Swimming in the Dead Sea: Jordan Part 6

Along Wadi Arabah from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea and a Dunk in the Briny

Jordan

Leaving Wadi Rum

We were up early; despite the clear blue sky there was a nip in the morning air and it had been raining overnight. Deserts aren’t supposed to be like this.

Space Camp, Wadi Rum, in the early morning, the sand pock-marked by raindrops

Given that we were on the world’s biggest beach – there are 1,000km of sand between here and the Gulf of Aden – someone had to make a sandcastle. Lynne has every intention of passing from first childhood to second with no intervening period of maturity.

A sandcastle in the desert, Wadi Rum

After a good breakfast we packed the car and were ready to go 8.30. ‘Not yet,’ K said as I started to climb in. It was a relative cool morning and he was of the opinion that a car needed to be fully warmed up before driving. We live in a much cooler climate and I have never bothered – life is too short - so I checked to see if I was damaging my car: the internet is unanimous, the best way to warm up a car is to drive it.

Packing the car at Wadi Rum

We left Wadi Rum and re-joined the Desert Highway, but not for long, after 25km we turned right towards Aqaba.

On the Aqaba Highway

Aqaba – Just Passing by

Jordan’s only coastal city sits at the tip of the Gulf of Aqaba, the eastern part of the Red Sea’s two-fingered salute to the world. The Elomite city of Elath was founded around 1,500BCE and merited a couple of mentions in the Old Testament. Its name was derived from the Semitic word for pistacia tree (pistachio nuts come from pistacia vera one of the 16 species of pistacia).

From Wadi Run to Aqaba then north to the Dead Sea

The Greeks renamed the city Berenice, the Romans called it Aela which became the Arabic Ayla. Al-Aqaba Ayla (the Pass of Ayla) originally referred to the route now used by the Aqaba highway, but by late medieval times the city was being referred to as Aqaba. In 1917 during the Arab Uprising/World War I, Aqaba was taken by the forces of Auda abu Tayi assisted by TE Lawrence.

Modern Aqaba sits at a crossroads; the Saudi border is 20km to the south, Egypt is 10km away across the water and the Israeli town of Eilat is separated from Aqaba only by the border fence. Although he is a Jordanian citizen, K is of Palestinian origin. He nodded towards Eilat and said 'that's Eilat in Palestine.' Then in case we had missed the point he repeated 'Palestine'. K is a decent man, an honest man trying his best to raise and educate his family. Like many others he carries a hurt over his lost homeland - a hurt it is almost imposible to address without being branded a terrorist sympathiser or worse. It should not be like this.

Entering Aqaba

Along Wadi Arabah to the Dead Sea

I am sure Aqaba is worth a visit, but we turned north onto the Jordan Valley Highway just after the picture above, and that was as close as we came.

The Jordan Valley Highway follows the Israeli border north from the Red Sea, past the Dead Sea and into Jordan’s north west corner just south of the Sea of Galilee. Geologically this was once considered part of the Great Rift Valley, stretching over 5,000km from Mozambique to Lebanon but that is now regarded as a series of related but separate features. In current terminology the 166Km stretch from Aqaba to the southern point of the Dead Sea is the Wadi Arabah. For its first 77Km the wadi rises gently to a height of 230m. It is an empty, desolate land where rainfall is almost completely unknown.

Wadi Arabah. Israel is over to the left, Jordanian hills to the right, nothing all around

At 77Km we crossed the watershed between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea.

The scenery changed little as for the next 76Km the road descended as gently as it had risen.

Looking across the Wadi Arabah to a distant Israel

We paused for a coffee at a roadside shack with an optimistic range of touristic and household merchandise.

Bonding with K at the coffee stop

For the last 15km the road drops more sharply to the tip of the Dead Sea, at 417m (1,368ft) below sea level, the lowest point on earth not covered by water or ice.

Beside the Dead Sea

The southern tip of the Dead Sea sounds a simple concept, and not so long ago it was, but not now. It is not the industrial extraction of mineral riches from around the basin that have caused the problem – though they are hardly scenic – but the diversion of the River Jordan’s waters for irrigation and a decrease in rainfall. In 1930 the Dead Sea had a surface area of 1050Km², it is now only 605Km² and the southern end has fragmented into a series of salty lagoons.

