City Post: Aqaba

The flight to Aqaba was short, but interesting. I noticed pretty quickly as we were approaching Jordan that we weren't taking a traditional approach. We were making all sorts of odd turns as we dropped our altitude. Then it hit me: we weren't flying over Israel. Aqaba was a border town, as was the Israeli city of Eliat right next door, and each had their own international airport. In aviation terms, they were right on top of each other. Now, I didn't know if we weren't flying over Israeli airspace for airspace deconfliction reasons or because of the on-going conflict in Gaza, but I had a distinct feeling it was the latter.

Anyways, we landed with no fanfare. No one cared about documentation. There were so few people traveling through the Aqaba airport at this point that the few flights remaining seemed more to annoy the order guards, immigration officials, and airport employees more than anything. I pulled got my passport stamped, pulled some money out of the ATM, and grabbed a taxi to the main city...or so I tried. The taxi broke down halfway there, so I had to grab a different one.

The hostel I stayed at was, essentially, a family home that was converted to be a hostel. They had 31 beds, and I was the only one there. It was so dead that the owner's son (who ran the hostel) simply didn't expect someone to be there. I got settled in after a bitt of waiting. The son asked what my plan was, and when I told him that I was diving and how much I was paying, he said, "Jack...what the fuck, man? You're paying 25 JD a dive plus transportation?" Well, that seemed decent enough for me, but he arranged for me to dive for 25 JD (Jordanian Dinar) a dive transportation included with another company, which I was all about.

I had planned on doing more while in Aqaba, but, as I said earlier, tourism was dead. The conflict in Gaza had killed the tourism sector right at the crucial peak tourism season. Flights from Europe weren't flying in, because they'd have to fly over Gaza, cruise ships didn't want to sail through the Gulf of Aden, because the Houthis were launching rockets and missiles at shipping, and any and all land-based cross-border tourism between Israel, Egypt, and Jordan had simply ceased. It was a ghost town. Taxis just drove in circles honking at tourists trying to get fares (and by tourists, I mean the less than 10 that I saw there, me included). It was a surreal experience to say the least.

I explored Aqaba my first day there. Without the tourism sector in high gear, there wasn't much to see at all. Shops either had their lights out to save money or were closed entirely. Restauranteurs competed for business from passers by. In many cases, locals just ignored me in favour of their own private conversations. It was a town totally resigned to a grim reality wholly out of its control.

Luckily, I had diving to keep me busy. Quite frankly, as a tourist diver, the dead tourism sector played to my advantage. I got great rates, a private guide, and we had the dive sites 100% to ourselves. I did 10 dives that week, and not one time did we have any other divers near us.

I dived with Aqaba Shark, which was a new dive center. It was run by Rafat, a Palestinian dive guide who I swear was half fish, and Karyna, a Canadian seamstress of South American heritage who got into diving and partnered with Rafat to open the business. They were two awesome people, and I had a great time hanging out and talking with them over the course of five days.

We dove at 10 different dive sites. Rafat was excited to hear that I had my Advanced Open Water certification, because that meant we could go deep. He was big on spending time at 25 meters beneath the surface I would learn.

We started each day at their dive shop. They had a wall full of brand new equipment, much of it still in the plastic from the manufacturer. I found this interesting, and asked them about it. They said that per the government, any dive operation must have at least 30 full sets of dive gear. I figured this was to ensure that any dive operation that wanted to open had a substantial financial stake in making sure they abide by safety and tourism standards, but they told me that couldn't be further from the truth. The limits were designed to limit participation in the industry to a few large operations which had relationships with the government. Despite this barrier, they got all the permits and permissions and opened their dive shop.

The first beach we went to was totally empty upon our arrival. Karyna told me that the beach would usually be extremely busy and full of divers, so we would have had a much earlier start, but the conflict in Gaza meant there was no one there. No one but the mama dog and her puppies, that is! Mom was weening them off of feeding, and they spent their days split between sleeping under the date palms and wandering off to get into mischief before being called back by mom. There were four when I got there, but apparently her initial litter was of eight. The government attendant told us that the other four had been taken home by random people. Which, you know, was great to hear in a part of the world where dogs weren't exactly treated the best.

