My Weekend (Friday)

The next day, Friday, was supposed to be the highlight of my weekend. I had signed up for a school trip to Dibeen Forest, a RSCN site (Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature) that the website described as hosting a “pristine pine-oak habitat”. The proceeding sentence then went on to explain that “these Aleppo pines are some of the oldest and largest in the Kingdom.” The website also mentioned something about deer, bird, and flora, but I skimmed over this and assumed that Dibeen forest was home to endangered animal and plant species that we might occasionally see during a hike. After a 2 hour bus ride that left at 9:20 AM, we arrived a hill top that was covered with trees that looked exactly like the trees that I had seen all along the road sides of Jordan. However, these trees were more numerous and didn’t appear to have been planted with any deliberate placement. On this hilltop, however, we did have an excellent view of a valley of green. Never before in Jordan had I seen a group of trees so densely populated that I couldn’t see the ground underneath them. I then figured that this was probably the forest we were looking for and that we would probably hike down to it. Something I forgot to mention was that as soon as drove up to this hilltop, someone in the bus looked out the window and said that we could see deer about 50 feet away from us. Looking out the window, I saw a group of deer in a grazing pen surrounded by some sort of metal fence. When we got off the bus the first thing we did was approach this grazing pen. At the same time we realized that the people in next to the fences were letting the deer out of their pen to come and meet us. Before any of us really knew it, we were immersed in a sea of deer. These deer, however, didn’t really look anything like the deer I was used to seeing in America. They were about half the height, twice as thick, and all had bambi-like spots on their back. For the next 25 minutes our group contented ourselves with taking pictures of the deer and feeding them some of the pita bread we had brought along on our trip. Although I had never seen domesticated deer with absolutely no fear of humans, I grew bored of them in about 10 minutes. But after another 10 minute we proceeded to the open area with the view of the valley that I mentioned earlier. There, we took some pictures of the group and explored the tree dotted hillside for about 20 minutes. Although these pines looked like the same short, stubby, and deformed trees that I had seen all over Jordan, they really were very beautiful. They were a light shade of green and all had large pine cones growing off them. Moreover, their placement was natural and wide and complemented the altitude of the rocky hillside. But, after our short exploration of the surrounding area, we all headed back to the bus for a ride to see the hyena pen. Now I hadn’t read anything about hyenas on the forest website but I figured that they would be more interesting than deer. Also, since I had heard that they were also in the forest, I figured that we would see more of the forest during our drive. In about five minutes we arrived at another hilltop that looked almost exactly like the one we had just seen, except for one difference: no animal pens. In fact, there were no animals to be seen anywhere. After we walked down a road for about two minutes I heard someone say that the deer were somewhere near the restaurant where we were planning to eat lunch. We then contented ourselves with more picture taking and short distance exploration. We never actually did see any hyenas because we learned on the bus that a trip to see them would delay our lunch plans till 2:00. Since most of us were already fairly hungry and since we had seen in our experience that Jordanian restaurants usually served food at their own pace, we decided to skip the hyenas and head right for lunch. On our way to the restaurant, we drove down the hill into that valley of dense forest vegetation. The trees in this valley certainly were much taller and much more closely concentrated, but the area really just reminded me of one of those camping/rest areas with picnic tables where families come to play football and grill burgers and hot dogs. I won’t say anything about the restaurant except that it overlooked a river valley, was outdoors with a canopy, and served delicious mezze and grill- pita, hummus, eggplant spread, herbs, yogurt, vegetables, French fries, spiced ground lamb kababs, grilled lamb, and grilled chicken. I ate as much as I possibly could at this restaurant because I was so thrilled to be eating good, Middle Eastern food again; in Dahab we basically lived off of store bought pita and condiments, inferior quality falafel sandwiches, and medium quality pizza. After lunch we began our two hour drive to campus and arrived at around 4:30. Thus, was our trip to Dibeen forest. But, luckily, the day wasn’t completely wasted because I was able to meet up with some family friends were visiting Dr. Eric and Dr. Meera for dinner. Then in the evening when I was on duty in the dorm, I watched Casino Royal and wrote post cards to about half the people to whom I had promised to write.