Jordan: Why’s It So Hot Right Now? (Hint: It’s Not Just the Desert.)

You may or may not have noticed, but lately Jordan (the country) is popping up in the media a lot, from Queen Rania on the cover of Condé Nast Traveler and in Time to a #1 nod in the Sherman’s Travel list of top-10 luxury camping destinations. Perhaps this has led you to think, “Jordan, the next great tourist destination — really?” As a female colleague put it when I mentioned I recently visited the country: “Jordan is really hot right now.“

It should be. These days, Jordan’s tourism board spends a crapload of cash to bring over journalists from other countries and show them around — and those journalists are typically going home and writing about the country in a positive light. In addition to its massive PR blitz, the country is offering newly great incentives for developers, attracting both middle-of-the-road Hiltons and high-end brands like Kempinski and Six Senses. Dozens of new resorts are expected to be appear in the next five years.

It’s all part of a multi-million-dollar effort to establish tourism as one of the engines of Jordan’s economy. King Abdullah II even made a video with everyone’s favorite travel hack Peter Greenberg in which the monarch highlights all the exciting adventures one can have in his country.

Also part of the effort? I have no proof of this, but I’m pretty sure the government has instructed its citizens to greet all tourists with: “Welcome to Jordan!” I heard the phrase from every person I passed on the street, and while some seemed genuinely hospitable, others reminded me of pissed-off shop girls required to say “have a nice day.”

Which is not to say that now isn’t the time to go to Jordan — especially if you’ve ever wanted to see the ancient city of Petra, float in the Dead Sea, or camp under the stars in the magical Wadi Rum desert.  Currently, Jordan’s undergoing a massive shift — and just won’t be the same in two years. I’m not saying we’ll have another Dubai on our hands, but because it’s a fascinating hotbed of political and social change, Jordan’s a spectacle at the moment.

Take, for example, the Jordanian government’s recently launched multi-million-dollar ecotourism effort, establishing conservation areas and eco-friendly lodges throughout the country. If you’re thinking that these two strategies — massive development and green travel — contradict each other, you’re right. But here’s another random move: King Abdullah has signed on to the “Red Sea-Dead Sea” deal, a plan to pipe water from the Red Sea into the Dead Sea to stave off the salty one’s evaporation. The problem is that the Dead Sea’s water levels are so low because new developments are highjacking its natural water supply. Furthermore, the water from the Red Sea is regular-old ocean water, and it’s anyone’s guess how it will mix with the Dead Sea’s super-saline water — and how that will affect the ecosystem, to say nothing of the water’s famed healing powers and natural ability to keep us afloat.

But the move to become a tourist Mecca is not just bringing in more foreigners and affecting natural resources. It’s influencing a change in the culture. In the lost city of Petra, for example — the ancient city of the Nabataeans, carved into desert sandstone to keep it hidden from ancient Roman attackers — officials have formed a U.S.-style parks department to make trails and train new park rangers. It’s a long process, so there’s still a good year or two left to experience the city in a state closer to ancient times (as it was portrayed in, say, that historical document Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), and to enjoy the wit and magnetism of the Bedouins who still hang out there, even if they were technically moved from their Petra caves to government-funded apartment blocks to make way for tourists a decade ago.

But even the desert is becoming more civilized — tacky tourist camps, luxury tent sites. Plus, the country’s new resorts don’t just attract tourists but new immigrants looking for jobs.

“Most Jordanians consider it dishonorable to work in a service position, especially women,” a general manager of one of the Dead Sea resorts told me. “I don’t actually know how we’re going to deal with getting good labor once all these new resorts open — we already have a problem keeping people, and by law we can’t have more than 10 percent of our employees be non-Jordanian. So it’s a real issue. Even a lot of the Jordanians on staff could leave at any time; some of them are working here secretly, and if their families find out, they would probably have to quit.”

The majority of immigrant workers in Jordan are Egyptian, however, and most of them live in the country’s largest city, Amman. “The Egyptians here are like the Mexican immigrants in the U.S.,” explained my guide, entirely unconcerned with political correctness. “They’ll take the jobs no one else wants and they’ll work for less. People complain about them, but no one wants those jobs so it’s sort of the only way the country can continue to develop.”

Palestinians make up the other large and often discounted segment of Jordan’s population, and they’re in an unusual predicament too (surprise). “He’s not a real Jordanian; he’s Palestinian.” That’s a “joke” I heard lobbed at my Palestine-born, Jordan-raised guide on more than one occasion during my trip. “Jordan has more Palestinians than Palestine, but they keep it on the down low,” he told me. “They don’t really want everyone else knowing that they accept so many Palestinian refugees, for political and diplomatic reasons.”

In addition to Palestinians and Egyptians, Jordan has one of the highest populations of Christians in the Middle East, and many Muslim children (my guide included) attend Christian schools and vice versa. It’s not too much of a problem for most people, if you can believe them. “When it comes time for religion class we just split up, it was never a big deal,” my guide said.

Another result of Jordan opening up to the rest of the world has been a slow but steady feminist revolution, spurred on in large part by the country’s queen, who became a YouTube sensation with her 2008 speeches about women in the Arab world. Many women now dress in Western styles, and there are a larger number of Muslim women than you might expect who opt not to wear the hejab and modest dress of their sisters. It’s a fascinating shift to witness: Poolside at the country’s new mega-resorts you’ll spot women in full-on birkas next to those in skimpy bikinis — both Jordanian. The government’s cabinet currently has two female cabinet ministers (in the departments of tourism and social development!), seven female members sit in the country’s Parliament, and Jordan posts high numbers of women in a variety of professional occupations.

Perhaps the greatest reason to visit Jordan now, however, is the impact these changes are having on the specific culture of the Bedouins, now moving from their nomadic lifestyle to a somewhat less-transitory one. This is more than just “Americanization” (in fact, most Jordan visitors tend to be from Europe or, somewhat surprisingly, Brazil). Despite adherence to traditional values, many of today’s Bedouins have cell phones (shocker), and many of the young ones that I met pair Western indie-rocker clothes with traditional eyeliner, oversize jewelry, and unruly hairdos. In other words, expect to see “Bedouin-chic” on a runway near you soon. As a Bedouin in a Metallica t-shirt and skinny black jeans shot back at me over a drink one night, simultaneously texting with a Petra friend: “You Americans talk about freedom, but we Bedouins are the ones who are truly free: We have no ties to jobs, things, cities — we have the desert, we have our caves, our camels, our people. Our souls are free.”

Indeed, but for how much longer?