Travel Book (first Draft)

The World is a book - and those who do not travel read only a page.

A Savage journey in the search of the Danish mentality:

This travel diary is not meant as an exact diary day by day about my travel around the middle-east region, it is more meant as a memoir of my reflections and some of my experience that I had during my travel which started on the 6th of June 2005.
The reason why I travel is not to lay on the beach or see famous tourist sights, certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living. I travel to understand my own life, and the background I come from. I also travel to meet my friends, and to get new friends. I feel that I succeeded in this, but I haven’t still experienced the whole travel yet. No on realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow. To travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection, which was also the reason why I travelled alone, because I personally feel that one reflects more.

My journey started in The Holy Land which it has been for more than 3000 years. The country I arrived in is the world’s only Jewish country. We have many “Christian” countries and “Muslim” countries, but only one Jewish; Israel. The country is very young, it was proclaimed the 14th of May 1948, and it “expanded” even more in the famous war in 1967. The capital was before 1967 an “international city” according to the UN, but it is today the capital of Israel. You can see that it is a new country in a very simple way; many of the signs says “the best … since 1951” for example, nothing older than 1948.
The city I arrived in was Tel Aviv, or more precisely Ben Gurion Airport, Gurion being one of the most famous Israeli politicians.

The first strange experience which happened for me was already on the second day I Israel when Itay invited me to the cinema with two of his friends. We got checked by the security forces three times before we could enter the cinema (first, a check of the car trunk, second, a full body check, third, a check of our “hand luggage” before we went into where the movie was shown). The cinema was almost empty, and I got the reason for that when we went to a café afterwards.
We were sitting at a quite crowed little café when Itay’s friends started talking about the security, the military etc. More young people had started going to the café’s and cinemas during the last year, the reason why they didn’t go before was due to the second intifada. The second intifada stopped almost all tourism, plus the chances for the young people to go out in the nights. This is what happens when politics and religion travel in the same cart, the riders believes nothing can stand in their way; therefore suicide bombings and rockets became a part of the young people’s everyday life.

However, I think it is important that I mention one important thing. I felt incredibly safe in Israel; actually I feel that the most risky part of travel today is to drive to the airport. The reason why I felt so safe was mostly due to all the military that you see all around. Every Israeli young man has to go for 3 years to the military and every young woman has to go for 2 years. You have a chance of picking your own “unit”, if you get “good scores” at the military test, nonetheless you still have to go one week to the Gaza stripe no matter the unit. This whole thing about the military is one of the most talked topics while I was in Israel, almost every single person talk about the military, some people are nervous about going to the military, other people feel that they have to do it, due to the fact that their grandparents served in the army, and their parents served in the army, so many young people kind of feel that they have to “defend” the country which is hated by all his neighbours.

Itay and I went to Jerusalem on the 8th where we met Itay’s uncle, he showed us Jerusalem and the Old City, and it was really nice to have a person around who knew the history of the city, the old history, but also the history of the last 15 years. Jerusalem is a very multi-cultural city; you see Jews, Christians and Muslims living together. Jerusalem is separated in four quarters; the Jewish, the Christian, the Muslim and the Armenian quarter.
One thing I also saw while I was there was all the orange ribbons; I had seen them before, although it was never in such big amounts as in Jerusalem. The orange ribbons were a symbol that “you” supported the settlers which the government decide to get “rid off”.

We went to the Holocaust experience on the 9th, it is a totally new museum and it is very beautiful. The museum explains the suffering of the Jews during the Second World War, and there is also a special part made for the Danes who saved the most Jews. One thing I think is very clear is that the Jews have gone through A LOT of suffering during the last 3000 years; furthermore they like to talk about the suffering, and not to forget that Germany STILL pay money to the Jews for the things that happened under Hitler’s dictatorship. I was interesting for me to travel around the region and see how the Israelis politics the last 50 years have created A LOT of suffering for a lot of other people, mostly the Palestinians who lives in big refugee amps all around the region. It is important for me that I don’t compare the Nazi’s with the way that Israelis act, every society is special and govern in special ways; but the State of Israel has build walls around people, they have the worlds largest army compare to it’s country size, and they have committed war crimes (for more information’s, try to read a very good book called “The Iron Wall” written by Avi Shlaim).
We took the train back from Jerusalem to a station close to Itay’s town (Even Yehuda), Israel is a very beautiful country, it is very dry and I am very impressed how they have manage to build up such a good and well-run society. I am especially impressed by the infra-structure of the country, it is almost (ALMOST) like the Nordic system (I could also mention that the train we took was a Danish train).

