Journey to the Center of Iraq

Or I should say, journey that never got us through the border. On Thursday Abe and I rented a car and trekked across the desert wilderness of Eastern Jordan with hopes of being allowing into Iraq, just to see it and say we’d been there. Four hours after we left Amman we got the Karameh border crossing, only the chat with the border guards for a few minutes until we were informed that we couldn’t go in without either Iraqi citizenship or a valid visa. Oh well, we tried. And now we can legitimately say we have seen all of Jordan; east to west, north to south.

Despite our failure to achieve our goal, it was a heck of an adventure. We ran out of gas in Ruwayshed, which is this tiny town 100 km from the border in one direction and 100 km from the next town in the other. And when I say closest town, I don’t mean you might see something resembling civilization in between the two. I mean there is nothing except igneous rock, sand, and mirages, for farther than the eye can see. Not only were we almost on Empty, but there was no gas in town. At all. They had run out and it wasn’t supposed to come till the next day. Not really wanting to stay in the middle of nowhere (literally, in every sense of the world) we negotiated to siphon gas from some guys tank, paid them 5 JD, and went on our merry way. Not entirely merry though, as we got stopped at something like 3 checkpoints on the way back. But return to Amman we did, eventually, with one more adventure tucked under our belts.

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