How We Got Rejected by Israel

The following is a long and painful story.
Since my last entry, Zach and I have endured constantly rising temperatures, covered hundreds of miles, slept in the streets twice, and lost boatloads of faith.

What happened before:
On the afternoon of my last blog posting, we caught a local minibus to Petra - about 3 hours crammed in with suitcases, sweaty men, and no air conditioning. I was shoved in backwards on the ledge of a seat an old religious guy lacked the courtesy to fully share. He sat spread out in the middle, while I balanced all my weight on the edge of a single butt-cheek. Zach on the other hand, got the floor, which was not far off from sitting on a skillet. It was bad through his jeans, but when he laid down to sleep, he woke up with his back blistering. At Petra we found out it costs 21 JD or $30 to get into the ruins, and as it was already evening, we decided to postpone our sally forth until the next day. That night, we smoked nargile and talked with some Jordanian kids about how tourism is the only industry where a young man can expect to make any money in Jordan. We saw some incredible rocks and decided to sleep in a cave. A little way in, we found we still have a lot of energy, so we aimed to climb over the mountain and sneak into the park under the cover of darkness. Along the way we found some guys sneaking swigs of a bottle of vodka and though they were very friendly, they tried to convince us that America is responsible for all wars everywhere in the world. We asked him if he had heard about the violence between Georgia and Russia but he assured us that Jordan isn't fighting Russia. THen the tourist police came and took us into the station. They told us we couldn't sleep outside "for our own safety" which was "their only concern." They let us sleep on the ground outside of the station and after a few snatches of sleep on concrete, I woke up shivering and covered in ant and mosquito bites.
We got up feeling miserable at 6 and went and bought our tickets into the park. There's a monastery (where one of the Indiana Jones movies was filmed) that's about an hour hike in if you go straight there. We hiked through the empty desert while the sun rose, and even that early it was still hot where there wasn't rock coverage. We took our time leaving, looking at the other sites (that takes about 2 or 3 days to see all of them), and by 10 am the heat was utterly unbearable and the park was a veritable river of tourists. We saw all these bedouin dressed up in silly costumes getting their pictures taken and looking really sad.

Anyway, that afternoon, we took a bus to Ma'an and then another all the way south to Aqaba, where Jordan meets the Red Sea. And here is where the most brutal 24 hours of the trip began.

Too hot to move, we decided to go straight to the ferry that would take us to the Sinai Peninsula because I wanted to see St. Catherine's monastery, and Mt. Sinai, and then we were going to head to Cairo, where Zach has been planning to fly home from in the next few days. (He was going to travel for a few months, but this trip has been so hot and mostly miserable - the same questions about whether or not we are muslims, the same drivers trying to cheat us, sleeping in the streets everywhere except Amman -where we found a 3 JD hotel where we slept on hard mattresses on the roof - and so he's decided to fly home and go back to school in Madison, Wisconsin) First, the cab driver charged us double the standard rate, which in itself wasn't horrible, but when we got into the cab, Zach had made him repeat that he was going to charge the standard rate for both of us, not just one. Then he spent the entire ride evangelizing Islam, trying to get us to repeat Qur'anic phrases. So when he cheated us, Zach asked him in Arabic whether he was a Muslim or not, then called him a liar and I tossed in my two cents of "Haram!"
At the port, we were asked if we were Muslims, then were told the ferry cost $60. twice what the Internet had said it would be. Not only that but it wasn't leaving until midnight and would take 3 hours.
We took a cab back to town to find a bus, but were told there were none to Egypt, only crossing through Israel, which I figred would be easily enough. We could take a cab to the border, walk across the little stretch of land that is Israel's access to the Red Sea, and then take a bus from Taba, in Egypt. We spent our last JD on the exit stamps to get out of Jordan, then walked to the Israeli side where we were immediately flagged and our passports taken. This was fine and expected because we had been in Lebanon and Syria and we knew that was suspicious.

The procedure:
We walked through the metal detector and our stuff went through the x-ray machine. No problem. They asked us to wait a moment and everyone else in line passed through. Then they took me aside for questioning and asked me where I came from, what I was doing in Lebanon, a play by play account of where all I had been, what I did, what holidays I celebrate in the USA, the religions of each of my grandparents and parents, and my own, whether I had been in any mosques, did I pray there? Why more than one? What did I want to see in Israel? Why did my grandmother leave Lebanon? Why do I wear my sideburns like I do? And my beard? What about my hat (a tourist hat I bought in Jordan for a dollar)? Then she asked me about Zach, what his major was, why we were together, where all he had been in the last two weeks, why we had so little luggage, etc...When she seemed satisfied, she let me sit down and then they started going through our stuff. First they looked at every individual item, then they decided to x-ray every individual item, and swab them down with the papers that say whether you have touch any explosives recently. Then we were each thoroughly strip searched. Finally, she asked for every number of every person I had met in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, and all my contacts in Israel. I wrote down those that I could, but I had thrown away most of them along the way. After all that, they let us sit down for awhile. Meanwhile, everyone else who passed through were allowed to continue without hindrance.
Finally, after we had been there three hours, they told us the border was closing, so we had to go back to Jordan. We were welcome to return the next morning at 6, but it would "take at least a few hours then."
Both of us were speechless. Two Americans with absolutely nothing suspicious on us (we even had our group picture from SINARC showing us smiling along with the other students)turned away from Israel. Zach kept reminding them that Israel wouldn't even be country without American money and support, and howoutrageous it was for them to reject two American citizens. As consolation, they offer to drive us the 45 second walk back to the Jordanian border, where we were allow to re-enter but were not reimbursed for our exit stamps. We both both incredibly offended by the whole situation.

