The World Is Squared: Episode 4 – In Hot Places

And the travelogue continues – this chapter covers my family’s visits to Jordan and to Sri Lanka. The next episode will take us to a seaside cottage in Bali …

1. Jordan motorways by night

So, out on the road in a Group B Mazda, the first car we’ve hired so far that has enough room in the boot for all our luggage. And the first culture shock is achieved. There is something really strangely terrifying about rolling down the road and not being able to read any of the signs, not even phonetically, not even to recognise them as writing or tell if you’re seeing the same ones one time after another. This turns a simple set of directions (“leave the airport and get onto the motorway”) into a cryptic ordeal. Added to that is the fact that the road signs are themselves referring to driving practices somewhat different from those we were used to. So a sort of squiggly arrow which certainly looked like it said “carry straight on and allow yourself to be led into a clover-leaf type loop to bring you into a left turn onto the motorway” actually meant “drift into the left hand lane, then do a U-turn on the motorway and drive back to the right turn, because on this particular stretch of road, the left lane is not just the high speed and overtaking lane, it doubles as the slip road for anyone wanting to do a U-turn, this sounds like it might be terrifying and nonsensical, and it is”.

This might have been more fun if it wasn’t all happening in the pitch dark, but I doubt it. We also had something like a tenth of a tank of gas in the hire car, which meant that we actually needed to do one of these suicidal U-ies ourselves, in order to reach a filling station – you might think that in a middle eastern state they would be everywhere, but they’re not. A nice helpful fellow motorist set us right; it turned out that it wasn’t a creeping paranoia that was giving me the dreadful sense we had lost all bearings and were going diametrically the wrong way, it was my sense of direction. So, with a slight turn from the local road onto the motorway, we reasoned that we had only wasted half an hour, and things could be worse. And that was when things did indeed begin to get worse.

For some reason we had convinced ourselves that Jordan was a super-rich Gulf state (this belief was surprisingly resistant to all other knowledge of either economics or geography), and that consequently the roads would be beautiful and flat and efficient. This was really very very not the case. “It must be a motorway, it’s got a concrete divider” was basically the state of play; I was reminded of a particularly hellish 36 hour bus trip I once took on a suspiciously cheap holiday to Poland in the early 1990s, where the switch from capitalist to Communist road surfaces happened at just the point in the trip when you were hoping to get some sleep. The French construction giant Lafarge had their logo up on a few of the bridges that crossed this road – I don’t know if this means that the state of it was their fault, but either way if I was them, I’d send a gang to get it taken down immediately, as it certainly created a material amount of badwill towards them in this traveller.

Speedbumps on the motorway. There is simply no other way to put it. That’s what they had. Speedbumps on the motorway. I don’t know what anyone could have been thinking. In so far as I can reconstruct the thought process, it must have been something like … there are stretches of the motorway (ie, the main arterial highway of Jordan, route 15), where it goes past towns. In these stretches, the land must in some way be zoned as a built-up area – specifically, a whacking great motorway, with a strip of coffee shops and fruit markets on the edge of it. Since it’s a built up area, it ought to have speed limits suited to that status, and the best way to enforce those speed limits would be to have great thumping brick policemen sticking out of the motorway surface, with a few desultory cats-eyes a couple of yards in front of them to give a token warning to drivers. Some of the speedbumps are signposted – some of them, not so signposted. I took to yelling “yeee-ha”, Dukes of Hazzard style as we went over them, and to looking out for sudden movements in the brake lights of cars in front. God only knows how long the suspension on these rental cars might last.

The “motorway traffic calming measures” really weren’t doing much for the safety of the lorry drivers who parked up on the hard-shoulder to buy coffee and fruit, chat, pick up hitchhikers and settle their vehicle infringements with the Jordanian highway police (a long suffering bunch). Nor was the quite widespread practice of advertising your roadside coffee shop by putting a massive bright flashing blue-and-red light on the top of it. Yes, one that exactly resembles the light on top of a police car. It took us a few tens of miles to get wise to this one. By the end of the journey, I saw something on a hilltop and couldn’t work out if it was a low flying plane, a radio mast or a particularly ambitious coffee shop.

