Detour #149: The King's Highway, Jordan
The King’s Highway offers a biblical drive through the Holy Lands, says Ben Coombs.
To tell you the truth, I never expected the Kingdom of Jordan to provide me with one of my all-time dream drives. In fact, if I’m honest, I’d never really considered Jordan’s potential for offering up automotive nirvana at all when planning the drive which took me through there; a Porsche-based odyssey from the UK to South Africa, via the Middle East. While researching the trip, which I’d imaginatively named “The African Porsche Expedition”, my attention focussed more on the big hitters of overland travel – places like the dusty crossing of Sudan’s Nubian Desert, the rutted badlands of Northern Kenya or the edgy dystopia of Syria. But one of the great things about travel is that sometimes a series of ingredients come together to provide an experience greater than the sum of their parts. And when it comes to Jordan’s little-known King’s Highway, the parts are pretty special even in isolation.
Take the starting point, for instance. My King’s Highway experience began in a home-made roof tent perched atop a Porsche 944, overnighting on the shores of the Dead Sea. When a day on the road begins with the sun rising over such a stirring locale, it’s hard to believe that things are immediately going to go up from there. But as the Dead Sea is the lowest dry-land point on planet earth, being located at a mind-focussing 428m below sea level, from there it’s very much a case of ‘the only way is up’. And this has been true for millennia.
Millennia, that’s no exaggeration, by the way. The King’s Highway is probably the first road I’ve driven which gets a mention in the bible, and you can’t get much more provenance than that. It genuinely traverses the Holy Lands. 1,300 years ago, when London was a small, backwater kind of place, the King’s Highway was already a busy pilgrim route to Mecca. And throughout history, it has been a trading route connecting Egypt with the Silk Road towns to the north of Damascus. To say our route was steeped in history would most certainly be an understatement.
But how did the ancients know the exact ingredients which make for a great driving road? You want well-sighted, open turns and enough elevation changes to keep things interesting? Check. How about smooth, flowing tarmac? You’ve got it. And some next level places at which to pull over and stretch your legs when the fancy takes you? Of course. This is pretty much the place in which history was invented, remember?
Once we’d woken up, taken down the Porsche’s homebuilt roof tent and drank our morning coffee while gazing out across the Dead Sea towards Israel’s West Bank, we fired up the Porsche and hit the road, climbing up a dramatic sweep of parched earth into the mountainous terrain of Central Jordan. The first substantial piece of history you encounter on the drive is the Crusader’s castle at Kerak, a relative newcomer to the King’s highway, having been built a full 1,200 years after the roads cameo appearance in the bible. The castle is one of the biggest of its kind in the area, and it towers over the road solemnly, its sand-coloured walls rising clean from the dusty landscape, aloof and seemingly impregnable. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying, and since the castle’s construction eight centuries ago countless battles have been fought to control it, by everyone from those initial hardy Crusaders, to the Ottoman Empire who coveted its strategic position early in the 20th century.
The castle marks the point where the road which climbs up from the Dead Sea meets the ‘official’ King’s Highway, and so after spending some time gazing upon its battlements, we rolled on south, following in the tyre tracks of history. It was just under 100 miles from the castle to our overnight stop, and every one of those miles delivered, as the road swept left and right across the barren hillsides, its unexpectedly smooth tarmac giving the Porsche an opportunity to venture towards the upper echelons of the rev range. And as we drove this sinuous piece of history, the views unveiled by the twists in the road captivated us all. To our left, the arid hills rolled on to the dust-blurred horizon while on our right, the earth plummeted to the valley in which the border between Jordan and Israel lies, which climbs from the Dead Sea to the Bay of Aqaba. For hours, this evocative landscape was ours and ours alone, for traffic was light and people were few – though if we’d encountered Moses patiently thumbing a lift we wouldn’t have been surprised, because who wouldn’t want to be on that road in a Porsche, travelling to our evening’s destination?
Ah yes, the evening destination. Just as every great drive needs a great starting point, so it also needs a great objective, to bookend the awesomeness of the tarmac in between. And this section of the King’s Highway plays host to one of the greatest destinations you can imagine; a genuine wonder of the world, in fact. The lost city of Petra.
Having parked at the ruins, we walked through the cleft in the rock which leads to the lost city, the passageway – between two sheer cliffs getting narrower and narrower as we went. But just as the sides felt certain to close us in, the view ahead opened out and there it was towering over us, the famous treasury, jewel of the Nabataean Empire.
Lying in the roof tent that night, I ran the drive over in my mind. From the Dead Sea to the lost city of Petra, via the King’s Highway - it would take a lot to top that. But then I thought forward to the following day, when we would climb back into the Porsche and carry on along the King’s Highway to the deserts of Wadi Rum, the Bay of Aqaba and then on to Africa and I smiled, because the adventure certainly wasn’t over yet.