Over Jordan

Author: By Christine Temin, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, August 18, 1996

Page: M1

Section: Travel

The complicated border protocol began on the Israeli side with a teen-age soldier approaching my car with what looked like a giant dentist's mirror -- the round kind with angled handle that facilitates the dentist looking into odd corners of your mouth. In this instance, the soldier slipped the mirror under the car, to check for bombs. The ritual of crossing continued at a bus station that looked like a mirage in the desert, with examination of passports and visas, exchanging of currencies and little slips of paper that permit you to go from point A to B. Passports were confiscated, tourists packed onto buses -- you're still not allowed to drive your own car across this particular border -- and at last I arrived in Jordan, at another bus station where, mysteriously, my passport had arrived before me.

About the only thing I knew about Jordan before I went was that its queen is a blond American, like me. This seemed an auspicious sign. Jordan turned out to be delightful. The two hotels I stayed in -- the elegant Intercontinental in Amman and the picturesque Taybet Zaman near Petra -- were world-class and reasonably priced. Ditto for the food. My visit coincided with Ramadan, the holy month when Muslims fast from sunup to sundown, and so I'd come armed with granola bars. No need. The food in the hotels where foreigners stay was plentiful, excellent and available all day long.

I hadn't come for the food, though, but to see ruins, art and architecture. Jordan was a revelation. I'd known about Petra, of course -- the ancient fabled pink stone city whose Treasury building was the backdrop for the movie ``Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade'' -- but Jerash, a Roman outpost that peaked in the third century AD, came as a surprise. So did the existence of good museums housing archeological treasures and ornate Bedouin costumes. And so, especially, did a strong contemporary art presence, which is nurtured by none other than King Hussein's sister-in-law, Princess Wijdan Ali, director of Jordan's National Gallery and herself a serious painter. Some Western visitors to the Middle East limit their time in Jordan to a single day in Petra: They're missing a lot.

Taxi ranks in Amman look like retirement homes for Mercedes, all decades old, all decked out with Oriental carpets. Riding in a cab is safer than walking, which is hazardous because of the wild driving that prevails.

From the back of the cab you'll see loads of new construction. Everything is built from the same pale stone, so despite some architectural flights of fancy -- residences in styles from crenellated castle to The White House -- a certain visual unity prevails.

It's the older art and architecture that foreigners come to see, though. There is an impressive Roman theater in downtown Amman; it seats 6,000, dates from the second century AD, and is under restoration more or less constantly. While I was there, men were banging away at the stone seats, removing the old but picturesque stones and replacing them with new ones distinctly wanting in the charm and character category.

The Citadel, overlooking the city, has been a fortress for thousands of years. Among the ruins here are a Roman temple, Byzantine Church and a palace of the Umayyad period, named after the Islamic dynasty in power in the seventh and eighth centuries. Here, too, is the small Jordan Archeological Museum, one of the city's more important attractions. The museum has excellent wall texts in English, written by someone with a sense of humor. A label beside pottery bowls of the Abbasid and Fatimid periods, 11th century AD, are identified as ``the Tupperware of their day.'' One room is devoted to documentation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, with photos and texts about their excavation, but no mention of where the scrolls are now -- in Jerusalem.

Jordan's National Gallery is presently housed in a building that was a private home before its conversion in the late 1970s. In the office of its determined director, Princess Wijdan Ali, though, is a model for a new national gallery. The government has given land for it, but there remains the matter of the $12 million for the building itself. The gallery's permanent collection numbers 1,500 works, not just from Jordan but the entire Islamic world. ``Western artists have enough venues,'' the princess says; her mission is to give exposure to those from Islamic countries. ``What the West doesn't understand,'' she says, ``is the depth and all-encompassing nature of Islamic culture. It's not all Fundamentalism and Hamas.''

The huge contrasts among Islamic nations show up in their art, not necessarily in predictable ways. Sudan is so poor ``they don't even have crayons in the art school there,'' says the princess. ``But Sudan has very good artists.'' Artists from the Gulf States are strongly subsidized, she says. ``The government will even rent apartments in Paris for them! But there is no good art there!''

In the National Gallery she has sometimes shown art that is critical of Fundamentalism, including a painting by a Palestinian woman, Layla Shawa, called ``Impossible Dream.'' A protest against purdah, it shows veiled women holding ice cream cones. They can't get the ice cream to their mouths; it will melt, uneaten. The entire second floor space is given over to a semipermanent show the princess organized on the influence of calligraphy on contemporary Islamic art. It's striking both for its variety and sophistication. Among the outstanding works is an installation, based on the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, by Mahdi Moutachar, an Iraqi artist living in Paris.

The National Gallery isn't Amman's only showcase for contemporary art. Since 1993, an organization called the Artists House has operated on a hillside site where the Roman temple of Hercules once stood. Columns with Corinthian capitals still dot the grounds. Jordan's only contemporary art center, the Artists House, is headquartered in an early 1920s stone building where Lawrence of Arabia once stayed. It has been handsomely renovated by Ammar Khammash, a Jordanian architect who designed marble lighting fixtures in the shape of open books for the 2,000-volume library -- the only one in the country devoted solely to visual arts. The Artists House collection is both intriguing and, to a Westerner surprised to find good contemporary art in Jordan, unexpected.

Jerash, an hour north of Amman, is about as noncommercial as a major archeological site could be. On the day of my visit there were more shepherds than tourists in the vast complex that began to prosper around the time of Alexander the Great, and the loudest sound was from the bells around the necks of their sheep. Jerash was an outpost of the Roman Empire, and a particularly wealthy one. Its population peaked at 15,000, and to serve the citizenry there were temples, theaters, a marketplace and baths. In the fourth century AD, though, Jerash's star began to fade as the overland trade caravans that once visited were replaced by shipping routes. The city declined, its population dispersed, and Jerash slept until it was discovered in 1806 by a German, Ulrich Seetzen. It wasn't until more than a century later that restoration work began.

