Jordan!!

Jordan

Shortly after writing my last blog I met AJ and Tom, an American and an Aussie who had met each other in Istanbul and had been traveling together for the last 2 weeks through Turkey and Syria. Full of the joys of Damascus we all bundled onto a bus to Amman which was refreshingly uneventful if typically lackadaisical in it's progress. In Amman we checked into a pretty standard hostel and were ecstatic to find that we were the only three guests in a five bed dorm. That was until 2.30 in the morning when two guests who had apparently no understanding of hostel etiquette arrived. The debacle began with a sequence of door openings and closings, the switching on and off of our catastrophically bright light and a clearly un-hushed drunken conversation in an unrecognizable language by our new roommates. I was too confuse to know what to say. So I just lay there hoping for it to end. But once the louder of the two started playing some sort of football match on his phone (which is probably the only phone I've ever seen with a subwoofer and tweakers) AJ sat up in bed and cried "JESUS CHRIST!!!" startling the footy fan into ceasing his infernal racket. Sadly at 6am the sequence of events was repeated in reverse (barring the football broadcast) as the guests got ready for their breakfast. I decided to see the whole experience as a hilarious anecdote to distract myself from the fact it lead to me getting just 4 hours sleep and we giggled about the bizarre audacity of the pair for the rest of our time together.

The next day we got in a taxi which was ours for the day to see all the main sights around Amman. First was Madaba which was, sadly, a ghost town due to the Eid festival, where some ancient but frankly uninspiring mosaics are confined within a Greek orthodox church. Before being allowed to view the mosaics we watch the end of a service which was, for me, a far more interesting experience than the mosaics themselves.

From Madaba we ventured up Mt Nebo from where Moses saw the promised land and promptly popped his clogs. Again, the exhibition was closed and the view foggy but none the less it was ticked off the list! I was, however, by this point beginning to feel a little bit like my trip to Jordan was cursed with bad luck and this feeling is still with me as I write this blog as subsequent events will help to explain.

After Nebo I instructed the driver to search out Wadi Musa, or, the spring which was reported to have begun when Moses struck a rock and water gushed forth. Expecting fanfare and vast Moses related memorabilia we were shocked to find that Wadi Musa was deserted with the only signs of life being the piles and piles of rubbish which had been dumped there. However, the spring was really quite special. Because of it's location, in the middle of the desert, it was clear why people believed this to be Moses' spring. Water did indeed gush from a rock into a pleasant stream down into the valley below. I decided that this would be a great place to put a little Moses themed restaurant by the spring with a Moses bus to feed it with tourists and Moses themed salt and pepper shakers on sale at an appropriately placed Moses mall. Maybe even a Moses themed "parting of the red sea" water park or maybe that's going a bit far. Joking aside I couldn't help but feel that Jordan was missing something by not making more of this attractive and historically important sight. The next religious point that we visited was given a far more cacophonous fanfare.

The Baptism site of Jesus is located at the end of a 5k drive by jeep and a 2k walk thereafter and is nearly 400 meters below sea level. The sight itself is uninspiring as most of the water has dried up but a vast explanation as to why this place has become accepted by historians over the last 2000 years as being the exact position of an event so crucial in the development of the world's largest religion made it worth the significant effort it took to get there. The guide was extremely informative and happy to answer all questions and the trip was generally run with a level of efficiency uncharacteristic of these parts. Furthermore, the river Jordan, which was still flowing, was extremely beautiful and allowed me an opportunity to cleanse myself and see another country, which my wish to return to Syria forbids me from entering, only meters away. One awkward moment occurred when, standing on the river Jordan, an American tourist asked "So that's Israel over there right?" To which the guide replied, "NO! PALESTINE", refusing to even say the naughty I word at any point during his talk.

Finally, we headed towards the Dead Sea and the "public beach" from where we hoped to enter the water. I'm not sure what is "public" about a beach that charges 7JD (roughly 7 British pounds) to get in but it was, I guess, a little more public than the 12JD one that our commission seeking taxi driver wanted to take us to.

Despite feeling slightly aggrieved by the whole process we decided to enjoy the experience and what an experience it was!! I guess everyone knows what happens in the dead sea - it's so full of salt that you physically cannot sink in it - and trying to explain the sensational feeling that such a physical phenomenon gives is utterly pointless but it was certainly something that is worth doing if you ever get the chance! Sadly my Jordanian bad luck struck again as I cut up my foot on a salt-rock and had to go to first aid to stop a suprisingly perpetual stream of blood. Then, in the excitement of cutting my foot, I forgot to properly wash off the salt which lead to a burning sensation on my legs and bum much akin to how one would feel if someone had taken the time to give me a chili flavored massage of those areas. This lasted until I got back to the hostel bloody and burning, where I jumped in a shower!!

All in all the day was a mixed bag. Feeling like we were being ripped off every step of the way and the bad luck of it being a public holiday and a day of limited visibility in the region put a damper on things but all the sights were, in their own way, worth doing!!

