We rented a car – yes, we’re driving this thing… and yes, within 5 minutes of picking up the car, I damn near collided with another vehicle.

Here’s what we very quickly came to realize about driving in Jordan: it’s more of an intuitive thing. In the states, we’re (generally) very good about following the rules of the road. We count on everyone to do their part so as not to pull any surprises. Nobody knows how to deal with surprises because they generally just expect everyone to follow the rules. In Jordan you approach driving like you have no idea what the rules are. Your just GO. If you want to pass someone, you pass them, if someone’s in the inbound lane, you can still pass them.. the person in front of you sees you and will usually get into the shoulder (frighteningly, this happens on blind turns commonly). I’ve never seen anybody use a turn signal, but I’ve seen a few hand signals. Stop signs rarely exist and I’ve only seen a handful of traffic lights. So, the approach is to treat it like a video game.. go where you’re going, assume everyone’s watching what you’re doing and just be really careful, but be fluid. It’s not safe, by any stretch, but it’s not so much wild as… intuitive.

I should also note that, frustratingly, there’s road construction in a lot of places that make directions complicated. I took the precaution of downloading the entire country into google maps, and it’s been great, but google isn’t really hip to the redirections. Google also doesn’t realize that many towns have a largely impassible median running through the center of Main Street which means you have to usually overshoot your turn, make a u-turn a ways down, and then find your turn from the other direction.

The overall impression of rural Jordan (and actually the Amman city center) was actually one of surprising familiarity. It’s got all of the same things we’ve found in developing Latin America – scrappy, dusty and somewhat unkempt small towns with big trucks, boys wearing knockoff polo shirts and jeans, kids in brightly colored plastic backpacks with cartoon characters, low cement block houses with few windows, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Large garish photo printed storefront signs for restaurants, tiendas, clothing stores. Then there are the reminders that you’re not in small town Bolivia – women covered from head to toe in niqabs or hijabs, men with heads wrapped in keffiyehs and the full length thawb‘s, and of course, lots and lots of Arabic, though signs are often inexplicably in English as well – for tourism, English is the unified touchstone of communication here, but it confuses me to see it on shops that are very much for the locals – like hardware stores or plumbers or clothing stores.

Jordan is a rather compact country, and you can pretty much get from Syria to the north to Saudi Arabia in the south in something like 4.5 hours. Luckily we have 12 days and can take it fairly slow. In this spirit, we hit our first stop within a half hour of our departure from the airport with a visit to the town of Madaba.

MAH-da-ba is kind of sneaks up on you from the highway. First we’re curling around sandy fields, golden hills and periodic orchards and farmhouses… then suddenly, Madaba arrives with it’s tight, tangled little roads, it’s single lane two-way streets, it’s slow creep up the hill on which its perched with it’s uniform cream colored square buildings that make the whole thing look like loose stack of bricks. Madaba is a tight and loud but friendly market town that was a bracing start to our driving in Jordan… but we quickly found our way to our destination – a few blocks at the heart of town with a collection of some extremely well preserved 6th century Byzantine mosaics, including what Wikipedia describes as “the oldest surviving original cartographic depiction of the Holy Land and especially Jerusalem.

The complex of sites is woven into a living city, but carefully considered for visitors with a very fresh new visitor center with ample free parking, and a series of archeological parks that are easily strung together with short walks. Though the “old map” was a great thing to view, we were really more struck by some of the larger works – the wide eyed Byzantine figures, mer-people, tigers and bears and birds. Outside of them being 6th century, honestly we’re not going to tell you we know a ton about it.. so look at the pictures.

After a quick lunch, we made our way south towards Karak castle, our second destination for the day. What we did not expect (because somehow the guidebooks don’t mention it.. at all) is Wadi Mujib. (Wadi more or less means valley or canyon or the stream in the canyon.. you’ll be hearing a lot about Wadis). Wadi Mujib creates a VAST canyon that makes its way from the interior of Jordan where it spectacularly meets with the Dead Sea to the west. It’s like the Grand Canyon, and more than one roadside Bedouin rest makes reference as such. After a gorgeous and exhilarating ride down, we grinned our way up in our rental Mitsubishi Lancer, eventually really needing a short break for a cool drink and the bathroom. Sadly for the old guy that ran it, the first rest when we needed one had locked bathrooms – the keys having disappeared with an old lady to the city. We pulled up the second, not knowing what to expect, and a darkly tanned and spirited face came bouncing out of a little building, wearing a Keffiyeh, a thick mustache, and a smile. Sami quickly pulled us to his patio, a series of couches with unrestricted views of Wadi Mujib and the dam within it. He poured water over our heads to cool us off (though the car AC was fine), then he pulled of our shoes and rinsed our feet, propped them up on pillows… then fired up a lively conversation. He taught me how to flick rocks in such a way that they buzz and whistle through the air, he challenged me to a stone throwing contest (which he readily won), and he told us about his past.

Sami had spent some time in the US – in fact, just about everyone we had the chance to speak to had a story about time they spent in the US, including the old woman who kept us on a park bench for an hour at sunset in Amman telling us about her time in Ohio and New York and her beloved Michigan. About how she’d climbed the ladder at Wendys and out earned her teenaged contemporaries. It seems like everyone we come across has had a sometimes lengthy story about their life in the states. Who knew?

Returning to Sami the Bedouin on Wadi Mujib – after some time, he offered to cook for us. Having just ate, we asked for some tea and treats. (Note: mint, or the sage filled Bedoin tea, is an absolute staple and touchstone in social life everywhere in Jordan) We dined on a few cookies and fruits with our tea, but being in a hurry and trying to outrun the sunset to reach Karak castle, we eventually dismissed ourselves and asked for the check.

Then it got complicated.

There’s kind of an opacity in charging thing here that you run in to from time to time. An uncertainty about what’s on the house and what’s running up your tab. Prices are fluid, and tips MATTER. Sami asked us what we thought it was worth. Here’s the thing – we’ve only been here a few days and this, particularly, is a very novel situation. I said, “Look, it would help if you’d tell us what you expect, because we’re new here and we don’t understand the value of the money”, and he refused to do this, eventually I made an offer, and he seemed to feign outrage. He told us to leave, said he didn’t want our money. Along the way he had made a joke that he’d charge the Germans such and such price, so we offered that price, and he refused and said a lot of things. But of course, “Fine, there’s the donation box, you do what you want”… so we did. And we walked to our car.. and he chased us down and gave us bottles of water.

We have not yet run in to anything quite so energetic, but there is this recurring theme. We try not to be too nickel and dime oriented about haggling because… what’s it to me? What’s a dollar? This is a person’s living, and we see it as a kind of giving – a way to help support the local economy. So they end up “winning” with a higher number. We walk away, and then as if some kind of guilty comes over them, they come running out with a package of cookies or something to offset their win. It happens with a generous tip, too, which is funny and counterproductive, but we don’t argue.

Our stay with Sami kept us much later than we intended, which meant we basically arrived that the crusader castle of Al-Karak at nearly closing. We passed through the ticket area, and inexplicably, a security officer took it on himself to give us a lightening fast tour of the castle. Can’t say too much about it, really… it had bedrooms, stables, kitchens, jails, VIP jails, VIP bedrooms, VIP kitchens and cisterns.

Winding up the roads to Karak was an uncomfortably sporty situation, and so too was the way down, only this time fueled by the fear of the setting sun and the drive that still remained until we hit our final destination down in Dana. Shifting google directions and a need to hit an ATM machine royally janked up our progress, and we made our final, winding turns through the very rural outskirts of Dana, dodging cats, children and women dressed as shadows until well after nightfall.