One of things that that I try to do whenever I’m working away from the UK is to visit the countries near to where I’m staying. It worked especially well when we lived near Kuala Lumpur, and we spent a lot of time exploring the region with a mix of iconic sights and low-level sport.
Nobody would ever think of describing Al Ula as a ’hub’. There are usually around four flights a day, mainly internal and so it takes a bit of planning, and some time off work, to visit just about anywhere. Jordan is one of the places that I’d been lining up for a while. Petra, of course, is a well-known tourist destination and equally importantly, it’s a country where I’d not yet seen a football game.
The trip didn’t get off to the best of starts. I’d booked a hire car from the only agency that claimed to be at the airport, rather than off-site. They lied. After some difficulty tracking the guy that had arranged to meet us, we were taken to the middle of nowhere. I began to wonder if they had a side gig in organ harvesting. When we arrived we were offered a car that not only had more than a hundred thousand miles on the clock, but it looked as if it had spent most of those miles competing in demolition derbies or delivering coal. I couldn’t be arsed to go back to the airport and start the whole process again though and so we took it.
Our first couple of nights were in Amman and we made the obligatory visits to the Citadel and Roman Amphitheatre. They were fine. Of more interest were the pavement pet shops that we saw whilst walking back in the direction of our hotel. I quite like the idea of someone passing by and, on a whim, buying half a dozen week old ducklings.
The next stop was Wadi Rum for a couple of nights in the desert. It’s a four hour drive south from Amman and, as it’s close to the Saudi Arabian border, it’s probably not much further away from Amman as it is from Al Ula. The rock formations at Wadi Rum were spectacular and we spent time riding camels and hiking early in the morning whilst there was still some shade.
Jen and I were also driven around in the back of a pick-up to see rock carvings and places of interest. Lawrence of Arabia featured heavily with stops at his house, a spring that he drank from and a secluded corner where he had a piss.
The camp that we stayed in was virtually empty. On the first night a Dutch couple were there but on the second night we had the entire twelve tent set up to ourselves. Apparently, tourism virtually halted a year ago with the escalation of hostilities in the region. We passed other camps that also seemed deserted and at some of the destinations on the pick-up drive around, we were the only people there.
I felt sorry for the camp owner, who was just a young lad and had clearly made a big investment in his business. He seemed upbeat about prospects, but how do you absorb a year’s worth of bookings just vanishing?
The final part of our trip was three nights in Petra. It was about an hour or so’s drive back in the direction of Amman. Whilst hammering along the motorway I noticed something unusual in the middle lane. I slammed on the brakes and realised just in time that it was a puppy. Fortunately, there were no cars immediately behind me, so I was able to leap out and grab him. He can’t have been more than about six weeks old.
We tried googling animal shelters but that doesn’t seem to be a thing in Jordan. If I’d been in England I’d have kept him, but we eventually decided that his best chances of survival were to be dropped off where there were plenty of people and few cars. We found a spot in the next town and got a few strange looks as we abandoned him, but it gave him a better chance of surviving than he’d had twenty minutes earlier.
Petra was virtually as quiet as Wadi Rum. We stayed in a five-storey hotel right by the main gate which had only five guests. The Petra site was similarly deserted, which was great. Quite often we found ourselves with no other people in sight. On the third day we hiked in from a back gate to the tomb known as The Cathedral and it felt like we had the hiking trail to ourselves.
At times, there were more stray cats and dogs than people. Cats seemed appropriate to be wandering ancient tombs, but the dogs looked out of place. I always think a dog should have a human of its own.
Good as all the tourist stuff was, I needed to tick off a football ground to make the visit complete. There weren’t many options, and the only match of the trip took place on our first night in Jordan. Getting there required a forty-minute drive north from our hotel in Amman to the Prince Mohammed stadium at Zarqa. The roads were poor, as they were in most of Jordan, and I seemed to hit a pothole every few hundred yards.
The fixture was in the Shield Cup and from what I could gather, was being played at a neutral ground. It’s a pity that we hadn’t arrived in Jordan a few hours earlier as there had already been a game in the same competition at the ground that afternoon.
We were able to park at the stadium and had a chat with a lad hoping to pick up some of the passing shisha trade. He mentioned that he was a Liverpool fan then directed us further along the stand to the nearest entrance gate.
There wasn’t a ticket office, or at least not one that I could see and a guy scanning tickets pointed us in the direction of a young lad who he reckoned would sort us out. It seemed that the section we were trying to get into was for the Al-Faisaly fans and one of their ultras had been tasked with buying tickets online for anyone who turned up without having made prior arrangements.
We gave him four Jordanian Dinars each and once he’d downloaded the tickets, he accompanied us to the entrance and the first fella scanned them from his phone. It all seemed a lot more complicated than just handing cash over without involving the middleman, but that’s modern life.
We were then searched, and Jen had two cans of fake coke that we’d bought ten minutes earlier confiscated. When I asked if we could drink them there and then, someone intervened to point out that elderly visitors from abroad would be unlikely to misbehave and we ended up having our drinks returned to us to take into the stand.
We had seats along the side of the pitch, facing the main stand. Prince Mohammed Stadium was built in 1998 and has a current capacity of 11,400. It’s an artificial surface with a running track between the pitch and the stands.
Every now and then a group of Al-Faisaly fans would wander over to chat, checking out who we were, why we were there or explaining to us the difference between ultras and hooligans. One group of young lads even offered to take us out to a restaurant to sample the Jordanian national dish of mansaf.
I think Al-Faisaly were expected to win but unfortunately for the fans around us that’s not how it worked out. Al-Sareer had the better of the chances, but the game didn’t really take off until the final ten minutes when Al-Faisaly had a man sent off and then Al-Sareer took advantage of their numerical advantage to nick a late winner.
More importantly, I’d ticked off a football ground in my sixty-second different country.
Trail of the Lion King 