Interestingly, we had to register with the Jordanian Navy every morning before diving, and the Navy had observation posts set up periodically along the beach. In places where tourism is the dominant / only economic sector, the safety and security of visitors is paramount (even from their own stupidity).

As I said, we did ten total dives over the course of my week there. We took one day off because of weather concerns, but outside of that it was a nice week of diving. The ten dive sites we hit were:

- King Abdullah

- Coral Garden

- Military Museum

- C-130 Hercules

- Seven Sisters

- Japanese Gardens

- A drift dive

- Undersea Cables

- Cedar Pride Wreck

- Out into the gulf to find a whale shark

The last one on that list was interesting. Rafat had asked me what my favourite dive was, and I told him there was a cool one I did at a wreck in the Dominican Republic where we saw a shark feeding. Not to be outdone, he decided we would swim straight out into the gulf to try to find a whale shark. Apparently, there was one whale shark that lived by herself in the Gulf of Aqaba. The thought was she was attracted to the hum of the undersea cables that run between Egypt and Jordan and the nearby power station.

Well, Rafat took us literally straight out into the gulf. The gulf itself was a major shipping lane which got real deep, real quick. At 25 meters beneath the surface, we swam out to the middle of it in search of the whale shark. At one point, I realised we couldn't see anything but deep blue water. I looked around, took a video, and had one of the most freaky, surreal experiences of my life. I was in a place of absolute nothingness. Nothing but deep blue sea. No indicators of direction except for our own navigational skills. No way of seeing anything that may be eyeing us 25 meters below the surface. Just us, our gear, and the water. Rafat says he saw my air consumption go through the roof when I had this realisation. I didn't think so, but he was the one that was part fish, so I took his word for it.

We surfaced without finding the whale shark, and had a 15 minute surface swim back to the shore. It was actually a pretty cool swim, because we wouldn't normally be able to be this far out because of the shipping industry. Funnily enough, I didn't think of anything eyeing us at the surface, even though that was arguably the place where I was least aware on the entire dive.

A couple of days into my stay in Aqaba, a French girl named Louise ended up at my hostel. She was cute and fun to be around (and chances are she won't see this post, so I can say that here!). We grabbed drinks one night and had a fun time talking about our travels. We also had dinner with our hosts and their long-term friends a couple of nights. She was heading back to France for the holidays to see her family from Canada, and then heading off to Senegal. Like me, she wasn't a fan of staying too long at home over the holidays. She didn't know what Senegal was like or how much of a travel circuit there was there. She just knew there was a cheap enough ticket, and she had never been to Africa, so the stars aligned.

I may have asked her out for real while there and got shot down. C'est la vie. She was headed West to France, and I was headed East to Iraq, so probably for the best anyways.

The only frustrating thing about Aqaba for me happened on the day that we had weather concerns for diving. There was a "worldwide" boycott of so-called "Zionist" businesses to protest the war in Gaza, and in Jordan that translated to all businesses shutting their doors in protest to make a point to their government. That meant that getting food and coffee that day became quite a bit tricky. Had there been large numbers of tourists in the city, it probably wouldn't have happened, or maybe it would have happened more intensely, but in any case the boycott in Aqaba didn't have a massive effect outside of being annoying to people like me. There just simply wasn't the business for it to make a substantial impact. Funnily enough, because of the weather, the dive shop and I ended up participating in this boycott on accident.

Now, I have talked a bit about the conflict in Gaza and its impact on the economy in Aqaba. I had plenty of run-ins with this conflict across Jordan, but I will dedicate a separate post to those rather than talk about them here.

What I will say here as a primer is that around 70% of Jordan's population is Palestinian, with a great many being born in the disputed / occupied (depending on which side of the conflict you are on) Palestinian territories. I got a first-hand, straight-from-the-horses-mouth experience, unlike anyone else I knew whose opinions had been formed based on social media, the news, and so-called Palestinians who were not born there, had never visited nor lived there, and who had no intention of returning. I got to experience the true Palestinian sentiment, and this is what I walked away with: the conflict will never end. The sentiments, right, wrong, or indifferent, are so strong, blinded by emotion, disconnected from reality, and fueled by irrational conspiracy theories that any legitimate dialogue about the conflict and bringing it to a peaceful end is impossible. It was truly disheartening.

Where I Stayed: Al Amer Hostel #2

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