Swimming through history: From the Jordan River to the Dead Sea

IT FELT like I was inside an oven when I waded into the Jordan River — the same river where John the Baptist once immersed Jesus.

- By Norman P. Aquino Editor

The water at Qasr al-Yahud — one of two tourist sites in the western section of the river where Jesus was supposed to have been baptized — wasn’t postcard-blue; it was brown, murky, and less inviting than symbolic. Still, I dove in. Not because of faith or ritual, but just to be able to say I had done it.

Less than a minute of swimming in the water, I suddenly hear our tour guide shout: “Not there, come back here!” I swam back to the edge, and my companions teased me about trying to breach the border with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. “Were they seriously concerned that Jordanian guards would shoot me?” I thought.

“This place was full of tourists before the war,” Or Rochlin, our tour guide from Tel Aviv, tells us. “I hope the war will end soon so people can go back to their lives.” Normally, the site teems with tour buses and pilgrims in white robes, their baptisms captured on smartphones and cameras. But this time, the only group in the souvenir shop was ours, made up of more than a dozen journalists from the Philippines.

The shelves at the souvenir shop sagged with trinkets no one was buying: olive-wood crosses, bottled “Jordan River water,” ref magnets stamped with “Jerusalem” and an image of the Last Supper. The war in Gaza and tensions with Iran and Yemen have scared off foreign tourists. Silence hung over the riverside, broken only by our laughter as we compared the heat index to Manila.

From the river, our bus took us south to the lowest point on earth: the Dead Sea. The salt content of the lake is so high it makes swimming impossible; the body simply bobs like a cork. I leaned back, sat in the water, and floated without effort. The sensation is both comical and surreal. But beauty has its limits. Accidentally rubbing my eyes with wet hands left them stinging for minutes. The Dead Sea is no spa pool; it is nature in its harshest form.