We took a short half-day trip from Amman to the Dead Sea. Apparently, the New Rest House is the place to go, not the Old Rest House. The Jordanians have built an ok little place on the beach with showers, restaurants, beach chairs etc. There is no direct transport to the New Rest House, so we took another micro-bus from Amman which, unfortunately, decided to drop us off 10 kilometres away from the Dead Sea. We then had to get another taxi/bus to take us the new rest house - the driver drove through several villages on the way, picking up and dropping off several people, before depositing us at the Dead Sea.
We plunged into the Dead Sea and immediately found ourselves floating with no effort at all on our part! The salt content of the water is so high (30%) that it increases the buoyancy of anything in the water.
In addition, given that the River Jordan has been pouring minerals into the Dead Sea for millenia, the water is very mineral-rich. We found several of the tourists liberally caking themselves with mud from the coastline. There are a bunch of cosmetics companies that sell Dead Sea salt and minerals.
It was funny to float sideways as well as have a nice nap on the water. We could also see the Israeli/Palestinian side of the Dead Sea from where we were.
After the swim, we wanted to head back to Amman. Having no other form of transportation, we walked up to the highway and tried to hitch a ride back to Amman. Thankfully, a car pulled up and off we went. It turned out that the driver of the car was a Jordanian systems engineer who had a Palestinian father (a refugee in Jordan) and an Italian mother. We had a very informative chat on the way back. He said that, notwithstanding what Arafat kept talking about, almost none of the Palestinian refugees in Jordan wanted to go back to Palestine. He said the 2nd generation of Palestinians had grown up in Jordan and thought of themselves as Jordanian, not Palestinian.
He stopped at his office on the way back and we got to talk to a few of his colleagues as well. They told us some fun and scary facts about the Dead Sea. Their engineering firm was constructing a de-salinization plant next to the Dead Sea. Both Israel and Jordan are pumping water out of the Dead Sea and into de-salinization plants. The water-level of the Dead Sea is falling by 1 meter per year due to this de-salinization. As a result, the Dead Sea will be gone in 50 years, according to them! The Dead Sea is dying a slow death... They also said that Jordan is considering building a 170 km long canal from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. This would change the ecology of the region pretty dramatically. All this is being driven by immense water-scarcity in Jordan.
We hopped on the plane that night, bound for Tanzania and Mt. Kilimanjaro!
-Dev
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