The actual drivers didn’t seem to me to be particularly bad by global standards. White Mercedes taxis are a nightmare the world over, and although one guy I saw was definitely going to die young – tailgating at 110 kmh in your eighteen-wheel lorry full of building supplies on a two-lane stretch of bumpy highway is pretty special – in general the lorry drivers didn’t seem to be doing much that was different from what you see on British roads. The vehicles they were doing it in seemed quite frighteningly old and shabby though, and the general auto industry convention that red bulbs go on the back and white bulbs on the front seems to be taken more as a fashion statement in the local trade.

Three and a bit hours, total, from Amman airport to Petra. My family has a slightly unusual division of labour – by and large, unless something unusual has happened, Tess doesn’t cook and I don’t drive. Usually it’s fine because we both do what we like. This time round, her nerves were close to shot by the half way point – by the end of the journey, when the traffic calmed down, she seemed to be hallucinating that we had left the motorway and were driving in blank space. We wobbled out of the car at half past ten. I think she deserves a medal.

2. Jordan motorways by day

I was in two minds about whether to include the big “Jordanian motorways by night” section. I have never been a fan of the kind of travel writing where people go “I went to this foreign country and it was all foreign and scary, why isn’t everything nice like it is back home”. But I decided to let it stay in, for a few reasons. First, it’s an accurate record of what it felt like – I wrote it about half an hour after we’d reached our hotel, as an email to my mum. Second, I know that nobody really wants to read big thoughts about the world economy or little paragraphs about how much you love the exotic climes – they want to hear about the disasters. “World’s Most Terrible Journeys” is a book people want to read, “World’s Loveliest Holidays” is an advertising feature.

And third, there is actually quite a bit of economic significance to the state of the roads. The trouble is that it’s a self reinforcing system. The way that the trucks drive breaks the roads up, and the state that the roads are in breaks the trucks up. Jordan has two big highways – the King’s Highway and the Desert Highway – and it does its best to preserve them. In the daytime, we see that there are compulsory weighbridges at intervals along the motorways, and plenty of checkpoints and police controls, trying to stop the drivers carrying too heavy loads, and this is what all the traffic stops were about – combined with the fact that Jordan has about half a dozen “Duty Free Zones” in odd locations about the country where foreigners can buy booze, and so it needs to have quite a few internal customs stations. It seems like a pretty Sispyhean task to be regulating a weighbridge in Jordan though, given that the traffic is generally transporting very low value-density cargoes of building materials and bulk chemicals. The state of the trucks seems pretty terrible to me, and I would guess that it is only going to get worse, as Mercedes, Volvo and MAN all try to improve fuel efficiency for their core market, who will be driving along European motorways and want to cut out weight.

3. LTTE and card fraud

Monkeys sit by the roadside in Sri Lanka, presumably waiting for someone to chuck away something edible. They seem pretty friendly, or at least, reasonably scared of humans, but I try to warn my children away from them out of some half-remembered idea that they might bite. Someone tells me that they can be trained to open windows and steal from hotel rooms, which I can just about believe, but when she goes on to suggest that monkeys have also been trained to look over your shoulder and memorise your PIN number at cashpoints, my credulousness reaches its limits. It is true that Sri Lanka is one of the world hotspots for identity theft and card fraud – I have a couple of good-natured phone conversations about this subject with the security team from my bank, while trying to get my card unblocked. But this isn’t very much to do with the skills of the trained primates, it has more to do with the fact that card fraud used to be a quite important means of fund raising for the LTTE. In the cards industry, there was a famous case where it turned out that a single petrol station on the outskirts of Hull was one of the Tamil Tigers’ most important financial backers, due to some staff members who were skimming the numbers of a huge amount of cards and handing them over to be exploited in Sri Lanka.

More or less everyone with any degree of prominence of wealth and Tamil ethnicity seems to have been suspected at some point or other of raising funds for LTTE. Raj Rajnataram, the founder of Galleon Capital, was definitely suspected of it before going to jail for insider trading. As far as anyone can tell, though, he wasn’t guilty – he was just keeping all the crooked proceeds for himself.

