Praying Facing East: The Variety of Mosques Part 3

This post and its companions (Praying Facing West and Praying Facing South) have been developed from the November 2011 post ‘Three Favourite Mosques’. The world has many fine mosques we have yet to visit, but we have now seen more than enough to make ‘Three Favourites’ a very limited ambition – indeed the 'favourites' now fill three post.

Islam is the world’s second largest religion with 1.9 billion adherents. It is the majority religion in 49 countries, centred on the middle east but with a wide geographical spread. In 2005 we visited The Great Mosque in Xi’an in China. Some distance away an English-speaking person with an overloud voice (his nationality was immediately obvious) was giving his Chinese guide the benefit of his knowledge of Islam. ‘They have to pray facing East,’ he announced.

This map comes from Wikipedia. It is the work of Tracey M Hunter, the figures are from Pew Research Centre
It is reproduced un changed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike

Muslims, of course, pray facing Mecca, the city, now in Saudi Arabia, that was home to the Prophet Muhammed. To make sense of my collection of mosques I have split it into three, depending of the (rough) direction of Mecca. The mosques I have selected are old or beautiful or quirky or have an interesting history, or any combination of those four.

I should also point out I am not a believer, in Islam or any other religion, but I do like religious buildings.

For ease of access and because I have occasionally broken my own rules, countries are allocated as follows

Facing East	Jordan, Oman, Egypt, Libya, Portugal	Arab Countries (with one obvious exception!)
Facing South	Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Bulgaria, Albania, North Macedonia, Bosnia & Herzegovina	Countries wholly or partly in Europe
Facing West	Iran, India, China, Malaysia	An ethnic mixed bag

9 of the 18 are Muslim Majority countries, the others have or had an indigenous Muslim population.

Oman

I shall start this section with the Kingdom of Oman, if only to pass quickly over my apparent error. Muscat, the Omani capital is almost due east across the Arabian Peninsula from Mecca. Worshippers in Muscat, thus face west and those in Mirbat, where my second Omani mosque is situated face north-west. My excuse? Part 2, Praying Facing West was overlong, this one a bit shorter, so I cheated. Sorry.

The Arabian Peninsula with Mecca, Muscat and the much smaller town of Mirbat ringed in red

The Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque, Muscat

Sultan Qaboos came to the throne in 1970 in a bloodless coup against his father. Oman was then a British protectorate and his coup had British support. Far more liberal and progressive than his father, Qaboos ruled for 50 years as an absolute monarch, albeit a benevolent one (provided you did not cross him).

Oman’s oil money made him immensely rich, but he ensured the people also saw the benefits, providing vast numbers of new homes. He paid for the mosque (built between 1994 and 2001) from his own purse.

The complex is too large for a single photograph, so here is a model.

The Qaboos Grand Mosque, Muscat (model in Salalah museum)

The reality involves acres of gleaming marble…

Gleaming marble, Sultan Qaboos Mosque, Muscat

….and manicured gardens.

A small part of the manicured gardens, Sultan Qaboos Mosque, Muscat

There is a women’s prayer hall that can accommodate 750….

Lynne, in the women's Prayer Hall, Sultan Qaboos Mosque, Muscat

….while the men’s prayer hall has space for 6,500 (progressive but not that progressive!) It has an ornate mihrab…

Mihrab, Sultan Qaboos mosque, Muscat

….intricately designed squinches (the devices that allow circular domes to sit on rectangular bases)….

Squinch, Sultan Qaboos Mosque, Muscat

….and a breathtakingly huge dome and chandelier.

Dome and chandelier, Sultan Qaboos Mosque, Muscat

All the lines are elegant, the colours muted and calm. The mosque is grand without being grandiose, elaborate without being fussy. Designed by British-Iraqi architect Mohammed Saleh Makiya its is the most beautiful modern mosque (maybe modern building) we have seen.

We visited on the 14th of November 2018, just before the Sultan’s 78th birthday. He died without issue in January 2020 and was succeeded by his cousin, Sultan Haitham.

The Tomb of Mohammed Bin Ali, Mirbat

Sultan Qaboos was born in the southern city of Salalah. Once his mosque in Muscat was completed, he started another in his hometown. It is very fine, but not a patch on his mosque in Muscat.

