Aqaba is Jordan’s own little corner of the Red Sea – a piece of prime real estate it shares with a handful of neighbors, most of which you can see on a clear day. Israel across the Gulf of Aqaba with it’s high-rise resorts, a mountainous and largely empty Egyptian coastline, and Saudi Arabia, which probably takes a lot of squinting and a boat ride to see. We were back and forth on whether we would go – the snorkeling and diving there was said to be beautiful, with clear blue green waters and abundant marine life… but in a piece of the world concerned with female “modesty”, we weren’t entirely sure how navigable a meaningful Red Sea experience would be. Since our Wadi Rum trip ended up rather expedient, we found ourselves with more time on our hands than things to do, so we gave Aqaba a shot.
Aqaba instantly felt different than the other places we’d visited in Jordan. It seemed heavier, less friendly. The young men offered challenging stares, service felt curt and impatient – we simply felt a little unwelcome for the first time in our travels here. Then again, our first attempt to interface with Aqaba was at the peak of the intense midday heat. As it turns out, Aqaba doesn’t really seem to wake up until around sun down, and I suppose it goes to figure that those poor souls working the day shift during those sweltering hours can’t be expected to smile about it. We learned to adjust, and after adopting a siesta into our midday schedule, things got considerably better for everyone – never as good as Amman, but certainly more accommodating.
Showing up in the afternoon, we knew we’d literally and figuratively missed the boat for snorkeling on our first day in, so we asked the hotel to schedule a tour for us the next morning, and added a second night to our stay to allow us some rest after a day at sea. So after a short exploration of our neighborhood in Aqaba, we retired to the room and sacrificed a day of adventure to languidly laying half dressed in the air conditioning, licking our wounds from a somewhat unsuccessful expedition into town.
Rising early the next morning to meet the shuttle to the dive boat, we’d find the hotel had mangled our snorkeling reservations, leaving us with another day in Aqaba with very little to do but sweat profusely. Not wanting to file this leg of our trip under failure, we extended our hotel stay by a day and made use of our early rise in the cooler hours to poke around and to organize another trip by our own means. We caught breakfast at a well visited spot, and finally cracked a smile on Aqaba by way of a friendly young waiter with a face full of braces and a good command of English. As evening arrived, so to did Aqaba’s tense charm. We took a long walk through a large swath of town, and ended the night on a rooftop bar – an unlikely event both because alcohol is a scarce commodity in Jordan, and because neither of us are at all interested in loungy DJs.
The next morning, we took to the seas on a sizable dive boat alongside a group of slightly shy but friendly Kuwaiti divers. They huddled below deck, sharing photos and video of their dives, and planning the ones to come, leaving us above deck with the boat essentially to ourselves. From time to time a member of the boat crew would turn up to serve us plates of sliced fruit, tea, cookies, burgers… it would have been worth it for the boat ride alone.
The day would consist of a series of 3 long stops, and the drill was the same each time: we arrived at our spot, donned our gear, and after a quick undersea survey of the snorkeling area with a guide, we were on our own to explore the wonderful corals, bristly urchins and countless shimmering fish within the transparent waters of the poorly named Red Sea. Each of the locations spotlighted a sunken man-made object – a ship, a plane, and a tank – each, we’re to understand, placed there in a ploy to attract divers to the area. A ploy that worked for the Kuwaiti divers, who came for exactly that kind of action. We were, however, far more mesmerized by the abundant sea life.
As the day wound on, we soon came to realize that we were getting a lot more for our money that we had expected. It appeared that because there weren’t enough snorkelers for us to merit our own trip, we were tacked on to a 3 dive charter – extending our 4 hour half-day excursion into a 9 hour luxury adventure that would end with a beautiful sunset.
While neither of us had any intention of staying 3 nights in Aqaba (and we wouldn’t really recommend it either), in the end it was worth the hassle to spend a day at sea, having some kind of real vacation experience among the colorful, kaleidoscopic myriad of Red Sea locals just beneath its surface. It was also probably worth the intense sunburn I would earn, having failed to realize that my back would spend so much time aimed at the sun while we snorkeled.
Our next day would point us due north along the Dead Sea Highway towards it’s eponymous destination. After an easygoing 4 hour drive through the gorgeous desolation of the Jordanian desert, we turned up at our accommodation – The Holiday Inn Dead Sea Resort.
There’s no real free and easy ways to interface with the Dead Sea. The tourism infrastructure is organized around a series of resorts that speckle its northeastern shore. Though there are cheap public access points to the sea, female modesty norms would not have permitted Lucy to turn up in a bathing suit – so most tourists suck it up and spend a night or two in the luxurious hands of something like the Holiday Inn. Like most tourists, we covered ourselves in mud from sea bottom, renowned for its rejuvenating qualities, and we floated like corks on the saline thickness of this famous finger of water on the border of Israel and Jordan.