4.Zalatimo Brothers

One thing you tend to notice about countries that don’t drink alcohol is that they tend to eat a hell of a lot of sweets and biscuits (and to drink very sugary drinks). If you were to go by the contents of roadside shops, you would guess that the staple diet of the Arabic world was Fanta Orange and biscuits. Up and down the Jordanian highways, the billboards are ubiquitous – “Zalatimo Brothers, For Sweets, since 1860”; I also checked out their flagship shop in Queen Alia Airport, and the Zalatimo Brothers seem to be doing pretty well, slaking the sweet tooth of their customers. And doing so since 1860! I have a huge amount of regard for these companies which have just dug in and kept on doing their thing as history happens all around them. Think what successive generations of that family firm must have seen – the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the arrival and departure of the British Mandate, TE Lawrence, the State of Israel, the Six Day War, the first and second Gulf Wars, all of that. And while all this went on, the Zalatimo Brothers continued to boil sugar, chop walnuts and add rosewater to cornflour. Good on them, I say. While I was in Greece, I noticed that FIX Hellenic Breweries were also celebrating their 150th anniversary, having been founded in 1864. Good luck to them too.

5.In the pharmacy

I don’t know what this says about the relative stability and functionality of their respective political and cultural systems, but it’s something I couldn’t help noticing after two weeks in which we went from Jordan to Sri Lanka, having popped into a couple of pharmacies in both while looking for eye drops, headache pills and the like. In Sri Lankan pharmacies I went into, there is one massive thundering absence – there isn’t any massive wall-length display of skin-lightening and hair-bleaching proprietary products. This was particularly notable since the Jordanian pharmacies seemed to be chock full of them.

6. Lawrence and the Sons of the Desert

It seems absurdly arch and patronising to refer to the Bedouin as the “sons of the desert”, but this is indeed how they refer to themselves – it’s up in big proud letters on the front of the secondary school project in the village at the entrance to the Wadi Rum national park. We toured the desert, seeing “Lawrence’s Spring”, “Lawrence’s House”, “Lawrence Canyon” and many others – Wadi Rum is where the Seven Pillars are located, and where the film version was made. The Bedouin guides were pretty clear on the fact that all of these things were actually ancient desert landmarks dating back to the time of the Nabateans (edit: as comments below show, I had originally written “Naxalites” here and elsewhere, presumably having Maoist rebels on the brain as I was writing it while in LTTE country), and that the TE Lawrence branding had simply been added to them for purposes of the tourist industry. When, toward the end of the trip, one of them pointed to an old Mercedes up on bricks and said “look! Lawrence’s car!”, I got the distinct impression that the sons of the desert did not actually revere TE Lawrence in the way that the guidebooks suggested they might, and indeed that they might not have completely taken at face value the official story that he was their tireless advocate and was entirely stitched up by the dastardly Sykes and Picot.

As far as I could tell, the inhabitants of the Wadi Rum national park have a sort of semi-nomadic life – all of them seem to have some sort of base in the village, but they also have family camps, which might or might not double as tourism businesses. At any one time there will be some family members in the house and some in the desert. And they still have a real affection for the nomadic lifestyle; they seemed to talk about the desert environment in the same way that I think about the Welsh mountains, albeit that I would put a stronger bet on the Bedouin to survive for a month in Snowdonia than on myself to last four hours in Wadi Rum. I was also introduced to one of the great sensual pleasures of the Middle East, an experience called “Not Riding On A Camel”. I realise that most readers will be having the experience of “not riding on a camel” practically every hour of most of their days, but believe me, you don’t really appreciate it until you’ve tried the alternative for contrast. I must have been doing something wrong, as it later transpired that no other family members were suffering from wearing away great saucer-sized bleeding blisters on their arse, but it wasn’t even that which was the worst of it. It was the strangest kind of muscular ache, and it was extraordinary. After two hours on the traditional camel saddle, I found myself choosing to walk ninety minutes across the desert in the middle of the day, and profusely thanking the guy who allowed me to do it.