Mirbat, a small town 70km along the coast from Salalah has a nice new mosque in the centre…

New mosque where the largely abandoned old town abuts the shiny new town, Mirbat

…but on the edge of town is a little gem, a tiny mosque almost filled by the tomb of Mohammed Bin Ali.

Nobody knows who Mohammed Bin Ali was. Some say he was a descendant of The Prophet who brought Islam to the area, others that he was a saint who founded a madrassa and died in 1160 CE (long after the arrival of Islam). No matter, his memory is respected, whatever he did. Photographs were not allowed inside, so here is one of Lynne outside.

The tomb of Mohammed Bin Ali, Mirbat

Muslims are buried on their sides with their faces toward Mecca, the orientation of some of the surrounding graves suggests they are pre-Islamic and so over 1,500 years old.

See Salalah and the South Coast (Nov 2018)

Jordan

Jordan is welcoming to foreign tourists, but the same is not true of its mosques. Few are of particular architectural interest, and the locals prefer to go about the serious business of prayer and worship without unnecessary interruptions. The major exception is the King Abdullah I Mosque, where foreigners are warmly welcomed – provided they are properly dressed.

Lynne properly dressed. The 'brown gown' was supplied by the mosque. Her own headscarf was tied by the attendant

King Abdullah I Mosque, Amman

The mosque was built 1982-9 during the reign of King Hussein and named after his father.

Amman is hilly, and the mosque sits on a platform surrounded by a wall, several metres above street level, making it impossible to photograph from outside. Once inside you are too close, but I did my best. A blue-domed circular prayer hall accommodating 3,000 worshippers sits in the centre of a courtyard, with minarets at its four corners.

King Abdullah I Mosque, Amman

The interior is a huge, calm space with subdued lighting and the underside of the dome, if not quite as breath-taking as the Sultan Qaboos Mosque, is impressive.

Inside the prayer hall, King Abdullah I Mosque, Amman

We had been warned we might need to hurry as prayer time was approaching. The days when the muezzin climbed the minaret to give the call to prayer are long gone, and I had assumed that his job now is just to flick a switch and start a recording. Maybe in some places it is, but not here. The dark-robed man standing with his back to us between mihrab and minbar had a microphone in his hand and was singing the call to prayer live.

The call to prayer live, King Abdullah I Mosque, Amman

We were ready to go as the faithful flocked in, but they didn’t. Only three answered the call; at 11.20 on a working day few can make it to the mosque, but many will find a quiet corner to pray.

see Amman (Nov 2019)

Egypt

Cairo

Cairo

With over 20 million citizens, Cairo is the biggest city in Africa and in the Muslim world. Known as the ‘City of a Thousand Minarets’, it has an ample supply of mosques.

Muhammed Ali Mosque, Cairo Citadel

The rocky outcrop of Cairo’s citadel might not dominate as it once did, but it can be seen from all over this otherwise flat city by the Nile.The profile of the Muhammed Ali Mosque, built on its highest point, is familiar to every visitor and appears on the city flag.

The Muhammed Ali Mosque from the Gayer-Anderson Roof Terrace

Muhammad Ali Pasha, became Ottoman governor of Egypt in 1805. He rebelled, twice invading the Ottoman heartland and in 1842 could have taken Istanbul had the European powers not brokered a peace. The peace granted him and his descendants rule over Egypt in perpetuity. Perpetuity lasted until 1952 when King Farouk was deposed.

The Mohammed Ali Mosque, Cairo Citadel

Work on the mosque started in 1830 and was completed by Muhammed Ali’s son in 1857.

The Muhammed Ali Mosque

The mosque is open to tourists, and is usually crowded (at least it was in pre-Covid days).

Inside the Mohammed Ali Mosque, Cairo Citadel

In 1980, Lynne and I stood with my sister, then a local resident, in the courtyard outside the mosque and looked across Cairo. We could make out the Pyramids some 14 km away, just beyond the city’s eastern boundary. We tried again in 2010 and all we could see was smog. Perhaps it was the weather, but maybe it was more significant. We contented ourselves looking down rather than across at two more large mosques and two smaller ones a little closer to.

Looking down from the citadel at the Sultan Hassan and Al Rifa'i mosques, Cairo

The Ibn Tulun Mosque, Cairo

The Muhammed Ali Mosque is fairly recent, as these things go, but the citadel’s first fortification was started by Saladin in 1176. The Ibn Tulun Mosque, barely a kilometre from the foot of the rocky outcrop, was three centuries old before Saladin began building.

