Part
III: Aqaba
Some friends and relatives expressed some distress that I was to visit the Middle East at this point in time, but only the ones who had never been to Aqaba. We used to say that the only danger in Cairo was from the traffic; the only danger in Aqaba is that one will die of boredom. There are about four restaurants in town, and given that it's Ramadan, none of them are open during the daytime. There is a movie house under construction, as it has been for about a year, I'm told, and if it ever opens Aqabans will be able to see five year-old heavily censored Western films, just like they can in Amman.
Aqaba sits at the very armpit of the Red Sea. Standing on the beach at Aqaba, you can see Saudi Arabia to your left, Jordan beneath you, Israel to the near right and Egypt to the right and ahead.
It is the proximity of Israel that is most jarring -- the high-rise hotels of prosperous Eilat lie across a few meters of no-man's land, visible from almost anywhere in town. Most of the radio stations on the dial are in Hebrew, and my mobile phone picks up Israel's Orange network just as easily as the two Jordanian networks.