7. In flight magazines, slight return

In the grandest tradition of globetrotting punditry, I get half of my views about any given country from the inflight magazine of its national airline. And it has to be said, as a provider of hooks for chin-stroking think pieces, Royal Jordanian did me proud. I was thinking about the fairly unique position of the Hashemite Kingdom Of Jordan in the region, as a state which is allied to the forces of modernity, but where the head of state’s claim to his position is based on his status the 42nd generation descendant of the Prophet. On the one hand, particularly as it can’t smooth over these contradictions with oil money, Jordan is inextricably linked to the secular West and constant liberalisation. On the other hand, it’s a Muslim country and can’t get away from that fact either. And then staring up at me from the inflight magazine, there it was.

The lead feature in the issue I read was a travel piece extolling one of its recently opened routes, and selling its readers on the joys of a trip to … Munich …in September. Apparently, this is a festival celebrating Bavarian culture, music and art, during which it is possible to see plenty of the locals dressed in their charming local costumes, in large tents which have been erected for the purpose of celebrating Bavarian culture. You can also get a really great meal in the traditional local restaurants, which offer excellent vegetarian alternatives. Yep, someone at the Royal Jordanian inflight mag had taken on the job of writing 2000 words about Oktoberfest, but doing so without mentioning either beer or sausage. Fair do’s, they rose to the challenge. As a triumph of papering over some fairly fundamental differences in outlook and ignoring the elephant in the room, you couldn’t beat it.

The inflight magazine of Qatar Airways had an article on rural development by one of the country’s most prominent surgeons. It was accompanied by a uniquely uninformative byline picture of the author in her burqa, but I leave heavy-handed metaphors like that to less talented pundits.

8. After life of brands

Brands that you half remember from childhood sometimes have a strange sort of afterlife in the developing world, which gives you a bit of deja vu when you come across them. Barbican, for example. This was a non-alcoholic lager developed by Bass in the eighties, at around the time when the drink-driving laws were considerably tightened. It was never much of a substitute for beer and when Guinness launched Kaliber, it didn’t even necessarily have top dog status in a category which was already failing to go anywhere. So it more or less disappeared from the UK market. It’s still alive and kicking in the Islamic world, though, and prominently displayed in fridges at petrol stations. I would guess that nothing has survived of the original product though – the selling point of Barbican was meant to be that it was brewed like a normal lager and then de-alcoholised, and although my knowledge of Islamic dietary restrictions is meagre, I’d guess this would have made the original Bass version haram.

Similarly, British Leyland is long dead and gone, taking its unenviable reputation for quality control and toxic industrial relations with it. At some point in its history, however, it must have concluded a joint venture called Ashok Leyland Lanka, and when BL went off to leak oil into the great car park in the sky, the joint venture carried on. It still seems to have the largest market share of buses and light trucks there, although Hyundai are making inroads.

Sri Lanka drives on the left hand side of the road, a legacy of old colonial days, but one which presumably keeps going because it means that the country has access to the world’s largest second-hand car market (Japan). Second hand cars are a big part of developing world economics – Fiji actualy switched from driving on the right to the left for exactly this reason. The jeep which carried us around the desert in Wadi Rum had started life in Bern, according to its registration plates. I also, via casual survey, put together a generalisation about the use of off-road vehicles, which basically seems to be that dilettantes drive Land Rovers, professionals drive Toyotas and locals drive Mitsubishis.

9. Petra

Petra is one of those things that has to be experienced – you can see the main landmarks and the most impressive buildings (the “Treasury” and the “Monastery”) in any number of photographs, but the place itself is pretty amazing, even if you do pretty inevitably end up with half your party sloping around with the beginnings of sunstroke. The thing that photographs can’t communicate though is the scale – this was a real city, built around the same time as ancient Rome, about the time that my own ancestors still thought that balancing one horizontal stone on top of two vertical stones was pretty amazing stuff.

