Ramadan rush hour!

This is the story of how we mastered driving: the Jordanian way!

So we left Warsaw in the dark of night and the 3 hour drive to the Airport in Katowice plus the 4 hour flight to Amman definitely did not do much to calm my jitters about hopping onto a car and driving in Jordan. We were going to be grabbing the wheel in a new country in the middle of Ramadan and I was worried that I’d either crash us into the first kebab store or of simply looking bad in front of my partner. 

#Jordan #driving #camel

Walking out onto the arrivals hall and past the people awaiting their loved ones I suddenly got pulled by my arm by A. With a look of apparent shock she told me to look at the crowd where I suddenly found a sign with my name. I won’t lie, at first I really didn’t know what on earth was going on and confusion set in my tired mind… but it happened to be the car rental company that was waiting for me outside. Kudos to Auto Nation car rental, you definitely managed to surprise us!

Now, being new to the middle east, I had in the back of my mind all of those American movies where people dress in traditional dresses, ethnic music is loud and traffic is just confusing but as we jumped onto the transport that took us to the actual rental car park with another couple flying in from Poland it all seemed to be standard. The two gentlemen from Auto Nation where polite, dressed in jeans and shirts in a western fashion and despite the effectively loud ethnic music, the driving was ordered. 

And so it was for about 30 seconds until suddenly driving became a team sport! 

A call came in and our driver proceeded to drive and talk on the phone while his co-pilot swiftly took over shifting gears. It was curious to see in a “this cannot be safe” kind of way but not one of those 4 souls being driven dared utter a single word about it. I guess we all just figured that’s how it’s done.

As we tandem drove on, the people seemed to be respecting the general rules, the roads were in good shape and signals were bilingual. Suddenly I was far less nervous about having to tackle these roads. “This is not too bad” I thought to myself.

As it turns out, we were told that rental cars have special green license plates and that given their low incomes, people who get into car crashes of any sort with tourists often just leave as they cannot afford to pay. I’m not sure if this was an easy and smart way to get tourists to pay extra for insurance but I do know it worked with this tourist and I was forking out the extra cash before you could say Shish Kebab! Also, I thought to myself “this may actually be bad after all”.

In handsight, yeah, I’d have to say it is worth it as a lot of cars had bumps and scratches of all kinds. My advice is for you to do the same!

Apparently being upgraded, we ended up with a pretty new Toyota Camry with an automatic gearbox. I’m not a car buff and the ride itself didn’t mean that much to me but the automatic gearbox was a novelty as I’d never driven automatic before. While A was inside the rental car office trying to use the wifi, I hopped onto the car and for a couple of minutes and failed miserably to understand how to get it to work. This was supposed to be a type of gearbox made to allow idiots to use it and there I was looking at it like I was trying to sort out quantum equations. I guess my consternation was quite evident as the staff came along and politely asked my, “Have you ever driven automatic before?”. I may have not said it out loud but at that moment I was sure that guy was an angel! 

Since our Airbnb was in a pretty central place in Amman, I knew driving there was going to be an adventure and sure enough we hit rush hour in a middle eastern country with me just having a 30 second lesson on how to not drive stick. Traffic started to thicken and as soon as I saw the first roundabout I really started to get a dose of reality. What had been thus far a relatively gentle drive with only a few moments of people disregarding the amount of lanes, was now a full on smorgasbord of honking cars around a circle. At that moment I rued my primitive impulse to want to impress my partner and remembered that risk taking is the reason why men live less than women.

We were trying to enter a jam packed 3-lane roundabout at a crawling pace and it was a terrifying experience! Everybody was honking in every direction, everybody seemed to very slowly be changing lanes at random places and what is more people were crossing the street in half the entrances. This was my “oh shit!” moment.

But it turns out that there is method in the madness. Honking is the basic equivalent to a signal light and since everybody slows down on the roundabouts, you have plenty of time to avoid all the cars which (pretty much like I was at that point) are also disregarding the notion of lane. And so it was that we both made it in and out of that first fateful roundabout. 

About 4 roundabouts (not that I was counting) later we made it to our destination in downtown Amman where I duly crowned myself king of the road and with tremendous satisfaction parked the car.

This was the prelude to just about all the city driving we made, even at night. Sure, there were a lot of cars, people crossed the road literally anywhere, signaling to change lanes was definitely not in fashion and occasionally a 2 lane road was occupied by 3 or more lanes but it all seemed to be a kind of really controlled chaos where you can easily operate if you remember the rules. 

On that note, ladies and germs, if I could drive there, so can you. In fact, I dare you to!