Before we took off for Aqaba we needed to file a flight plan. I sat down with my mobile, and tried to work out how to say “Can I file a flight plan, please” in Arabic. It wasn’t in the phrasebook, but I managed to get a result in the end, mainly in English. But then the local army began to take an interest, and a small well disciplined squad consisting of a Major, two heavily armed soldiers, and two civilians with guns, all marched up, in step, to ensure that everything was in order, halting smartly at the Major’s command.
Cairo air traffic control assured us on the phone that no further permissions were required from an aviation point of view. The Major demanded to see a fax to that effect. Cairo refused to send one. In the end I showed him a completely unrelated fax about Libya, which seemed to satisfy his requirements, or perhaps his dignity.
Delayed by an hour and a half, we climbed away towards Aqaba, 120 miles to the east.
The Sinai Peninsula, which we had to cross to get to Aqaba, has mountains, including Mt Sinai, that rise to 8500 feet. Using the valleys you can get across it, though, without flying much above 3000 feet, but we flew at 5000 feet anyway because of the heat. At that height, the temperature in the cabin was just about bearable. The landscape is golden and rugged, sandstone and scrub, cut across north/south with dry water-courses. It was a flight we were happy not to have done in the dark, because if anything went wrong landing in the dark would definitely have killed us.
When we were within 10 miles or so of the Gulf of Aqaba we had to take care to fly well south of Eilat, because we had no clearance for Israeli airspace, and they’d be entitled to shoot us down.
We flew carefully along the edge of the Israeli zone, using the GPS. Suddenly, the helicopter rocked sharply as the wake of another aircraft hit us. At the same moment, we saw him flash past us, a modern jet fighter. He was flying in the same direction as us, slightly above, on his side in a long turn around us, passing close enough for us to see the detail of his flightsuit, and to hear the roar of his engines. I spotted tiny blue Stars of David against the desert camouflage pattern on the stubby wings. We rocked again as a second jet roared past a few seconds later. I reported our position to the controller at Aqaba. He made no mention of the Israeli supervision. Nor did I.
The jets made one more pass, this time farther away and slightly below us.
I double checked our position, to be certain that we were legally outside Israel’s airspace.
“It all looks ok”, I confirmed to Martin, “though I suppose it must look a bit unusual to them to see a British registered civilian private helicopter passing their way.”
We also wanted to avoid straying across the Saudi border, only 15 miles or so south of Aqaba. The air traffic controller’s first question whenever we spoke to him was to ask if we were still in Jordanian airspace. In each case we were, and we made it into the airport without incident, to be marshalled to land next to a gleaming British Airways Concorde. From our tiny little aircraft I looked out at it and reflected that it was really quite small as airliners go.
As the rotors were slowing to a stop, Martin’s door was opened from the outside.
“Hi, you’re a long way from home!” It was a British Airways stewardess from Concorde. Martin made a huge fuss of her while she listened to his explanations of what all the complicated controls were for. She smiled indulgently at him, unimpressed, and wished us luck.
Once we’d refuelled, a Dr Faisil, the Director of the SOS Children’s Village at Aqaba, met us at the airport building. The charity was becoming more and more interested in us as a tool for generating Press interest, and had been in touch with James to find out more about our route.
“Can we visit your Village?” I asked, keen to make the effort for anyone who had made an effort to welcome us. “We’ve got a couple of hours before we have to be on our way to Amman.”
It was just up the road. We met the children, and their adoptive “Mommas” who run each house, and admired the handsome stone domestic buildings set among orange trees and landscaped with neat bougainvillea, irises and succulents. We drank Turkish coffee. The children, and the Mommas, loved being filmed with my video camera, and the children loved watching themselves on the camera screen. They all waved us goodbye and we set off back to the airport.
We flew on to Amman, which took us about an hour and a half. SOS, now seriously interested in us, had a car waiting to take us to another of their press conferences.
All of those interviewing us for the press and TV were women, offering a stark and welcome contrast with the restricted role of women in Libya. We did our best for the charity, giving interviews to each of the TV, radio and press groups represented there. We explained, having been hastily briefed, why we were interested in SOS Children’s Villages, our route from England to Australia, the record we hoped to achieve, and how we were aiming to raise the profile of the excellent work done for the orphans. We expressed our admiration for the Children’s Village we’d just seen at Aqaba. The Jordan Director for SOS Villages, Lina Kopti, organised it, and made it all run smoothly.
