BY Lorna Parkes

The Dead Sea is wilder than I expected. Beautiful, but tempestuous and sharp at the shoreline where salt-encrusted boulders have hardened into ragged razor edges. From a distance, its shores look like ribs of bone-white sand hugging turquoise lungs.

For all of its visual splendour, the buoyant Dead Sea is Jordan’s prime tourist trap. Coach-loads of tourists get dropped at upmarket hotels on its shores for lunch and a float at inflated prices. It’s a captive market – the water is so viciously salty that showering off is essential.

Historically, the Dead Sea communities have benefited little from this great natural marvel. I am visiting the area to have lunch at Al Numeira, a non-governmental organisation working with the South Ghor community, between the Dead Sea salt pans and Jordan’s fertile Rift Valley.

The ethos here is zero-mile food. I’m greeted with lemon leaf tea on a terrace made out of shipping containers, overlooking polytunnels and palm trees. In the distance, a group of farm workers is bagging onions.

“I can remember before Covid-19 the Dead Sea was there,” says the project’s founder William al-Ajaleen, pointing to a brown streak of land beyond the farm. The sea is receding at an astonishing rate of more than a metre a year and the land is destabilising.

In this agricultural area, food security and resources management are increasingly urgent. Al Numeira’s mission is to raise environmental awareness through sustainable farming, education and, since late 2018, grassroots tourism.

Mr Al-Ajaleen explains: “We are trying to educate the next generation. To give a value to the agriculture, by serving direct to the international tourist, will teach people to respect the local resources.”

Cooking classes, bike rides and hikes between farms can also be organised. Al Numeira is part of Jordan’s Meaningful Travel Map, an initiative launched in 2018 to highlight projects across the country that empower communities, supporting gender equality and grassroots economic activities through tourism. Some are relatively new, others have been around for decades.

Holidays that benefit all involved
While I have come to Jordan to see its big-hitting attractions, I am also using this map to ensure that my trip directly benefits communities.

My journey takes me inland to a remote mountain village near Madaba, home to the Bani Hamida Women’s Weaving Project. Founded in 1985 to create employment for local Bedouin women in a job-scarce backwater, it now supports 350 women across 14 villages.

In the contemporary gallery, large woollen rugs dance with creative motifs reflecting Jordan’s landscape: orange triangles for the arid mountains; blue lines for the River Jordan; shoals of diamonds for fish.
Huge click-clack looms in the back room allow women including my hosts Amal and Namah Alqaida to demonstrate how troughs of wool are woven into the rugs displayed in the gallery.

Working here has enabled women to send their children to university, buy cars and build their homes. Asked how this makes them feel, Namah sums it up, with a heave of her bicep and a broad grin: “Strong.”

The stars switch on like lightbulbs as night cloaks the Feynan Ecolodge, in a sheltered slot of the Dana Biosphere Reserve. My stargazing session on the roof is no doubt more glorious for the fact that the lodge is off-grid, illuminated by candlelight.

Baking with Bedouin women
The next morning, I make bread with one of the 45 Bedouin families whose tents surround the lodge; all of Feynan’s neighbours benefit from the lodge. Around 80 per cent of Jordanians are Bedouin and the semi-nomadic way of life is an important aspect of society.

Feynan is one of the 12 projects included on the Meaning Travel Map, but the map is by no means exhaustive. In the Middle East, Jordan is a community-tourism trailblazer and more places are expected to be added to the map in the next few years. In the same reserve, I also stay at Dana Guesthouse, run by Jordan’s Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature.

It isn’t on the map – yet – but stays here support a number of socioeconomic development programmes established to prop up rural communities around its reserves.

On a tour of Dana’s local Ottoman-era village, a flat-roofed huddle of honey-coloured houses that has seen an exodus of residents in recent years, I get up close to the grease and grindstones of jewellery-making in one workshop and find Dana women sifting fresh mountain herbs amid bubbling vats of fruit jams in another. The products made here are sold in the RSCN’s Wild Jordan shops all over the country. At sunset, overlooking a sublime deep valley where Tristram’s starlings flirt with the wind in the void, I inhale hot thyme tea on my balcony – marvelling at the fact that it was packaged metres away in the workshop I visited earlier.

By contrast, steel swords clash in a theatrical 12th-century Saladin army display amid the ruins of clifftop Shobak Castle. The performance is by a community of military veterans, employed by the Jordan Heritage Revival Company.

I am told tourists sometimes visit this Crusader castle en route to Petra, but few stay. Local jobs are scarce. Indeed, I am the only guest at the hotel Montreal – and that’s exactly why I’m here.

*inews