A weekend in Amman

Saturday: the Dead Sea

The water is around thirty per cent salts, roughly ten times open sea, and that’s why the body floats effortlessly: you can’t dive or swim normally, only lie back. The sensation is very strange and short-lived, because twenty minutes in is about all the body tolerates comfortably.

Rules that matter and that nobody mentions beforehand: don’t put your head under or splash, it stings enormously in the eyes, don’t shave that day, and cover any cut, because it burns.

And the Dead Sea is drying up: it drops around a metre a year, so the shorelines in photos from twenty years ago are no longer where they were.

On the way: Mount Nebo and Madaba

From Mount Nebo, by biblical tradition, Moses saw the Promised Land without entering it. It’s on the way to the Dead Sea and on a clear day you see the Jordan valley, the whole Dead Sea and, beyond, the hills of Jerusalem. A few kilometres on, Madaba holds on the floor of St George’s church the sixth-century mosaic map depicting the Holy Land and the Nile delta: the oldest surviving cartographic map of the region, still used as archaeological reference for locating lost sites. Some two million tesserae survive.

The evening: shisha in Jabal Amman

In Jordan, a Muslim country, alcohol doesn’t structure the evening, though it isn’t prohibited and is sold in licensed places. What structures it is coffee, sage or mint tea and shisha, with conversation stretching without hurry.

The terraces of Rainbow Street and the rooftops of Jabal Amman are the place, with downtown lit below. One welcome note: coffee here comes with cardamom and, in a traditional setting, shaking the little cup as you hand it back means you’ve had enough. Hand it back still and it gets refilled.