And it’s perfectly preserved, not by being buried in volcanic ash or anything, but just because of the fact that things don’t tend to rot in the desert, and because once the original residents (the Nabateans) had decided to abandon it, nobody else moved in or even bothered to visit the place for hundreds of years on end. Its actual existence had been forgotten about – being located in a depression at the end of a canyon, it’s easy to overlook – for more than a thousand years. And it wasn’t a small or insignificant place; you can see from the architecture and the infrastructure that it was a propserous and populous city, and it was the capital of a powerful trading empire. In modern terms, it would be like all the residents deciding to leave Frankfurt, and over time everyone just forgetting that there was any such place.

When a civilisation disappears so completely and suddenly, you want to believe that there was some big or catastrophic event which caused it. This doesn’t seem to be the case for the Nabateans, who seem to have just disbanded and joined other empires without too much fuss. There were a couple of earthquakes, but not huge ones, and visibly, not ones which did so much damage to Petra as to render the place uninhabitable. There were the usual scuffles, but no big military disaster. All that happened is that the trade patterns changed, and Petra wasn’t on the way from everywhere to everywhere in the way that it had been before. Then, presumably, the city was faced with the cost of maintaining its infrastructure (particularly the system of channels which brought its water), and decided it couldn’t pay. So they all got together and left. It’s a strangely dignified end to a once glorious civilisation; they just made a sensible and unsentimental economic decision. I wonder what the Nabateans would have said about the sunk-cost fallacy, because heaven knows, there are some majestic sunk costs there.

The whole country of Jordan, by the way, has about a hundred years’ more water left in its aquifers at current rates of usage. I wonder if they will end up having to make the same sort of unpleasant decision as the Nabateans one day.

10. Airports and the things that happen in them

I was originally planning on titling this episode “Airports and other man made environments”, because we had a lot of travel time in this month, and I was anticipating having a lot more to say about the big statement-architecture airports of Qatar and Jordan than I actually did. There you go. Colombo Airport had some of the most comprehensive security measures I’ve ever seen – they’re not up in your face with questions like at Tel Aviv, but you have to go through four or five X-ray machines – one at each stage of the process – and there are armed guards everywhere. Of course, the reason is that this has historically been, literally, the suicide bombing capital of the world. Even to this day, something like half the suicide bombers that there have ever been were Tamil Tigers.

11. Potash City Limits

A grim geographical joke has made Jordan, a land almost entirely made up of desert, into one of the world’s bigger producers and exporters of potash, a bulk chemical mainly used in the manufacture of agricultural fertilisers. Potash can be manufactured, as ammonium nitrate is these days, but when you’ve got massive deposits of the stuff, like the ones around the Dead Sea, it’s cheaper to dig it out of the ground. The United Arab Potash Company has a massive mining facility not far from the Dead Sea resorts, including a mining town which is indeed listed on the maps as “Potash City”. The children grew quickly tired of our singing its name to the tune of “Nutbush City Limits”.

12. Salt in the foundations

You couldn’t ask for two more contrasting environments than Jordan and Sri Lanka. In the desert, there’s a real sense that the air is driving the life out of everything. In ten days driving up and down the country, I saw precisely one green field, which was next to a large irrigation scheme. Tough little thorn bushes grow out of the sand, and that’s about it. Nothing larger than a lizard seems to be able to exist outside the towns, and if you happen to wander a hundred yards from your water supply, you get a fairly immediate sense of having done something that wasn’t very clever.

In a jungle environment, on the other hand, the sense is exactly the opposite. Everything is alive, the air is moist and the place keeps on thrusting life at you – mosquitoes, flies, green plants growing everywhere and the most astoundingly coloured and camouflaged insects. For the first few days, I kept noticing a sort of reddish colour to the soil and wondering if Sri Lanka had large iron ore deposits; it took me that long to realise that this wasn’t the native soil at all. The reddish colour I kept seeing by the sides of roads and in people’s yards was rocksalt. As far as I can tell, more or less everything that’s built in Sri Lanka seems to have a healthy layer of rocksalt in the foundations. Presumably, it’s the only way that you can keep the plant life at bay and stop your macadam roads and concrete slabs being immediately punctured by roots and grasses.