In the evening, Lina and her husband Owni, a sophisticated and metropolitan couple, generously took us out for dinner along with a group of friends connected with SOS.
It was an awesome party under the stars. The restaurant was a 100 year old merchant’s house deep in the old part of the city which tourists never get to, and we ate outside by candlelight under a liana-covered loggia, sensing warm aromas of spices and flowers, wafted around us by the warm breeze from the nearby desert.
The meal was one course after another of delicious Mediterranean food. Salad, vegetables, dips, lemons, spicy yoghurt, salsa and raw meats, including diced raw liver.
“Very good for your blood,” insisted Owni, a medical consultant, as he saw me hesitate.
“Yes, but is it safe for a British helicopter pilot with no lavatory in his helicopter?” I very nearly said, before trying it. Getting ill was still my main fear, as we couldn’t very well stop every five minutes in the desert.
You spike the small cube of liver with a cocktail stick, dip it in a ground spice, which sticks to the glistening sheen of blood, and chew. Actually I loved it, fully expecting the next course to be sheep’s eyes, and completely certain that I’d be hideously ill all night and for weeks. And I’d left all the medicines in the helicopter.
Ramas, the Koptis’ bright sixteen year old son, was aiming to become a pilot and I talked to him about that. I found him extremely well informed about aviation and keen to get some hand-on experience, though of course at that age there’s not much you’re legally able to do. He made a really enjoyable companion. The meal finished with coffee, served by a man dressed as an Arab warrior. He brought in a tall coffee pot and poured the coffee out with astonishing accuracy from a great height into a tiny cup.
Back at the hotel, Martin said he thought he’d see if he could find a late night chemist before turning in. He was walking oddly, and not looking at all well. I offered help.
“I’ll be fine, mate, you get some sleep,” he said.
At breakfast the next day, he was still a peculiar colour and we decided that this should be a day for chilling in the relative comfort of our hotel, the Marriott, and perhaps doing a spot of tourism.
We spent part of the morning in the extensive reception area of the Marriott, with Ramas acting as interpreter, phoning ahead for fuel. We made no progress, other than vague hints that we might be able to get some Avgas when we got back to Aqaba, and then beyond that in Saudi Arabia. The real problem turned out to be that leisure flying in Saudi Arabia uses jets, partly because the Saudis can afford them, and so there is little demand for piston-engine fuel used in light aircraft in the way there is in the West.
Martin’s colour did not improve, and he was pleased we were having the day off in Amman, as he went on feeling really unwell after the liver, and didn’t fancy six hours in a hot helicopter. He was really brave about it, and took loads of pills from the chemist, but he was visibly unwell and should really have stayed in bed.
Later, Lina took us to the Children’s Village at Amman. We had lunch with a Momma and the nine children she cared for, and with Lina. We played our fatherly tricks with the children and the camera, and made a great fuss of them and the Momma as we left their house.
An SOS educational worker told us about the SOS practice of looking after the children until they are 18 years of age and have a vocational skill; whereas other agencies in Jordan did not look after them for nearly as long or as well. And she told of how the children, on leaving, kept up the relationship with their Momma, the girls often choosing to bring back their future husbands for approval.
We also met an engaging Jordanian medical doctor who taught street children English in his spare time. We sat in on a bit of his lesson. His English was humblingly good; as humbling as his selfless dedication to these street kids. “Houses of Parliament,” he said carefully to his boys, while holding a picture book aloft. They took notes and drew pictures. You could tell that the boys were keen to learn; they knew this was their only way out of the mess they’d been born into.
We spent the evening being shown around the city by the SOS driver, Ibrahim, a Palestinian refugee, who had collected us at the airport.
He drove out of the parts of the city where Westerners congregate, and took us mainly through the bazaars. So what we saw was a mass of little lights, and alleys of shops crowded with wandering pedestrians enjoying their leisure. We were amazed to find a tiny shop in the middle of a vast bazaar that would take all our left-over money from every country we had been through, and swap it into dollars, the rate for each currency being haggled over in turn.