The southern end of the Dead Sea

Villages had been a rarity since Aqaba, but there are some dwellings and cultivation around the now detached portions of the southern Dead Sea.

Settlement at the southern end of the Dead Sea

Once the contiguous Dead Sea is reached the road largely clings to a shelf between the rock and the water.

The road along the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea

It looks as though the tide has gone out, though of course a salt lake has no tide.

The Dead Sea looking like the tide has gone out

We first encountered the word ‘meromictic’ in 2017 when we were shown a meromictic lake in Penang National Park. It means a lake with two distinct and unmixing layers of water. Most lakes are holomictic, the waters mixing at least once a year, meromictic bodies of water are rare but not very rare (about 1 in 1,000), the biggest being the Black Sea.

For centuries the lower level of the Dead Sea was a saturated salt solution at a constant 22°. The upper 35m was unsaturated and generally warmer, its temperature varying with the seasons. The upper layer floated on the saturated layer.

Lynne at a roadside viewpoint by the Dead Sea

From the 1960s the use of the River Jordan for large-scale irrigation lowered the inflow of fresh water, so the upper layer became almost as saline as the depths. It was still warmer, so less dense and continued to float until the cold winter of 1978–79 increased the density of the upper layer creating a major mixing event.

Mixing events in meromictic lakes usually result in the near extinction of the lake’s wildlife, but the Dead Sea is too salty to have any – there is a clue in the name.

The Dead Sea as it is today
(Thank you, BBC)

The Dead Sea as it was
(Thanks to Archaeology magazine)

Since then the Dead Sea has been largely holomictic though becoming meromictic for four-year periods after seasons of heavy rainfall.

Meanwhile the water level continues to drop at 60cm a year. A Jordanian scheme to take water from the Red Sea, desalinate it for drinking water purposes and pump the rest to the Dead Sea has been under consideration since 2008. With Israeli agreement established, building is scheduled to start in 2021, but there have already been several false starts.

A Small anti-Corporate Rant

Near the northern end of the sea is a cluster of resort hotels with all the usual suspects, Movenpick, Marriott and the rest. We checked in to the Holiday Inn, a little away from the others, on the sea’s north east corner.

I was irritated on arrival by a big sign announcing that only food and drink bought in the hotel could be consumed on the premises. Then they asked for payment in advance for the evening buffet – and much as I hate buffets there seemed little alternative. It felt as though they did not trust their customers, a very unJordanian approach to business. Holiday Inn was founded in Memphis but is now part of the Intercontinental Hotels Group based in Buckinghamshire. Intercontinental is what used to be the Bass Brewery which steadily became more interested in making money and less interested making beer. They quit brewing in 2000; Bass Beer is now made by Marston’s under licence from brewing behemoth AB-InBev who own more brands than is good for them, or us.

😠

We were a bit late for lunch, so cocking the smallest of snooks at The Dead Hand of Corporatism we retired to our room and lunched on Cup-a-Soup from our own stash and ate some peanuts. The snook really was minimal, Cup-a-Soup is made by Batchelors who are owned by Premier Foods who have as many brands (Oxo, Fray Bentos, Mr Kipling etc etc) as AB-InBev.

Swimming in the Dead Sea

Rants apart, we had only come to the Dead Sea for one thing, and it was not the hotel. We walked past the pools and sun loungers and made our way down to the beach. It is not the finest of strands, the sand is imported (though not from afar, there is plenty lying around) and the sea bed is pebbly but that mattered not, we had come to swim – or perhaps float.

Holiday Inn Beach, Dead Sea

Everybody knows you can lie in the Dead Sea and read a newspaper, but lots of things ‘everybody knows’ are not true, so we put it to the test. A kilogram of Dead Sea ‘water’ is actually 350g of salt and 650g of water, making it ten times more salty than normal sea water. Pure water has a density of 1Kg/l about the same as the human body, the Dead Sea is 1.24Kg/l so floating should be simple. Lynne claims to be a ‘sinker’, if she can float anyone can.

