Don't look down.

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We had quite an interesting day following Petra. We head north and stopped first at the ruins of an old Crusader castle called Shobak, built high up on a hilltop, one of several in the Jordanian countryside. The road leading up to it was very steep, single lane with a sheer drop 1 foot off the edge of the road. Amazing views from the top though, of course! The knights used these views to effect, as it's positioned in one of the three main routes running north-south through Jordan, and it allowed them to see anyone moving through the corridor and thus control trade routes. The castle was once captured by Saladin after a 2 year siege.

Following some more twisty turny narrow mountainside roads, we proceeded to a little village on the edge of a conservation area, where we were scheduled to meet a guide for a tour through the village, but it seems he had better things to do and never showed up. Probably fell off a cliff I'd guess... rails are your friend.

Back in the bus and onwards and upwards... next stop was the highlight, a church in a small town called Madaba that was host to the Madaba Map. This is a fantastic mosaic, created about 600AD, that once covered about 95sq meters, consisting of several million tile pieces. It's a religious map, as opposed to a geographical or political map, and lists over 100 places named in the assorted bibles, including a large centerpiece of Jeruselem, the Nile (where moses came from), Jericho, Petra, Arimathea, Bethelem, the Dead Sea, the Sinai. I got a particular thrill out of seeing Mt Sinai and even St Katherine's monestary, which I'd only visited a few days earlier. All the place names were in Greek, but recognisable with the help of our trusty guide, Sami.

Following that we had a brief stop at mosaic workshop, where they create mosaic tiled tables, etc. The larger tables take one person about 4 months to make. They hire a lot of disabled/disadvantaged workers and the government provides free shipping and insurance for any item with the name 'Jordan' on it, but even that wasn't enough to sway me to pay the $US1800 they were asking per table!

On the road out of Madaba we were lucky enough to see a rare flower, the national flower of Jordan, so we piled off the bus for some photos. I can't remember what kind of flower it is (some kind of tulipy thing, the bulb about 6-8cm tall) but it was unusual in that it's coloured black. I thought I'd read somewhere a long time ago that there were no black flowers, so I found it interesting. I'll try to remember to upload a photo. Sami found it hilarious when I pointed to a nearby black plastic bag entangled in the grass as 'rather a large one'.

Leaving Madaba we headed into Amman, the capital of Jordan, which... well, really wasn't much to write about. So I won't.

-- Leigh

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