At the Roman Amphitheatre, we met a Bedouin, a professional tourist guide. He spoke immaculate English, with an accent combining Jordanian, home counties, Midlands, Welsh and British Army officer. He was a handsome man, tall, self-assured, and pleased to meet us.
He said he had been to the British Army military training college at Sandhurst. As with so much of what you hear in the Middle East, this seemed plausible, if unlikely.
I had promised Ramas that I would give him a circuit over the city in the helicopter, and next morning he was with us first thing. On the way to the airport, he and Ibrahim helped us find some plastic canisters and a funnel, equipment we now knew we needed for airports not equipped with Avgas bowsers, so that we could fuel the helicopter manually.
Amman is a city of 5 million people, and we got some feel for the sheer size of it as we hunted for these canisters in one bazaar after another.
I took Ramas for his circuit round the airport perimeter in the helicopter. It was not, though, your average gentle first time circuit. With the heat and the altitude, the Robinson was operating very close to its limits, and moments before landing the rotor-stall warning horn shrilled in the cockpit. It’s a warning that if you don’t react urgently on the controls the rotors will stall and you’ll crash.
It gave me an early morning reminder that we were operating a machine in conditions which kept us very close to the dangerous edge of all the graphs in the pilots’ handbook. These graphs show you the speeds, control settings, weights, balances, temperatures and a host of other variables which allow you to stay within the limits of the physics in which you are operating. Step outside the physics, and not even Sir Isaac Newton will save you. In fact someone like Newton will probably be needed to explain to you why it was inevitable that you were going to crash. The limits we were operating close to were air temperature, take-off altitude, and, with all our gear and extra fuel, helicopter weight.
Ramas, cool under fire throughout the flight, thanked me for the experience and gravely wished us luck for the rest of our journey.
Our aim for the day was to get as far south as Al Wehj, a little town on the Saudi coast of the Red Sea. This meant going the 125 miles south back to Aqaba, then out down the Gulf of Aqaba for 50 miles or so, and following the Red Sea for over 200 miles, to give a day’s journey of around 400 miles.
To do it we needed maps. We had intended to fly down the pipeline which goes from northern Jordan south east across the desert to Bahrein, and the maps we had brought were for this route. But the Saudis had now refused permission, possibly because it was too near the no-fly zone in Iraq; and instead required us to enter at Al Wehj, on the west coast. We could then cross the mountains to Ha’il and continue to Riyadh, and from there to Bahrein from the west.
So we called James and asked him to fax us some maps. Waiting for them to come through, and searching out the petrol canisters, meant we had a late start, but we still hoped to get to Al Wehj by 6 o’clock Jordan time, before the light went.
If we were lucky, we reckoned we could find Petra (the Rose-Red City cut from the rock, used in the Indiana Jones film) on the way down to Aqaba. It should have been visible up in the hills on the left as we flew down to the southern end of the Dead Sea. We flew over where it should have been, but the light must have been wrong, or it just wasn’t visible from the air, and we just couldn’t find it. Eventually we thought we’d better carry on before we ran short of fuel over the desert.
What we did find, though, while circling high over the baking desert, was what turned out to be a Bedouin camp, in the hills a few miles west of the romantically named 'Kings Road', which runs north–south across the desert from Amman to Aqaba. In amongst the stunning mountain ranges and desert scenery, the only people who seem to have the wit to withstand the extremes of temperature and aridity here are Bedouins. Formerly nomadic herdsmen they now tend to move around less frequently but still maintain much of their traditional lifestyle, grazing their goats on the desert’s meagre vegetation.
“Hey, there’s a Bedouin tent down there, and a load of camels!” I said pointing. “Let’s go and say hello and see if we can blag a coffee.”
I circled down, with the engine idling to cool it, coming down using only the spinning main rotor blades to slow our descent, like an Autumn leaf falling from a maple tree. I landed on the red sand, a respectful distance from the low block of tents which flapped about idly in our downwash. No-one stirred from the camp.
We walked across in the leaden heat, our shoes filling with scorching desert sand, and our flightsuits immediately soaked by our sweat. It was much hotter on the ground than it had been in the air, as the ground, heated by centuries of sunshine, radiated its stored energy into our shoes and bodies. The lazy desert breeze was hotter than we were.