Then we had to get back to Aqaba, which we wanted to walk but they wouldn't let us. We told them we had spent the last of our money on the exit stamps but they wouldn't believe us. We got yelled at for a long time by a cab driver who said don't come to Jordan unless you have a lot of money to spend. He did, ultimately take us back to town because it was on the way home for him anyway. But he yelled and lectured the whole way and dropped us off with a red face. So much for the famous Arab hospitality.

Zach snapped. "I'm going home. Fuck this place, I'm going home right now."
The only question was whether to fly from Amman or Cairo. We knew how expensive the ferry was, but the Cairo flight was actually cheaper. We debated the question for hours and finally the deciding factor was me telling him I wanted his company to Egypt and that he would be kicking himself in a few years if he didn't see the pyramids now when he had the chance. So after dinner, we went back to the ferry (cab rides were now added up to over $40 - almost the price of the ferry ticket we didn't want to pay earlier). We got there at 10:30, got our tickets and exit stamps from Jordan which we had to pay for again. They said it would be 12:00 when we left, but after taking naps for hours on the sidewalk, the pedestrians were finally allowed on at 1:30. There was a massive mob of Arab men trampling each other and shoving and swarming to get on the buses that went a mile or two to the boat. We flashed our American passports and got escorted to a bus before the rest of the crowd, which we would otherwise have been against (special treatment), but we had to escape this violent mob. On the boat we waited a long time to drop off our passports for Egyptian visas, and then went and found some floor space to sleep on. We were on the roof, under the stars, floating on the Red Sea, and I kept waking up with sharp pains in my back and sides, and each time we were still in the port. I thik we finally left about 4:30 or 5 in the morning, and arrived at Egypt maybe around 8 am. Then it took an hour and a half to get off the boat, and when we finally did, we walked through the steadily growing heat to an office where we paid $15 for Egpytian visas. Then we went and found a bus that cost $15 into Cairo, but we couldn't board for nearly over an hour. So we sat. Then they let us board and there was air conditioning and we fell asleep. We woke up an hour or so later, sweltering, still in the same place but with the air conditioning off. We didn't leave until 1 pm, but eventually we got going.

Somewhere in the middle of the desert on the Sinai Peninsula, the bus broke down and we found ourselves in a scene right out of a movie, standing around the bus, taking refuge in its shadow with no buildings, only sand and rocks, in all directions of the horizon. We waited for over an half an hour.
Finally an Egpytian guy came up to us and said he was going to take the next small car into town and becasue he had a lot of money, he would pay for us. We suspect he offered because he thought this American girl named Lindsey who was also on the bus was with us though she wasn't. A car stopped and the 4 of us piled into the back with our backpacks, Lindsey's 2 giant suitcases, and her purse. Then we burned out across the desert in an air-conditioned Nissan Altima stopping only for a nargile (hookah) break, and a long, slow line to take the tunnel under the Suez canal.
It was after 10 pm when we reached Cairo. Lindsey was meeting a friend Shereef who she was going to stay with and the drivers got in touch with him on cell phones. He agreed to drop us off wherever we were staying, no problem, and we eventually met him on the highway. It was more comfortable in his car, and he offered his cell phone for me to call Muhammad, a guy from couchsurfing who said we could stay with him. When he answered, he semed confused that we needed a place to stay (though my e-mail had said little besides just that) and so Shereef said we could stay at his place. He lives on the 14th floor of a gorgeous apartment building overlooking the city.

When we got to his place, we took showers, ate some dinner and sat around talking. He speaks English like an American though he's from the Emirates and has never been to the US. After we had settled, he took Zach with him to do some work (which I haven't yet heard about) and I passed out. I woke up in the middle of the night and he and Zach and his brother Muhammad were talking in the kitchen and we ate some delicious mangos, then went back to sleep.


So here we are now. Zach is still passed out though I've been up for 4 hours. He needs to buy a plane ticket home, and I need to figure out what to do with myself for the last 13 days before my flight home. On Sunday, I'm thinking about going back to the Israeli border and trying again to get in, armed with patience and a really long book. But the last thing I need is to go 8 hours across the desert, wait awhile, then come 8 hours back to Cairo. I've also heard rumors that a new eruption of violence in Gaza has temporarily closed the Egypt-Israel border.
Once I get in, I have a few places to stay, and there are all sorts of things I want to see in the holy land...plus I have already bought a ticket to fly from Tel Aviv to Cyprus (where my flight home leaves from). So all things considered, I realy really want to get in to Israel, but if it isn't meant to be...

I send all my love,
tcm