty gravel lot toward a huge Iranian hospital. Outside of the Iranian hospital, we were pulling an uber-lichtenstein when Claudia’s pedal fell off into the street. There were some moments of confusion and anxiety as we dashed into traffic to retrieve it before some Lamborghini or Land Rover crushed it. Unlike our Speed TRs, Claudia’s Speed D7 did not have detachable pedals, hers instead folded up against the cycle, so the pedal falling off was something to be alarmed about.

Luckily, the repair required no tools, just some careful manipulation of springs and bending and snapping back into place of plastic bits. The Iranians walking in and out of the hospital paused, forming a small crowd around us, quietly looking on as we performed bike surgery.

Then we were wheeling again. Soon we came upon a large beach, where a paved path led out onto a kind of jetty.

We decided to wheel out to the end of the jetty and take in the view, which was magnificent. There we met a group of young men whom we decided not to let ride the cycles. Normally on AsiaWheeling we are more than happy to indulge locals who are interested in tasting the raw freedom of the Speed TR themselves. For one reason or another, these chaps gave us a bad feeling, and we decided to decline. So we snapped a quick picture and split.

From there we followed the directions of this sign:

And we wheeled the one or two kilometer bike path that runs along the beach. It was a nice gesture by the Emerate of Dubai toward wheelers, but was far too short to provide anything other than a mild whetting of one’s appetite for cycling.

Claudia’s stomach had begun to hurt during the ride, so we decided to call the wheel. From there, we headed back toward Sid’s place, using the giant towering Burj Khalifa as a navigational tool. The sun was dipping low, and traffic was picking up as we pulled onto a great bridge arching over the Sheikh Zayed Road. The ride was high voltage but beautiful. From up on the bridge, we could see all the architecture of Dubai laid out around us, colored gold by the setting sun. It was exhilarating, dampened only slightly by the exhaust I was breathing at the time.

Back at Sid’s we began packing up our things for tomorrow’s flight to Jordon. The Gulf had been a magical place, in no small part due to great people, like Sid and Jackson, who helped us to make it so magical.

That evening, Sid opened a bottle of wine (quite the luxury here in the Gulf), and we lounged around the kitchen discussing Life, The Universe, and AsiaWheeling. That evening, Sid treated us to a meal at the restaurant of the hotel downstairs. It was a nightly theme restaurant, with tonight’s theme being Africa. For one reason or another, AsiaWheeling was most interested in the extensive salad bar at the place. It had been quite some time since, I guess, we’d eaten raw greens, and we reveled in the opportunity.

Before retiring for the night, we managed to do a little work on the web, though not before encountering a few blocked sites to our surprise with the following warning with a woman wearing a Batoola:

We crawled into bed that evening, not knowing quite what the rest of the Middle East would hold, but if the Gulf was any indication, it would be incredible.