Ibn Tulun was appointed ruler in Egypt by the Caliph of Baghdad in 868 CE. He promptly declared independence and founded his own dynasty, which ruled until 905. His mosque, built in the ninth and tenth centuries, is massive and plain. Its open courtyard 'has the grandeur of the desert where all of Allah's worshippers are prostrated equally beneath the sun' (The Rough Guide to Egypt). It was extremely hot the day we were there and we had the place to ourselves. The simplicity and quietness were impressive - few places in Cairo are ever quiet - but I would have thought that worshipping in the open courtyard was a recipe for sunstroke (maybe I have spent too much of my life in the chilly north).

The Ibn Tulun Mosque, Cairo

The unusual minaret with an external spiral staircase is traditionally said to have been the result of Ibn Tulun  absent-mindedly twisting a scrap of paper and then justified his fiddling by presenting it as a design for the minaret.

Around the arcade is a sycamore frieze. It is over 2 km long and bears a fifth of the Koran in Kufic script. That must have a taken a dedicated person a long time.

The arcade, Ibn Tulun Mosque

Ibn Tulun was one of the ‘three favourites’ in the 2011 post this series has grown from. The others, the Emin Mosque in Turpan, China and the Sheik Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan, Iran are in Praying Facing West. All three would still be contenders were I now to pick a single favourite.

The Cairo Mosques appear in Cairo Before the Revolution (which might as well have never happened) Feb 2011

Dakhla Oasis

The vast majority of the 100 million Egyptians live either in the Nile Valley or on the coast. Most tourists can be found there too, but it is possible to travel across desert Egypt.

In 2009 (pre-blog) we followed the well-maintained road from Luxor west and north through the oases of the New Valley Project (Kharga, Dakhla, Farafra and Bahariya) and then to Siwa. The map below shows a Bahariya – Siwa road, but in 2009 that was a drive across the desert.

From Luxor on the Nile we travelled west to Kharga and Dakhl, then South to Bahariya and west to Siwa

An oasis is not a pool with a couple of palm trees, it is a depression in the desert where the surface drops close enough to underground aquifers to allow cultivation. The oases cover substantial areas and each has Roman and/or Pharaonic sites, many of them hardly touched by archaeologists.

Kharga is the largest of the New Valley Oases with a population of 70,000. Dakhla is smaller, approximately 80 km long and 25 km wide and consists of four contiguous small towns surrounded by cultivated fields.

Nasr El-Din Mosque, El-Qasr

We spent two nights at the eco-lodge on the ridge above El-Qasr the semi-fortified easternmost town of the oasis.

The 12th century Nasr El-Din Mosque with its pepper pot minaret is typical of Ayyubid Architecture (The Ayyubid dynasty, founded by Saladin, ruled a big chunk of the Middle East from 1171 to 1260).

Mosque of Nasr El-DIn, El-Qasr, Dakhla Oasis

Inside is the tomb of Nasr El-Din. Arab history is replete with Nasr El-Dins, and I have no idea who this one was.

Tomb of Nasr El-Din, El-Qasr, Dakhla Oasis

Mut

The citizens of El-Qasr have largely forsaken the old town. The new town has new mosques and Nasr El-Din is now only a historical monument. The day before in Mut, at the other end of the oasis we came across a very basic, and maybe very old, mosque that was still in use. There is no decoration, the room is purely functional, but has all that is needed, a mihrab to show the direction of Mecca, and a clock so prayers can be held at the proper times.

Mosque in Mut, Dakhla Oasis

Libya

We visited Libya in 2006 during a brief thaw in Anglo-Libyan relations. It was an edgy experience; in some towns you could feel the tension in the air. We quickly discovered that Colonel Gaddafi was no longer respected, and if we could discover that, it meant he was no longer feared, either. Five years later he was shot dead while hiding in a drain.

Gamal Abdul Nasser Mosque, Tripoli

The Jamal Abdul Nasser Mosque in Algeria Square is so white it could be made of icing sugar.

Gamal Abdul Nasser Mosque, Algeria Square, Tripoli

As Tripoli cathedral in 1960
Public domain, Sourced from Wikipedia

Built as Tripoli’s Roman Catholic Cathedral in the 1920s when Libya was an Italian colony, it was converted into a mosque in 1970 after Colonel Gaddafi came to power. It retains its basic Romanesque design and basilica shape, though the façade has been modified in line with Islamic taste.

