In the morning I left the Amman hostel with two Japanese girls that I had met the previous day, Yoko and Yasuko. We meet up with another one of their friend’s Chi and take a taxi to the minibus stand. We are headed to Israel.
The King Hussein Bridge Crossing or the Allenby Bridge Crossing as it is called in Israel, is out in the middle of nowhere and is desert landscape all around. It is the few entry points where an Israeli stamp can be avoided. Our bus arrives at the border and everyone piles out. A Jordanian soldier checks all of our passports and before I hand over my passport I make sure he knows that I don’t want the Jordan exit stamp. He nods and just looks at the passport and we are all let back on the minibus.
The bus drives through the gate and down a dirt road towards another building. Here we take all our bags off the minibus and go into the building to get a Jordanian exit stamp. The officers here check my passport again before I am let into the building. Inside a queue forms behind a small pair of windows where two Jordanian soldiers are taking exit visa fees and stamping passports. I hand over my passport after explicitly telling him not to stamp it. He says okay and asks for 15JD which is the only border crossing that charges such a high fee. After paying the man, he places the Jordan exit stamp, which actually looks like a postage stamp of Petra, on a separate sheet of paper and then stamps it with a date. I take that page and then get back on another bus.
This new bus waits for full capacity before leaving and then charges us a fee for transport from one building to the next. In between there is another checkpoint. This soldier just wants to make sure we have paid our exit fees. He collects all the loose leaf pages of exit stamps and waives our bus through the check point.
The bus drives though the Jordan/Israel border lined with machine gun posts, barbed wired fences and to an Israeli building. On the side is a huge entry way where luggage is building piled through an xray scanner. We leave our bags at the front without any bag claim whatsoever and the porters slowly move them through the building. At this point I just have my daypack and we line up to go through a metal detector and another smaller x-ray machine.
An Israeli girl holding a US issued M16, checks my passport again before allowing me to go through the metal detector. I’m not sure for what but she asks for it and glances at it for not more than two seconds before handing it back. After I go through, we fill out a form and queue up in line to get our Israeli visas.
I finally reach the end hand over the form and intentionally hang on to my passport. Another Israeli girl plays 21 questions with me. Why do you want to visit Israel? Where will you go? Do you know anyone in Israel? Who are they? Where are you staying? What is the address? How long will you stay? Where in Israel do you plan on visiting? What do you do? How much money do you have? Do you have credit cards? Can I see your credit cards? Etc. She didn’t really like my indecisive answers since I don’t know anyone in Israel, I have not booked any hotel, I have no idea where I am going to go, I have no idea how long I will stay, I have enough money, I have no Israeli shekels, and no you may not see my credit cards. These types of questions go on for another 15minutes and finally she asks for my passport.
Before I hand it over I tell her that I don’t want the stamp. So she asks why? I make up answer saying that I plan on visiting other Arab countries and she asks which one. I randomly remembered Syrian as a country that didn’t allow visitors to have Israeli stamps on their passports. So she asks to see my visa for Syria. I tell her I don’t have it yet. And then she says it’s not possible for her not to stamp my passport.
Bullshit, it’s not possible, I thought. She exits the booth and goes to talk to her supervisor in a corner office. Another 10minutes go by and I am asked to go to her office. Inside, I play another game of 21 questions with the supervisor who is sporting an Uzi slung over her shoulder. The Uzi had a double sided clip for faster reloads. Finally she says that it okay and stamps another sheet of paper.
On the other side of the booths there’s another Israeli soldier that checks my passport before I am allowed to queue up for yet another booth. This soldier is just checking my passport for the Israeli entry stamp which in my case is on a separate sheet of paper. He says that I can’t enter with a stamp on a sheet of paper without writing on it. Not sure what he met, so I end up going back to the office where the girl writes some chicken scratch and then a smiley face on my loose leaf paper with the Israeli entry stamp. I show my passport yet again before I can queue up and finally getting to the front the guy says it’s ok, takes that loose page and lets me through. Before I leave I ask him what the girl wrote. It reads “it’s okay” he told me.
At the other side there are no ATMs and only one money exchange place where the worker wanders off for 15mintues at a time. There is a big pile of luggage here and I dig through all the suitcases before finding my bag. The Japanese girls I was traveling with took a big longer because they had to fill out a separate form. I changed my money and waited for them on the other side. Finally another hour goes by and they make it through as well. Going through this ordeal took an entire morning and required at least a dozen passport checks and now I am in Israel with no proof of exiting Jordan and no proof of entering Israel on my passport hoping that this is how its suppose to work.
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