I went with Itay’s family to the desert in the south on the 11th, I was really tired one the whole drive because Itay and I had been out clubbing the night before, so the first thing I saw when I woke up in the car was a sign saying: “WARNING camels are crossing”! It was on this trip that I saw some of the poorest people in Israel, the Bedouins (The other poor people are the Ethiopians who are VERY discriminated in the country). We went to visit some of Itay’s family’s friends who owned a restaurant before, but decided to sell all of it so they could move to the desert, build a little tiny house (two containers) and get a goat farm. It was a great experience to see how people still can escape from the modern globalization and live their own life on their own. It was also a big thing for a city boy like me to see a newborn goat kid.

Itay and I woke up a 05:00 in the morning the day after; our goal was to the catch the first bus, our destination; to reach the Dead Sea – The Worlds Lowest Laying Sea (800 meters below sealevel). The area around the Dead Sea is a mix between tourist from all other the world (and from Israel), and a lot of people with skin diseases. It was extremely warm that day, the air was around 35 degrees and the water was just WARM (and of course so salty that you can float without using any energy at all).

We spent most of the 14th in Tel Aviv, Israel’s business and party city; it is the modern city with the high-rise blocks and the big clubs. We met two of my schoolmates Olga and Donia there and we walked to Jaffa together. Jaffa is an old little town which is very beautiful; it is also one of the first “real” towns in Israel. It was also the first day that I felt how it was to dehydrate, damn I got a headache.

The 16th and the 17th were two special days in two different ways. We celebrated a special Jewish holiday on the 16th with some of Itay’s family, it was really nice to see how similar we are all around the world when it comes to family gatherings; I could really “see” a lot of my own family sitting there and talking and discussing why they actually celebrate that day. Itay and I went out to a beach party on the 17th, a really nice thing were the local youth just get a computer, some loudspeakers, some lights and a lot of alcohol, we smoked water pipe and talked and just enjoying our life… until the police came to stop the party.

I left Itay on the 19th in the early morning, the VERY early morning. I took the train from train station and I was at the train station in the airport at 06:00. I was wondering why I would have to be in the airport three hours before take-off. I later on realized the reason; but let me start out explaining why I took the airplane for 800 KR instead of taking the bus from Israel to Jordan for 20 KR.

The reason is pure simple; politics. Syria and Lebanon are official still in war with Israel, therefore it is impossible to enter Syria or Lebanon if you have a stamp from Israel. I brought with me, two passports from Denmark so I could switch passports in Jordan before I went to Syria. The problem was that I needed a stamp from Amman International Airport, and not from the borderline between Israel and Jordan.
The first thing that happened in the airport was that two nicely dressed guys came over to me from both sides and asked me where I was going. They took me over to a special area where they asked me questions about my whole travel for almost 2½ hours! They asked me what I had done day by day in Israel, and they even asked me to see pictures from the second last day in Israel where I went to Haifa. They also looked my entire luggage through, plus they did a full body search on me. 2½ questions and search just for a flight which takes 30 minutes. It all ended up with that they let me through, even though they didn’t believe that I would make it to Syria and Lebanon!

I was thinking about the first part of my journey when I was sitting in the plane between Tel Aviv and Amman. I had had a wonderful trip; I had seen Haifa in the north, the desert and the Dead Sea in the south, Jerusalem in the east and Tel Aviv in the west. Twelve days and one country. 22.145 square km. (including East Jerusalem and other territories taken over by Israel in the 1967 war)



JORDAN

I arrived in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan without any problems. It took me 5 minutes and 10 dollars to get my visa, and the three stamps I got were extremely important because they meant that I now could travel more freely on my further travel. I was waiting in Amman International Airport for almost two hours before Nareg’s dad, Vicken, came to pick me up; however, it was interesting to study how people react in the airport. Strangers are arriving to a new country, family members are coming back, and business are stressing around the burhka dressed women.

Jordan is a constitutional monarchy, but I will almost call it a dictatorship. It was King Hussein who ruled the country from 1953 until 1999, he was the one who signed the peace treaty with Israel in October 26, 1994, ended martial law in 1991, and legalized political parties in 1992. King Abduallah II succeeded his father in 1999, but he didn’t make any democratic changes. You can see the pictures of the father and the son EVERYWHERE in the country most of the time with Jordanian flag or the flag from the Arab revolt (1916-1918).
Jordan is a relatively small country with limited natural resources, and the Gulf of Aqaba and the Dead Sea is the only coastline, which is 26 km., I will talk more about Gulf of Aqaba later on.

While we drove through Amman I could feel that it was very different from its neighbour, Israel. Jordan and Israel are both old English colonies, but the difference is that Jordan has developed as much as Israel (probably because of US’s money to Israel).
Nareg was not in Jordan when I arrived, so I got to know the family very well the first days, especially Aram and Araz talked a lot with me (Nareg’s siblings). Aram showed me down town Amman on the 20th, where we for example saw one (more) Roman amphitheatre and the market where one could buy all kinds of souvenirs. We met Nareg late night that day; and I saw how close Nareg’s family is, a family that I later on felt a big part of.