The next day we decided to head to Petra but an inexplicably poor public transport system meant we didn't get there in time to see anything before sunset so we just chilled at the hostel in neighboring Wadi Musa (trying our best to avoid the exceedingly creepy owner and his unrelenting dishonesty) with 1 and a half chickens with bread that we had bought from a shop determined to convince us that we should be paying 50% government tax on top of the list price. It became very quickly clear that it was the sole intention of the people of this town to lie their way into fleecing all visitors of their JD's - a far cry from the Jordanian hospitality I had heard about. I nearly lost it the following day when a shopkeeper tried to give me 50p change from a fiver for a 50p packet of busiest - that was simply attempted theft playing on the assumption that I was some kind of idiot.

The Petra ticketing system reflects Wadi Musa's thievery since student prices have been abolished with entrance for 1 day costing 21JDs. None the less, we took the hit and Petra was as expected - truly mind blowing. For those unfamiliar with Petra, it is an Nabatean city of ruins placed between a number of high cliffs and rocks which, due to it's sheltered position, has in large part survived the battering of time. One of it's most famous feature is its entrance through a narrow canyon which takes 20 minutes to navigate before you emerge infront of a wonderful building sculpted into the rock which has become known as the treasury. Pictures of this and the other sights of Petra will say far more than my words. Other highlights included the Monastery (reached after a climb of 25 minutes which convinced me I need to excersize more when I'm home), an unnamed high point at which the picture of me overlooking the town was taken and the place of high sacrifice from where we watched the sunset.

It was at the place of high sacrifice that my second most coincidental moment of the trip took place. There I was, standing, admiring the view, when a man came up to me and said "you're not Gavin by any chance are you?" Slightly confused I said "yes" and he went on to explain he was a couchsurfer I had emailed who hadn't been able to host due to having other guests and I ended up spending the next two days with him and his guests travelling to and through Wadi Rum!

The next morning I said goodbye to Tom and AJ before heading off with Ryan, Keith and Susan - all Americans teaching English in the Middle East - to the town of Rum where we met our Bedouin guide and set out to explore the wonderment that is Wadi Rum national park. Wadi Rum is a series of breathtaking sheer rock faces that flank a dried up river system which is now technically a desert. Though, the word desert is misleading as sand dunes are the exception rather than the rule here with a colour system that looks more like the surface of Mars than the continuous yellows of the Sahara. Highlights included scaling an enormous dune and bounding back down it, climbing atop a natural rock bridge (pictures hopefully to follow when I get them off Susan - my camera was out of battery after Petra and in a schoolboy error I left the spare in the other car) and spending the night in a Bedouin tent enjoying a really rather exceptional feast that seemed to appear from nowhere. Annoyingly, it was a full moon (my luck again!!) so there were very few stars to be seen - one of the highlights of my trip to the Sahara last time I entered the desert but the moon did provide a eerie but beautiful night scape with the park's largest peak illuminated in the near distance to emphasise it's magnificence.

After leaving the Americans this morning I hitched a ride into Aqaba where I hoped to get a ferry across to Egypt. I decided to dot his as despite the incredible highlights discussed above, I have begun to feel rather fed up with Jordan. The constant fleecing and dishonestly of the people has really got me down. After being treated - generally - so well in Syria I'm just not used to being seen as a floating dollar sign and it frankly makes me sad that I am now suspicious of every "hello" I receive rather than grateful of it as I was in Syria! Infact, I think I'm yet to meet - barring a few boys on the beach today - a Jordanian who was honestly out to help me or even talk to me with no hidden agenda. I have, on several occasions, rued my decision to skip Palmyra and some other sights that I missed in Syria so as to set off earlier to Jordan.

None the less, I remain philosophical about the whole affair as, had I not have set off when I did I would never have been AJ and Tom or the Americans who made getting continually ripped off a much more bearable affair! Tom in particular had a splendid bitter and cynical sense of humour which culminated in a hilarious rant about how if Petra wasn't worth the 21 JDs he'd never do anything but surf ever again claiming that all famous sights were overrated including the Great Wall of China - as - "why wouldn't a country with that many people get a big wall!!?" I don't think I've laughed as much over 3 days in years as I did at Tom!

Anyway, back to Aqaba. I didn't get the ferry because, inexplicably, there is no cash machine in the port and, not knowing what the ferry company felt like charging today I didn't bring enough cash with me. So I decided to spend the night in Aqaba and did the only thing there is to do here which is snorkle. Sadly, the reef here has, I'm sure, seen better days as I saw just a limited number of fish darting in and out of grey corals. Perhaps there were better spots than where I was but I wasn't in the head space to go and find them and I eventually retired slightly underwhelmed by the whole experience.

So, tomorrow, I will try once again to get the extortion ferry across to Nuweiba in Egypt from where I will head down to Dahab where I will spend the next week or so chilling out and attempting to become the only person in my family with a tan at Christmas!! I feel a bit like I've misjudged things ending up with 9 days to just hang in Sinai with very little planned and I am under the impression that Jordan has SO much more to offer. It is a country full of natural beauty and fascinating historical sights, but I simply have no wish to put myself through the stresses of going about my business as a traveler in a country that appears to be entirely unfriendly to backpackers. I do, however, want to return one day to go unguided into Wadi Rum to hang out for a number of days. My one night in the desert seemed to be tantalizingly short.

Ahhhhh, longest blog ever over!! Again, I apologise that you've had nothing for so long and now get two at once but Internet has been inaccessible for much of the last week so despite writing my blogs chronologically I've not been able to get them on the web.

Thanks for keeping up with the blog. All comments and messages are appreciated!
Gavin

---

---

---