At the gates of the Promised Land.

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I’ve made arrangements to be in Jerusalem by Friday afternoon, but like a Facts of Life reunion, it’s a plan that looks far better on paper once it’s whirred into grim, regrettable motion. On Friday morning, having lazily worked my way through some old emails and a Nescafe, I get to Abdali Station just in time for a taxi driver to look at his watch, shake his head, and explain that the King Hussein Bridge border crossing into Jerusalem closes at noon for the shabat. It’s a perilously stupid start to my Israeli odyssey, one that - if you’ve come to know me by now - is bound to take a few more turns for the moronic before all’s said and done.

I check back into the Palace Hotel, with a few light-hearted barbs for the receptionist who - let’s be honest here - might’ve had certain border information at his fingertips to ward off these sorts of mishaps. Then I spend a hot, hazy afternoon catching up on emails and backing up five months’ worth of photos onto CDs - the glamorous side of travel writing that never quite makes it to the front page.

That night, heading back to my old haunts in the upscale suburb of Abdoun, my unexpected detour takes a turn for the better: instead of spending a quiet Friday night ringing in the shabat in Jerusalem, I’ve managed to catch Amman in full swing as it celebrates Jordan’s independence day. There are fireworks and street parties and flags flapping from the windows of passing cars. Groups of young boys dance in the backs of flat-bed trucks; old women pump their fleshy arms and rock from side to side, their bosoms swaying like low-hanging fruit in the wind. It’s all eerily reminiscent of the scene in Damascus just a few days ago, when the Syrians were taking to the streets nightly in anticipation of President Assad’s jubilant re-election. In fact, if there’s a difference in how these two very different parties unfold - one celebrating independence, the other almost the exact opposite - it’s that the Syrians seemed to be having slightly more fun.

In the morning, still dewy and flushed from the sight of so many perky young bosoms quivering in celebration, I don’t manage to leave the hotel until a quarter-past eleven. It’s just as my taxi is pulling up to the border that I watch the last bus across the King Hussein Bridge barreling into the hazy mid-day light. With a startling flourish of stupidity, I’ve missed the border crossing for the second day in a row.

Let’s not speculate for too long on whether some childhood trauma or over-weaning mother is the root cause here. In Jordan - a first-rate country, if ever there was one - no small amount of idiocy can’t be readily resolved with an open wallet. Twenty dinar later, I’m in a taxi bound for the Sheikh Hussein Bridge to the north, a border that’s open until 8pm daily, shabat be damned. We drive through long stretches of browning, sun-baked farmland and leafy palmeriaes. The trees are blossoming, whorls of orange and purple and pink against the rust-colored hills. On the side of the road, Bedouin men are grazing their sheep and goat along rocky patches of grass; they sit on blankets in the shade, tearing loaves of bread, surrounded by packs of barefoot children. We pass rough nomadic camps, past tents made from plastic tarps and palm thatches staked into the hard brown earth. There are squat cinderblock homes with corrugated-tin roofs held down by stones. The laundry is draped across a barbed-wire fence.

We pass through dusty towns with fruit stands and butcher’s shops lining the avenue, and auto body shops - those ubiquitous Middle Eastern standards - with their hub caps and mufflers and greasy engines sprawled out on the sidewalk. Women are sitting in the shade outside of banks and restaurants, nursing their tightly swaddled infants. Two young boys are reclined on a rug on the side of the road, selling watermelons under a goat-skin canopy.

For the second time today, I get to the border just in time to see a bus puttering into the distance. Oh Israel, you’re becoming a real pain in my ass! I clear customs and buy a bottle of water and sit in the shade of the station, fanning myself and staring into the brown desert heat. It’s an hour before I load my bags onto the next bus; a Jordanian official comes on-board and checks our passports, warily looking from our photos to our faces and back. The air condition is roaring like a frosty furnace; the engine thrums to life. Finally we pull away from Jordan, toward the sun-baked hills across the border.

The drive lasts just over three minutes. When we come to a stop in front of a bright, flapping Israeli flag, I press my face to the window and look back to the Jordanian border, across a bridge that’s roughly the size of a small suburban driveway. I can almost see the spot where I spent the past hour with grim forbearance, fully unaware that I could’ve trudged my way into the Promised Land faster than you can say Fiddler on the Roof. We’re idling while a young girl circles with a mirror attached to the end of a long pole, checking beneath the bus for God-only-knows. She has dark, wavy hair and rosy cheeks and a trim little waist that seems to suggest the plucky spirit of youth, and just how she got picked for bomb patrol is, I’m sure, a topic of great interest if you happen to bump into her around the water cooler.

When she’s finished we creep through another checkpoint and come to a stop outside of border control. Young, tanned guys in sunglasses and white polo shirts are watching us from a guarded distance, muttering into little black radios on their shoulders. A sign says “Welcome to Israel” in bold blue letters - an interpretation of the word “welcome,” I’ll soon discover, that must’ve lost something in translation from the Hebrew.

To enter the most heavily fortified country on the planet takes the patience of the saints and more than a splash of good humor. We’re funneled toward baggage screening while a few guards circle and occasionally pluck someone from the crowd. They inspect our bags with great deliberation; more than one suitcase that’s disappeared down the conveyor belt suddenly reappears, gets rearranged and poked at, then disappears once more. When it’s my turn they’re full of questions: about my business in Lebanon, and my friends in Syria, and, inscrutably, the Greek grandfather who’d died in a small mountain village before I was even born. They have a regular riot with the backpack that’s taken me a half-hour to stuff, carefully pulling out every last t-shirt and dirty pair of socks. By the time they’re through it looks like a swap meet’s broken out on the floor of the arrivals hall, and if you’d come up to me at just that moment with a stack of Motown 45s, there’s a fair chance you could’ve walked off with a snazzy pair of linen pants.

As I’m repacking my things a friendly young guard shakes his head and says, “That was the easy part.” Indeed. It’s the next three hours that are a regular big top of inanity, while security runs a background check that suggests the intelligence equivalent of a full-body cavity search. I meet a pair of Americans who’d been hoping to visit Jerusalem on a day-trip from Amman. They’d left the hotel six hours ago, and when one rather pointedly notes, “My father’s been dead for forty years; why do you need his name?” it’s safe to say their good humor’s reaching a calamitous, twelve-car-pile-up type of end.

In spite of it all, I can’t help but warm to these young guards. They’re in their teens and twenties, their pants rumpled and ill-fitting, their shirts untucked. On their dark-green, military-issue satchels they’ve drawn hearts in blue and black ink, or clipped little teddy bear keychains. When they’re not grilling dowdy old Arab grandmothers they’re playfully wrestling and plaiting each other’s hair. Gathered around the baggage scanner, their posture enough to shame any self-respecting Jewish mother, they look like college roommates scrutinizing the latest in celebrity porn. In fact, try as I might, I can’t quite shake the feeling that they seem less a steel trap of border control than a party patrol for Q104 FM.

“Who were you visiting in Lebanon?” they might ask. “And a free t-shirt to the first caller who can guess the size of Ben Gurion’s jock strap!”

They’re chatty and cheery as I finally gather my passport and break for the door. Interminable waits are far less taxing, their manner suggests, when you’re actually getting paid for the privilege. One of the guards even offers the hopes that we might cross paths in South America next year, though the last guy I want to meet on the other side of the world is one who’s spent twenty minutes rooting through my balled-up undies.

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