There's much still to accomplish, as any visitor can plainly see. Column capitals lie where they toppled centuries ago. Brambles grow out of conch shell niches. Much of the Roman architecture was plundered and recycled in the Christian churches that came later. Jerash is still in its centuries-old state. But it's impressive nonetheless. The level of carving in those fallen capitals is rich and refined, with crisp images of, for instance, lions crawling out of scrolled acanthus leaves.

The site is huge, with an immense hippodrome -- pure ``Ben Hur'' -- at one end and the vast Temple of Artemis at the other. A ``cardo'' -- colonnaded street -- is the spine of the city. Almost 2,000 feet long and lined with columns, it is majestic even in its ruined condition.

It takes at least a few hours to explore Jerash, making it a perfect day trip out of Amman. Petra is another story. The famed ``rose-red city half as old as time,'' as Dean Burgen's poem put it, would take weeks to explore completely. Allow at least one or two full days to avoid the frustration of rushing through. And go to Jerash first: Marvelous though it is, it would be an anticlimax after Petra.

The red city is a three- to five-hour drive from Amman -- if the weather is behaving. It wasn't, the day I went: A London-like fog blanketed the road. I was fortunate enough to have a capable and persistent driver, Ayoub Ail. We joined a long convoy of cars crawling along the road that wound around the side of a hill. The first car eventually gave up, turning around. The other cars pulled over to the side of the road. We took the bait, pulling ahead and having no one to follow. Eventually, we did arrive at Taybet Zaman, a charming hotel that has set a new model for Jordan by returning to an old style, that of the indigenous Arab village. To an American eye, it also looks like a ``Flintstones'' set. Its success has inspired local people to hang onto -- and restore -- older buildings instead of replacing them with gaudier new ones.

The stone buildings that form Taybet Zaman's ``village'' include guest rooms with nary a right angle in sight, equipped with well-stocked minibars and ecologically correct touches such as vegetable-green soap wrapped in corrugated cardboard containers that look like Frank Gehry's furniture. There's a ``souk'' -- an approximation of an Arab bazaar, where you can buy necessities, including holy water from the Dead Sea.

Taybet Zaman is several miles from Petra itself: The hotel runs a regular shuttle bus to the site, and taxis are plentiful and cheap. There are modern hotels adjacent to Petra; they're more convenient but also looked boring and potentially noisy.

Nothing can prepare you for Petra, certainly not ``Indiana Jones.'' Unlike most of the world's architectural wonders -- the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, Borobodur -- it's not a single structure or even a series of buildings, but an entire city, a big city, carved out of rock that's not only red but striated with pink and gold swirls that suggest an agitated sea. Petra was the capital of the Nabateans, Arabs who settled there in the sixth century BC and became rich by levying tolls on caravans passing through on various trade routes. Eventually, Petra was taken over by Christian and then Muslim forces, then forgotten by everyone except local Bedouins. Only in the 19th century was it discovered by a Swiss explorer, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt.

Nature has created a flamboyantly theatrical beginning to Petra. (You experience it after the shock of discovering that it costs foreigners $30 a day to enter; Jordanians pay only a pittance.) You walk -- or ride on a horse or in a horse-drawn buggy, both available for rent -- down a narrow slit between rocky walls, called a siq. At last this natural passageway widens and the Treasury, Petra's most astounding building, materializes before you. Like many of Petra's buildings, the Treasury is an enigma, probably built between 100 BC and AD 200, probably not a treasury in any official sense but possibly a hiding place for pirates' loot. It is definitely astounding, a collaboration between nature's genius and man's.

There's another theatrical aspect to Petra: The facades are the best of the buildings. There's virtually nothing inside. Not only are they bereft of furnishings, but there's no particularly noteworthy carving in the interiors. Petra is one of the world's largest stage sets.

Petra's other wonders include an 8,000-seat amphitheater, a seemingly endless series of temples and tombs, and sites with such romantic names as ``High Place of Sacrifice.'' There are several steep hikes to buildings with fabulous overall views. And there are still Bedouin families who seem to live here, despite the government's efforts to relocate them. The braying of their donkeys echoes through the canyons.

As a tourist haven, Petra is well-managed, clean and pleasant, and it's so immense that it's hard to imagine it ever feeling crowded, although I've heard that occasionally it does. Take extra rolls of film: This is one of the world's most photogenic wonders. And if you have to have a souvenir beyond your photographs, there's a chap who calls himself ``Abdul Picasso'' who will write your name in Petra-pink sand in a bottle.

If I had it to do over, I'd fly into Tel Aviv and out of Amman, avoiding the hassle of a second border crossing. On that subject: Borders are problematic in this part of the world, and governments have been known to close them on short notice. Check that the one you're aiming for is open at the time and date you want to cross it.

My best discovery in Jordan was my terrific driver-guide, Ayoub Ali, who is conscientious, charming and will, for very little money, drive you anywhere you want to go in his country. Ayoub's usual haunt is just outside the Intercontinental Hotel in Amman; ask for him at the concierge's desk.

The Hotel Intercontinental Jordan is on Queen Zein St., PO Box 35014/15, Jabal Amman, Amman 11180 Jordan. Telephone (800) 327-0200 in the United States.

Taybet Zaman is at PO Box 2, Taybeh, Wadi Moussa, Jordan. Telephone 962-3-339111. Fax 962-3-339101.