Square minarets are common in Morocco if unusual elsewhere. This square minaret, though, is in Venetian not Moroccan style.

Mosques Visits in Libya

The highlights of our trip were the well-preserved Roman cities of Leptis Magna and Sabratha near Tripoli and the Greek cities of Apollonia and Cyrene near Benghazi.

Libya (My thanks to Lonely Planet)

We did visit two mosques. The 19th century Gurgi Mosque in the old city of Tripoli considers itself a tourist attraction and was welcoming…

Inside the Gurgi Mosque, Tripoli

….but the Atiq Mosque in the distinctly tense city of Benghazi would rather have done without us.

Atiq Mosque, Benghazi

The Imam wanted to know why Massoud (our guide, red cap) had brought in these infidels. Our driver Shaqiri listens somewhat bemused. Lynne smiles ruefully.

Ghadames

The vast majority of Libya’s 7 million people live along the coast. We ventured as far south as Ghadames, a border town for both Tunisia and Algeria. The new town looks prosperous and has the sort of mosques one might expect.

Mosque in Ghadames new town

The deserted old town is preserved as a museum with a fine old mosque.

Mosque, Ghadames old town

I do not know how modern Ghadames makes its living, but old Ghadames grew rich on the slave trade. 2,500 enslaved people, mainly from Niger, passed through each year in the 1830s. The trade was officially abolished in 1853, but Ghadames market continued until the 1890s supplying slaves to major markets in Alexandria and Constantinople. Weekly slave markets were reportedly being held in Khufra in southeast Libya into the 1930s.

Standing in what was once Ghadames slave market

Portugal

Portugal today is home to around 65,000 Muslims, mainly immigrants from former Portuguese possessions in Africa and India.

Portugal is not a Muslim country, and has not been since 1139 when Afonso Henriques was proclaimed the first King of Portugal after the Battle of Ourique. Another hundred years were required to remove the Moors from the Algarve, but since then Portugal has been solidly Roman Catholic.

For 500 years before the Battle of Ourique, most of the region that would become Portugal was governed by a series of Moorish Caliphates. The Church of Haghia Sophia in Istanbul became a mosque (and then a museum and then, this year, a mosque again) – see Praying facing South – and this post features the Gamal Abdul Nasser Mosque, formerly Tripoli Cathedral. I know of only one building that has moved the other way….

The Church of Nossa Senhora da Anunciação, Mértola

Mértola is a small town on the Guadiana river near the Spanish Border. Its was important during the decades of the Reconquista when its originally Moorish castle became a Christian castle, but since then life has been much more peaceful and its importance has waned considerably.

Portugal with Mértola ringed in red (Thanks to Worldometers.org)

The castle sits on a commanding height with the mosque just below its entrance. Long after it became a church the main door was remodelled in Renaissance style, but its position at the south means the church is much wider than it is long – an arrangement common in mosques but rare in churches.

The remodelled south entrance, Nossa Senhora da Anunciação,Mértola

The altar and statue of the Virgin and Child stand in front of the niche that was once the mihrab - the directions of Mecca and Jerusalem being indistinguishable from western Europe.

Altar, Statue of Virgin and Child and Mihrab, Nossa Senhora da Anunciação, Mértola

Several side chapels entrances are also of Arabic design, but this may be a later whimsy.

Arabic styled doorway Nossa Senhora da Anunciação,Mértola

See Mértola and Alcoutim: Strongholds by the Guadiana River(Sept 2017)

oo00o00oo

So ends my three-part trip around the best and/or most interesting mosques we have encountered. We have been fortunate to have visited some incredible places and have (almost always) been made welcome.

Which leaves the preachy bit:

I have not introduced the churches that have become mosques and mosques that have become churches to sow dissension. Christianity and Islam are monotheistic religions, so if there is one God, they must, in their different ways worship the same God. And their ways are not that different, worship God and be considerate to each other pretty well covers both. Lynne occasionally, quite rightly, takes offence at attitudes to women, but that is more cultural than religious and is changing (though with glacial slowness). Most of the people we have dealt with on our travels have been decent, honest people who have welcomed us to their countries.

And if Christianity and Islam are alike in their good points they are also alike in their aberrations. Men who believed themselves to be true Muslims and men who believed themselves to be true Christians were both capable of enslaving other men and women for profit. Shame on all of us.

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