Floating on Another Planet

Somewhere on the walk down to the water, the ground stopped being ground. We had parked next to an abandoned shower on the roadside, the only landmark for miles, and started walking across the flats towards an impossibly blue sea about a kilometre away.

It was our last morning in Jordan, at the end of a long drive. The road down to the Dead Sea runs past military posts and checkpoints, with Israel visible just across the water, and somewhere along the way the GPS got jammed and insisted we were parked at the airport. The first checkpoint was a little unnerving, but the soldiers were friendly the moment they saw we were foreigners. The broken navigation didn’t matter much either, because there was only one road, so we just followed it until the shore looked promising.

The walk started on ordinary dirt and sand. Then the dirt dried and cracked into crusts. Then a dusting of white appeared across it, like frost in the wrong climate. Then the crust thickened into a crunchy layer that was half dirt and half salt, and then the salt took over completely. By the time we got near the shoreline we were stepping around huge white crystals growing straight out of the ground. We smashed a few of the bigger ones as we went, purely because they were enormous, they weren’t going anywhere, and smashing them was deeply satisfying. The beach itself was the strangest part. It wasn’t sand, it was billions of tiny white pebbles crunching underfoot, every one of them salt, all the way to the water.

Naturally, we had a taste. My benchmark is Death Valley, where I once licked the ground and the fine salt tasted so strong it became my perfect ten, and the Dead Sea’s dense crystals scored a seven out of ten Death Valleys. Steffi was genuinely shocked that a beach made entirely of salt barely tasted salty at all.

Then the water. It was an insane blue, clearer than any sea I had ever swum in, and when I waded in it was warm, somewhere between 26 and 28 degrees, more bath than sea. I leaned back the way you would in a pool, expecting my legs to sink. They didn’t. The water pushed back and held me flat on the surface like a mattress. No treading, no kicking, no effort at all. It felt like floating in air, and it gave me butterflies, that little lurch in the stomach when something doesn’t work the way it always has. I’ve been swimming my whole life, in pools and oceans and lakes, and nothing had ever felt like this. I started laughing and couldn’t stop. Steffi’s review, delivered from beside me, was one long WOAAA.

We knew not to push our luck in there. Water that salty is hard on skin, neither of us wanted to find out what a bad reaction looked like an hour from anywhere, and we didn’t fancy dehydrating out there either, so we gave ourselves five, maybe ten minutes each. We wished we could have stayed in for hours.

Steffi went back in for a second float, and her second exit was the strangest sight of the morning. The water dried on her skin and left a fine coating of pure white salt everywhere, arms, legs, shoulders, as if someone had emptied a salt shaker over her from head to toe, or as if she’d been rolling in perfectly white sand. It didn’t sting and it didn’t itch. She just stood there on the salt-pebble beach, white on white, blending into the landscape.

The abandoned shower back at the car was never going to work, so we’d come prepared. We walked the kilometre back across the flats, both of us drying stiff and crusty, and showered next to the car with a two-litre water bottle each, held overhead. It worked perfectly. The salt ran off us and into ground that was already full of it, at the lowest place on earth, next to a car that still thought it was at the airport.