The Sri Lankan road network seems to function though – as we drove around the country, I noticed that there was a “Central Fish Processing Facility” located pretty near the geographical centre of the island, which is surely something you’d only build if you were reasonably confident in your ability to get the fish there from the coast in reasonable time. All sorts of odd little government facilities seemed to have there offices by the side of the major highways – milk quality monitoring stations, fertiliser testers, all the things that an agricultural economy needs, but which developed world countries tend to tuck away at the other end of their road networks, and which really poor countries don’t have at all.

13. Red Sea at Eid-al-Abha

After the desert, we found ourselves wanting to run for the coast, and so we ended up in the resort town of Ayuba, on the last day of the Eid holidays – we were lucky to get a hotel room. The beach was boisterous and crowded, but the sea was cool and beautiful. There were five public beaches, all of which had different modesty codes for female bathing. Weirdly, they were set up so that things got more Western and secular as you got closer to the Saudi border, at which point they presumably reset with a crunch. We were on Public Beach Number 5, which wasn’t that much different from a Mediterranean one. I was interested to see that a large number of UNHCR tents had apparently found their way down to the beach, where they were being used to shelter from the sun and smoke hookah pipes in. Not entirely sure what was going on there – Jordan does have a huge refugee community, something like 40% of the population, but most of them are Palestinians, who are not clients of the UNHCR as they have their own agency, the UNRWA. I’d guess that at some point in the past, Jordan might have had more refugees (possibly as a result of the Iraq war) than it does now, and that at the end of the conflict someone at UNHCR decided that tents were bulky and cheap, and so it was less trouble to let them go cheap onto the Jordanian market than to pack them up to use somewhere else. Alternatively, it’s possible that we were just seeing some UNHCR employees who were having a holiday from looking after Syrian refugees and had liberated some spare tents.

I got talking to a guy in our hotel whose kids were playing with mine, and he was very specific in telling me that he was a Palestinian. I suppose this must be how things are; the refugee camps have been around for so long that they’ve developed infrastructure, including quite a lot of decent middle-class jobs working with the United Nations, of the sort that would provide a week’s holiday by the sea over the holidays. All that you see on TV of the Palestinians is the angry face of the inhabitants of the world’s largest open air prisons, but this is the iceberg below the surface; a pleasant, polite office worker with a United Nations NGO who has an overpowering sense of awareness that he is in the wrong place and that some past manouvering in the last stages of the big European empires has separated his family from their wells and their olive trees.

The Jordanian economy, given their lack of oil, is heavily dependent on foreign aid, which is poured into the country via the refugee camps. Although really, I think it’s wrong to think of this part of the budget as “aid”, given the way that things are arranged. I’d be more inclined to say that Jordan’s main exportable resource is its people’s hospitality to destitute travellers, and its willingness to bear and mitigate the tragic human consequences of the Great Powers’ continued and repeated appalling foreign policy decisions over the last fifty years. There’s always an ongoing discussion, usually a quite controversial one for obvious moral reasons, as to whether it might or might not be a good idea for geographically large and economically poor African countries to make an export industry out of accepting and processing toxic waste from industrial countries.

Without anyone necessarily intending this as a consequence, Jordan’s economy has shaped itself around an equivalent business model for human beings. As far as I can tell, they do their best, but a refugee camp is always going to be a horrible place, and it’s a place where traumatised children learn to have a very bad relationship with violence. There is an old proverb to the effect that “a scholar is a library’s way of reproducing another library”. I’ve always thought in similar terms, that a refugee camp is an atrocity’s way of producing a future atrocity.

14. Political styles of dress

The Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is, quite rarely in the world, a Democratic Socialist Republic in which all three words can be taken to have their usual dictionary meaning, more or less. Local politicians have a taste, pretty common in the developing world, for sticking big posters of themselves up everywhere, dressed according to the image that they want to project. You have three basic styles, as far as I can see – there’s “Western business suit”, and there’s “traditional or religious robes”. These two old favourites have now, probably as a result of Chinese influence, been supplemented by “open shirt collar and Harrington style bomber jacket”. This last one is apparently meant to signify a hard-working man of the people who spends more of his time chatting in factories and on farms than doing dodgy deals, but gives the curious impression that some regions of the country are governed by mods.