One of my biggest experiences on my journey was a refugee camp that Nareg showed me on the 21st. Nareg’s dad told us that we shouldn’t go there, or at least be very careful; people who knows me will never say that to me, because I of coursed wanted to go there now. Nareg first took me to an old Roman city which is build on the top of Amman, from where you can see all the mosques and also one of the tallest flagpoles in the world. We also saw the Dead Sea Scrolls that day. Nareg then took me in a cab to one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Amman, an area for Palestinian refugees controlled by the UN. You don’t feel that you enter the camp, because it is right in the middle of the city; the only way that you can see/feel it is by the warmer and natural smiles that you get from the people there. One could also see that the fruits and vegetables where smaller and in a worse quality than outside the camp. It was of course dirty, but people were still very friendly and all of them wanted to practice their English and shake hands with me.

We went to Jerash on the 23rd to see one of the biggest and most well-kept Roman province towns in the world; and also Hadrians Gate. It was as beautiful and special as Pompeii, but even better because of the few tourists there.

Nareg and I went on a three days trip the day after; it will be impossible for me to describe this trip in this “book”, so I will only give a short summary. We took the buss early in the morning to one of the most amazing and fabulous places in the world, Petra. The whole city was build 300 years before Christ and it is a whole city carved in the mountains. People who have seen Indiana Jones knows what I am talking about, I have seen castles in Tunisia, Coliseum in Rome, The Forbidden City in Beijing, the biggest mosque in Damascus, monuments in London, Prague, Israel, Copenhagen, and Lebanon but nothing beats Petra. This place is simply a “must see place”. We took the bus to the famous desert area Wadi Rum after some few hours in Petra; we were going to sleep outside in some tents in the desert. We also drove around in a jeep in the area, and we even ended up in a sandstorm.
We went to Aqaba the day after, the city is in the deepest south of Jordan and the only reason why it grew up was because of the access to the Red Sea. The city is a free-zone city which means that you see very few fundamental religious people there, but a lot of liquor shops there. We went out in a glassboat to see the clearest coral reef in the world (and I was diving in it).

Getting my visa to Syria was very problematic, and it showed me how much that bureaucracy can destroy a good day. I even had to get a “travel invitation” from the Danish embassy, but I managed to get my visa and I was ready to go with one of my second years, Hamzah from Jordan. We had booked a ticket with transport from Jordan, hotel in Syria and the chance to go out for some small trips. The last tourist sight that I saw before I left Jordan was Makaba, which is the mountain from where Moses promised the people he had left through the desert that they were standing in front of the holy land. Someone could say that this is the place that started all wars.

It was a this put, being so close to Nareg’s family that I realized one thing, all the things I have done in my past becomes a judge of what you are going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you are travelling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road. Every single family I stayed with greeted me in a way that I have never seen the like of it. The middle-east is a very open place to go, and we were invited for a cop of coffee every time we asked for directions! Some of the families even saw it as a bit of an offensive that I had brought chocolate from Denmark to give them. As I wrote before, to travel is to take a journey inside yourself and your culture; I got to understand my own culture more and more by seeing a totally different culture.
All this leads me to another story which made me thing about Life, a story that happened in Damascus.

SYRIA

I arrived in Syria after I had been waiting for 5 hours at the border; politics really stops a lot of travelling. Syria is a big country with a population over 18 million people. The country gets most of its money from the oil and agriculture. It is a “socialistic” country where the leader of the Baath-party Basahar al-Assad is the “one and only in charge”. It is a very undemocratic country, and I had to be careful not to mention anything about the government while I was in the country; people disappear for less! You can see posters everywhere of the president and his father everywhere, just like in Jordan; but the fear for the president is much bigger in Syria.

I went to Damascus with Hamzah mostly because he knew the city very well and have family there, so we met some of his family there and we also went to the oldest Turkish bath in the world, which was an incredible strange, but also nice, experience. We went on the top of a mountain around 22.00 so we could see the whole of Damascus, wauw what a view. Especially all the green “monoliths” made a big impression on me; all of them (talking hundreds) were mosques build all over the city.

