by Kristy Layton and Kate Laverriere

Everyone brings different baggage on a trip, both the physical and the metaphysical kind. While we all four turned up in Colombo with nearly identical luggage, our durable, accommodating backpacks well-worn from multi-day hikes around the mountains and shores of the Pacific Northwest, Kate and I arrived with our deeper baggage positively buoyant after 10 days of wanderings in Jordan.

Jordan was a barren, brown, and beautiful surprise. It was a last minute addition to our itinerary, a layover whim that was pure icing on our 6-week, 4-country journey. My pupils dilated and I became tachycardic when I discovered a stopover in the desert that could shave $50 off the already lowest fare from Seattle to Sri Lanka, where we planned to meet Jeff and Amanda, now officially Married To Adventure.

Jordan. Petra. Camels& deserts. My childhood crush on Lawrence of Arabia. Swimming in the Dead Sea. I was like a junkie smelling the meth cooking. Within days, Kate and I were pouring over a Jordan Bible (Lonely Planet) during breaks on our ER night shifts.

For this American girl raised on Evangelical Sunday School felt-board stories of Jesus tempted in the desert, Moses and his rescued slaves wandering-unto-paradise, Old Testament kings and prophets and epic, crushing battles, deeply embedded in folk songs about crossing the mighty Deep-and-Wide, hiking around the walls of ancient Jericho…

For this teenager who learned modern Middle East history through movie-crushes on Omar Sharif and Peter O’Toole’s blue-eyed Lawrence yelling, “To Aqaba!”

For a sci-fi geek-ette struck dumb when the Grail-seeking, fedora-topped Indiana Jones trotted his horse through that keyhole canyon and gazed up at the red-rose sandstone marvel that I found out later was a REAL PLACE called Petra…

…Jordan was going to be heaven.

As it turns out, Heaven itself has opened twice, mythically, on the same spot in Jordan,: Once when Elijah caught a one-way flaming chariot straight into the sky, and once when an off-kilter, locust-eating prophet dunked his cousin in the Jordan river and declared him the Messiah. We toured the place – Bethany-Beyond-The-Jordan, and bore witness to a Russian couple baptizing each other in The Mighty Jordan’s now greenish, stagnant, reedy murk. On the other side, spitting distance from our rickety wooden platform, the Israel side of the Jordan gleamed with surreal white marble and polished granite steps, industrial strength fans blowing humidified wind on its tourists, and identically clad packs of package tourists reciting prayers and taking turns dipping a finger in the historic river.

I’m usually a fan of high places, clamoring to the crests of mountains and castle peaks. In the Jordan valley, I discovered that the lowest places on earth are sometimes closest to heaven. We followed the oozing Jordan to its outlet, the terminal, dying lake known as The Dead Sea. One doesn’t actually swim in the Dead Sea, rather partakes in a “bob” around the eerily viscous, deep blue, inconceivably buoyant water. It’s 31% salt– 9 times saltier than the average ocean. You can’t possibly sink, and the high salinity burns any break in the skin. Warning signs on the shore caution against getting your eyes or mouth wet . Inshallah, you don’t end up floating on your stomach, because the effort required to right yourself might result in a splash to the face. And we’d been warned about not rinsing after a dip in the Dead Sea: burning skin and misery can ruin an entire day.

We visited Mt Nebo, the site where Moses stood and gazed at view of the Promised Land after 40 years of wandering the desert with his ragtag tribe of exiled slaves. I always imagined that the first glimpse of the Promised Land must have been spectacular: forests, rivers, cascading waterfalls of blue milky-honey, glacier-capped, cotton candy mountains. At the very least, some palm trees and coconuts, apple orchards, a vineyard or two. We found an expansive view from Nebo, but an expanse of brown upon tan upon brown, rocky, scrubby nothingness with a ribbon of green tamarisk trees that grow along the Jordan, the city of Jericho, the West Bank, and Jerusalem in the distance. (It seems strange that the inviting deep blue of the Dead Sea gets no mention in Exodus. Maybe there was a tree or something blocking Moses’ southern view).

But THIS?? This is what generation after generation of war, suicide bombing and broken peace treaties have been about? It’s Holy Land to many, I suppose, but it’s not MY Holy Land. Give me Glacier National park any day. I will Worship at the view of Northern Lights over the Denali wilderness. I would go to war to save Patagonia, or the Amazon basin, or the jungles of Borneo.

After the Holy Historical Lowlands, we drove the King’s Highway on to even more terrific adventures in Petra , Wadi Rum, and Red Sea diving in Aqaba, but we’ll save those stories for another day.

… so now here we are, Kate and I with sand in our shoes marveling that we can breathe without losing liters of fluid to insensible losses while Jeff and Amanda gently thaw in the tropical sun in awe of the NICENESS of everyone they encounter. We have arrived towing different baggage, different tolerances for spicy food, but an identical love of nature, warmth, animals, rural landscapes. I’ve already held a day-old baby Sea Turtle in my palm. There are wild Asian Elephants and Leopards at the next stop. We are all in a good, good place.

See all of Kristy and Kate’s Jordan photos here.