I didn’t get any insight into Sri Lankan politics despite occasionally trying to raise the issue with drivers; the conversations tended to start and stop with a general remark about how awful the civil war was and a firm statement that this was now all over. Which it is, kind of sort of – we stayed in a village in a Tamil stronghold which had been incredibly dangerous as recently as ten years ago, and there was almost no sign of this ever having been the case. There was an army base a couple of kilometres from the cottage we were staying in, where a smiling sergeant major asked me what I was up to when I was taking a walk, but other than that, the country seemed largely free of one of my least favourite sights in the developing world – that of young soldiers sitting around doing nothing but carrying their guns in a vaguely intimidating way.

The determination to not talk or think about the civil war probably means that the Trincomalee massacre, which happened about eighty kilometres from the beach resort where we stayed, is never going to be satisfactorily investigated. The Amnesty International report on Sri Lanka, frankly, doesn’t make very attractive reading, by the way. I suppose one could argue that the truth-and-reconciliation approach isn’t the only way of dealing with the legacy of past conflicts, and that Sri Lanka is entitled to put continued development and stability ahead of justice for the victims of the past. But it’s clear that the police force have not unlearned any of the bad habits they picked up during the civil war; torture and extrajudicial killings are still common.

15. Attack of the rubber ducks

We checked in to a big resort hotel next to the Dead Sea for one night – this seemed like the easiest way to see it, although as we drove down from Potash City we kind of wished we’d made our own way and stopped at one of the beaches where the locals went. The hotel was fine, although it was pretty hard to escape the nagging sensation that this was a bloody big swimming pool to be found in a country that was slowly running out of water. The Dead Sea itself was …considerably weirder than I had expected it to be. The least surprising thing about it is the bouyancy. If you just float about on your back like the signs tell you to, you quickly forget that there’s anything particularly odd about the fact that you’re floating higher in the water than you might otherwise. If you try to swim it gets quickly weirder, as the immediate effect is an overpowering sensation that your arse is taking flight. But the strangest thing, to my mind anyway, is to just look closely at the stuff you’re floating in. It really doesn’t look like water any more – it’s all full of greasy swirls and whorls, and feels more like a kind of oil than anything else.

We walked along the beach a little to get away from the crowds, merrily ignoring the big signs saying “Jordanian Army, do not enter”. Nothing happened to us as a result, but in an unrelated incident, the Army did show up while we were there, in a big jeep with a mounting on the back of it where a machine gun would go (presumably the ordnance had been removed at the insistence of the local tourist industry, telling them “come on, you can’t go around with machine guns when there are tourists on the beach”). A detail of soldiers was sent out to comb the beach in the opposite direction, and came back in the company of a visibly embarrassed hotel employee, carrying a yellow inflatable rubber duck. I couldn’t tell – as I never saw it float in and don’t speak Arabic – whether it was suspected of being a Muslim fundamentalist duck planted by ISIS or a Zionist rubber duck sent over from Eilat. All I can say is that, although obviously they have to treat all incidents as serious, and it would be just like the terrorists to plant a bomb in something innocuous looking, it really isn’t possible to maintain one’s dignity while walking along a beach in camo gear, mirrored sunglasses, slung rifle and carrying a yellow inflatable rubber ducky.

16. Land title required

As we took the taxi to the airport from the north-east coast of Sri Lanka, I saw the surest sign that somebody believes that the Tamil conflict is over. A big billboard, with the name of a developer in all three of the local languages. The English version read “Will Buy Beachfront Property With Valid Title”. The last three words could form the basis for a whole term of development economics. Land title systems are one of the banes of trying to get anything done in the developing world – although Hernando DeSoto’s book on “The Miracle of Capital” was rather hijacked by lot of quasi-libertarian types, he is dead right that the absence of a formal system of land title is one of the big forces keeping peasant farmers poor and facilitating their exploitation. Sri Lanka has a more or less functional land registry, and that might be why it’s the only country in South Asia which gets a good rating on the UN HDI.