As we approached the tents, we saw a flash of smiling white eyes and teeth in the shady gloom, welcoming us. A tall middle aged Bedouin man, in robes and head-dress, held his hand out towards us in welcome.
He told us he was a guide, who did desert tours for tourists, whom he took out into the desert for a couple of days with a jeep and a tent, and showed them how to survive. He was today between bookings, and alone, so we were especially welcome, he said.
He spoke immaculate English, with an accent combining British Army officer and Arabic. He was a impressive figure of a man, and he too said he had been to Sandhurst. I told him about our tour guide in Amman, and he smiled. “He is my brother”. I wasn’t sure about his definition of the word “brother”, nor of his actual military credentials, but neither seemed really important, given the hospitality on offer.
“Marhaba,” he announced in Arabic, “or ‘Welcome’. Come in to my Majlis, my best room, especially for visitors!” He gestured for us to go first, and we entered the cool darkness of a room thick with carpets and woven fabrics. We slipped our shoes off, and entered reverently.
He indicated that we should make ourselves comfortable on the mattress-like seats. Taking our lead from him, we sat cross-legged, and held out the small cup he gave each of us in our right hand.
“Coffee?” he asked us, but the question seemed like a formality, as soon he was pouring us some steaming 'qahwa' the traditional Arabic coffee black, without sugar. It was flavoured with cardamom, a sort of ginger, and he served it to us with agility and grace. And there were succulent dates.
“The cup is refilled until you tell me that you have had enough by shaking the cup from side to side,” he instructed us gently, with a smile. “If I were here with my family, my youngest son would serve you.”
“Arab hospitality is renowned for its warmth and is an integral part of our culture,” he continued. “This can be traced back to the days of conflict and struggle in the desert, where every visitor to an oasis was greeted with unquestioning hospitality for the first three days, be they friend or enemy. 'Diyafa' or hospitality, has always been at the heart of Bedouin lifestyle and we considered it sacred, and revere it as a tradition. We Arabs consider that religious belief and honouring one's guests go hand in hand”.
He poured us more coffee. I was getting nice and comfortable now, the extremity of the desert heat just outside seemed miles away.
''Hospitality is in our blood”, he said, warming to his theme, “It forms one of the cornerstones of our lifestyle and runs in our veins”.
I compared this with the rather edgy insularity of much of modern urban Britain, where you could live for years sometimes without getting to know your closest neighbours, and it had been known to find suicide victims who’d lain dead in their beds for weeks.
''Life in the desert,” he went on, “ was an equal challenge for everyone, and the only way to survive was to depend on each other, and to support each other. So a guest was to be welcomed and made comfortable even in the face of extreme hardship.''
It was odd, I thought, that he didn’t appear to question our presence in a helicopter in his desert.
“Are you here for lunch?” he asked quietly.
“That’s very generous of you,” I said, “ but we just popped in to say hello, really.”
He nodded his understanding.
Outside, the goats, unaware of their lucky escape from the lunch-pot, grazed quietly and unsuspecting around his camel, a majestic beast dressed impressively in woven cloths of red, blue, black and white, including a rather spectacular head-dress with tassles.
Our host was clearly drawn to Uniform Kilo, comparing various points knowledgeably with those of machines he’d sat in during his time with the British Army.
The encounter over, he gave us his card, and invited us back for a week-long tour when we were next passing. I thought I might just do that.
Back in the air, Aqaba air traffic control seemed jumpy, and wanted us to approach their field by way of a point fifteen miles to the east of it. We told him we were doing this, but flew at six feet above the desert so his radar wouldn’t see us, and cut the corner, as we were very hot and dangerously short of drinking water. It showed forty five degrees centigrade on Uniform Kilo’s outside air temperature gauge. In spite of our hurry, we were careful to keep well away from Israel’s wary guns on the western side of the valley.
There was no Concorde waiting on the apron at Aqaba this time, only a dusty military helicopter. It chose to take off just as we came in. We hoped it knew we were there. We had one delay after another getting Avgas, and when that had been achieved, and the formalities completed, we had no chance whatever of getting to Al Wehj in daylight.
So we stayed the night in Aqaba, and Martin especially was very glad to get to his bed.