Getting in was surprisingly difficult; it was warm enough but the pebbles hurt our feet and wading through Dead Sea water is not like wading into the sea - this stuff resists, catching your ankles and threatening to tip you forward onto hard stone beneath shallow water. Eventually Lynne managed to stumble decorously enough into an adequate depth.

Lynne sits in the Dead Sea

I produced a newspaper, she stretched out, and lo, you can lie in the Dead Sea and read a newspaper.

Lynne reads a newspaper in the Dead Sea

Like all non-swimmers Lynne tenses up in water, so her neck soon started aching and she demanded I pull her out. But I had a camera in my hand, so I first had to walk very carefully back to dry land to put it, and my shirt, somewhere safe. Meanwhile a slight breeze blew up, caught Lynne’s newspaper like a sail and by the time I was gingerly stepping back over those painful pebbles she was drifting like a small boat in the general direction of Israel. (I should not over-dramatize, it was a roped off swimming area, she was never going far.)

I tried to swim over to her. Signs on the beach advise you to swim only on your back and the first droplet of water to hit my lips stung mightily. I really did not want it in my eyes so I bowed to the wisdom of the signs, turned over and kicked. It was like kicking syrup. I gave that up, lay on top of the water and sort of rowed myself to just beyond her. My plan was to stand up and push her to the shore like a floating plank. Standing meant putting most of my body below the surface, but in doing that I displaced more than my bodyweight of water. Archimedes’ Principle says this is impossible - and the old Greek was right, I bobbed up and fell flat on my back on (not in) the water. So I folded myself into a foetal position, rotated to vertical and pushed my feet downwards while swimming down with my arms. Eventually I pushed them far enough to realise I was out of my depth. Throughout all this, apart from the odd complaint, Lynne remained remarkably patient

We needed a Plan B. Putting my shoulder to her feet I started kicking syrup, and kept kicking syrup as long and as hard as I could. At first, we hardly moved, then slowly, and in a rather zigzag fashion, we started inching towards the shore. Swimming in the Dead Sea, I discovered was not really fun.

With Lynne safely delivered to dry land, I went out again. Floating is easy, you can float with a remarkable proportion of your body out of the water, but nothing I would recognise as swimming is possible. Unlike Lynne I am and always have been comfortable in water, but this was not water, it would not flow round me like water does, it obstructed every move. Even drifting into the shallows and standing up was difficult.

Floating in the Dead Sea

I was glad when I had had enough, and we wandered over to the fresh water shower to remove the halogen soup before it dried and we became encrusted. The salt in regular seas is 85% Sodium Chloride, in the Dead Sea NaCl only accounts for 30% of the salt while 50% is Magnesium Chloride. The concentration of bromide ions is the highest in any body of water on Earth.

Many of our fellow beach goers were coating themselves in Dead Sea mud, supplied free by the bucketload. It is supposed to be good for your skin, but Lynne did not fancy it.

The sun prepares to set on the Holiday Inn bathing area, Dead Sea

I am glad I got to ‘swim’ in the Dead Sea, it was a life-time ambition, but I will be happy never to do it again. I have now swum in the Dead Sea and the Red Sea (which produced its own moments of excitement), and without doubt it is better Red than Dead.

Dinner at The Holiday Inn

The buffet was not awful, and the dining room had all the atmosphere of a works canteen.

13.-Now-2019

In the morning K arrived early, took us to Amman airport and we went home.

And finally....

Thanks to K for always being in the right place at the right time, for keeping us safe as he drove us the whole length of Jordan and for being a congenial travelling companion. We wish him and his family well. And thanks to Regent Holidays who made all the arrangements from their offices in the (soon to be re-named?) Colston Tower, in (soon to be renamed?) Colston Rd, Bristol.

Jordan

Part 1: Amman

Part 2: Ajloun and Jerash
Part 3: Shobak Castle and the Back Trail to Petra
Part 4: Petra
Part 5: Wadi Rum

Part 6: Swimming in the Dead Sea

THE END