Please pass the salt

We went to the Dead Sea today. Our journey actually began last night, when Tim, Ivette, Piyali and I took a taxi to a bus station at the edge of town. It was the sort of place where you get out of the relative isolation of the taxi cab and become suddenly and acutely aware that the pigment of your skin is at least three shades lighter than that of everyone around you. We could only tell this from the males, of course, because the females are all covered from head to toe, and they stared intently at the four of us who are quite obviously not. Nevertheless, we pressed on, not because we felt particularly daring, but because we wanted to get to the Dead Sea without having to sacrifice our ability to buy food the next week. Tour guides, we’ve found, are very expensive.


The bus drivers were all very friendly, and eager for our business. Unfortunately, discerning anything beyond that required a level of Arabic proficiency that no one in our group possessed. We left with a few phone numbers and a new friend named Mufeed, who, when he found out we were from America, said “Ah, New Jersey, Virginia Beach!” We did not take his bus.
We left at nine o’clock in the morning. Our bus was the approximate size and shape of Scooby’s Mystery Machine, only less colorful and in a greater state of disrepair. It didn’t matter to us, though, because once we left the city and started down the highway, it became far more compelling to watch the desert roll past the open windows than to wonder who had been sitting in our places the day before. We knew we were getting close when we began to see signs, large, red, and written entirely in English that said, “WARNING: SALTY WATER” under a picture of a swimmer with his hands in the air like his team had just scored a touchdown, or perhaps like he was drowning. It made me question for a moment whether the Dead Sea got its name because it doesn’t have any fish, or because unsuspecting swimmers who couldn’t tell from the thick gray haze in the air or oily gleam on the water’s surface that this was not normal water, and so decided to submerge their heads.


The Dead Sea is the deepest hypersaline lake in the world, a fact that was made painfully clear to anyone who entered the lake with an open wound, or who happened to get a drop of water on or near an eye. The shores are rimmed with deposits of salt where the water evaporates from the sand, and even larger rocks lie buried in the black mud that tourists, and undergraduate student researchers, like to plaster on their skin. However, it is second to Lake Asal in Djibouti in terms of overall salinity. The Dead Sea is also the lowest point on the surface of the earth, something that didn’t mean much to any of us until we realized that somewhere, 420 meters above us, was the ocean. We spent a good deal of the morning floating on our backs, basking in the sun, and staring across at the cliffs of the West Bank. A good part of the afternoon we spent wondering why the third language on all the beachside signs, aside from Arabic and English, was German.


Because the Dead Sea has insufficient inflow of water, evaporation has caused it to shrink rapidly in recent decades. It has fallen twenty-two meters since 1970, to 418 meters below sea level, and is currently dropping at a rate of one meter per year. Its preservation has become a subject of interest not only to Jordan, but to Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and various other organizations in the international community.

Tomorrow is the last day of our first weekend in Jordan. If it is anything like the first day, it will be a wonderful chance to recharge for a second week of hard work.