We went shopping the day after in the markets in Damascus where you could buy everything in the world and for almost no money. We also went sightseeing and saw some of the old palaces from the French when they had it, and one of the world’s largest and oldest mosques; where John the Baptist is buried. We also saw Saladin’s grave, castle and a sculpture of him. Saladin is very popular in the region for being the one who conquered the crusades, and marched into Jerusalem in 1187.
We also went to one of the more modern parts of Damascus in the “new city” where all the rich Syrians do their shopping.
It was in this shopping area that I realized how scared people actually are for talking bad about the president. I was walking on the street when I saw this sculpture of the old president standing whit his arm out “greeting” the people; 100 meters away from him was a big balloon of Donald Duck standing in the exact same position. Hamzah literally ran away from me when I made him aware of the funny coincidence. He was simply afraid that someone overheard us, and I wouldn’t be writing this today it that had happened.
I was walking back home to the hotel alone the same day; and when I walked by an old bakery shop, people selling coffee on the street, I stopped where people stopped or gathered, I listened and looked and felt, and in the process had a picture of little Denmark and I realized how much I got to know about it, only by my own shortcomings.

I took the taxi alone from Damascus to Beirut the day after; I must say that I love to travel on my own. To sit in a big old American Dodge (the only American thing that you find in the whole country, no MacD’s, no Coca-cola or Microsoft), whit three veiled women, a little baby and a taxi-driver who didn’t speak any English at all, but kept speaking in Arabic to me; that was simply wonderful.
I didn’t have any problems at all crossing the border to Lebanon; the main reason is probably that Syria is much hated in Lebanon (they have been in the country since the civil war until some few months ago). Actually, I realized how superficial borders are; just some random lines on a map, let’s move all borders!

LEBANON

There were two things which I saw immediately when I came into the country; the first thing being the beauty of the country, its mountains and its people. Its people because of the diversity, 56% Muslims, 40% Christians then add that these people come from all over the world after the civil war. The Civil war (1988-1993) was the second thing that I saw when I enter the Lebanon or more the scars after the war. Bombed houses and cars, and bullet holes everywhere was a part of every village I drove through.

Lukas met me in Beirut together with one of his friends. The first thing we did when we came there was to pay respect to the now death Hadidi, who was killed in a car bomb by the Syrians. He was the person who, with his own money, built up the Lebanon that I saw. He renovated the whole of downtown, and made it possible for the country to kick out the Syrians some few months ago. We went for a drive around Beirut; after we had seen the grave and the martyr square (where the statue was filled with bullet holes as well).

I stayed at Lukas’s place the first few days in a house that I could only dream of. If you want to see a fairytale house, then go to Lebanon, it was build in a hundred-years old house made out of big stones, and the view was just fantastic! Lukas showed me around Tripoli the day after; the city is very different from Beirut, less renovated and a lot more “Muslim”. It was also the first time that I got to relax at one of the beach resorts.

I took the buss to Jbeil two days after to go to Yara’s place. Jbeil or Byblos is the first town in the world, it is the first town mentioned in the Bible and it has a beautiful old castle which Yara showed me. Yara’s family are Argentineans, so there was a very different atmosphere in her house, but again, I felt so warmly greeted that I could have stayed for at least two more weeks; such a beautiful country and such a beautiful people.
We (Yara, Lukas, 15 of their closets friends and I) went to the mountains one of the days to go to this restaurant. It was very surreal to sit and sweat in 35 degrees on the beach, and then take a car ride 1½ hour up and then see snow in the mountains. We got a wonderful meal, and again, at a beautiful place in the middle of nowhere only surrounded by mountains and lakes.
I went with Yara and her “cool” brother to see some of; yes do I have to say it, beautiful, salt- stalactites. We had a great day running around finding figures, sailing in a little boat in the caves and see the animals in the zoo.

Actually A LOT more happened in Lebanon but I can’t even describe it in words, it was a wonderful and amazing way to end more than four weeks in the Middle East.


I travelled in one of the oldest parts of the world, I travelled in parts that they mention in the news everyday, and the more I travelled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends, and I discovered how wrong we are about other countries. I learned a lot more travelling in the region that watching TV, read books and consult all the maps in the world.
I am not so naïve that I think that travel can prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all people cry, laugh, ear, worry, and die, it can show the idea that if we try to understand each other, we may even become friends. So many people cannot see further than their own nose, the great world is a mirror where we must see ourselves in order to know ourselves.

So, the plans now? Yes, more travelling and probably back to the middle-east at some point. I have realized that I am in the driver’s seat of my own Life and I can point my Life down any road I want. I can go as fast or as slow as I want to go… and I can change at any time!
Too many of us wait to do the perfect thing, collects money and work more to save more time; with the result we do nothing. The way to get ahead is to start now! Don’t wait until the perfect time comes, because it never will. While many of us are waiting until conditions are “just right” before we start with our travel, others are stumbling along, fortunately ignorant of the dangers that beset them. By the time we are, in our superior wisdom, decided to make a start, we discover that those who have gone fearlessly on before, have, in their blundering way, travelled a considerable distance. If you start now, you will know a lot next year that you don’t know now, and that you will not know next year, if you wait!