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Published: September 16th 2006
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Dead Sea 1
Sign on the way to the dead sea showing we are at sea level. Note the lack of sea at this level. New blog, this time from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. I'm writing this blog from Aqaba, which is Jordan's only port city at the southernmost tip of the country. This is my last stop in Jordan, as I will shortly be leaving Jordan and entering Israel, hopefully. It still remains to be seen what the Israeli border guards will think of my Syrian visa and border stamps, but I'm hopeful they will let me in, although probably not without some sort of search.
But, with regards to Jordan, I've been in the country for about 5 days. As with all the countries I've visited, a very interesting place. Compared to Syria, which I just came from, it is much more westernized. Foreign investment is widespread, and there is not as much as an aversion to being associated with things American. Which makes it a more tourist friendly place. Pepsi is much more widespread than Coke however, which is interesting. Anyway, first stop in Jordan was Amman, which is a very new city as far as the middle east goes, as it is only about a century old. It is though built on the ruins of the old Roman city of
Dead Sea 2
Shore of the Dead sea. The coast line on the other side of the lake is Israel. Philadelphia, so there are some old things to be seen, just not many. As such this was really just a quick stop to the city to get co-ordinated and then move on. Really the only things to see here were the remains of the citadel, and the Roman theatre, but there are vastly more impressive examples of both structures in other cities anyway, so I was eager to get out of the city.
Our first stop was the Dead Sea, the lowest point of dry land on earth at an elevation of negative 390 metres. In all ways this is a screwed up lake. Atmospheric pressure is abnormally high due to it’s depth, making the temperature about 10 degrees hotter than the surrounding area, which is already very hot. Also, the salt content is extremely high, and it is not normal salt (ie sodium chloride), but rather a mix of sodium chloride, magnesium chloride, potassium chloride, and a whole bunch of bromine and other bromide compounds I think. Really quite disgusting when one thinks about it. All of these minerals are supposed to be good for you, however I have my doubts. There is a reason this lake is
Dead Sea 3
Required shot of me floating on top of the Dead Sea called the Dead Sea, and that is because nothing living can survive in there, so I find it suspicious that the mud from the Dead Sea is healthy. But whatever, it was quite fun to float in, the water is extraordinarily buoyant, and it is impossible to sink even if you wanted to. It’s like being a piece of cork. So we stayed there for about half a day, before making the drive down to Wadi Musa, which is the staging area for trips to Petra.
Petra, for those who have not heard of it, is the ancient city carved straight into the stone cliffs in the Jordanian desert, that was used as the filming location in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as the spot where Harrison Ford finds the Holy Grail. By far the most famous building is the Treasury, which is in extraordinarily good condition for being two thousand years old. One misconception is that Petra really only consists of this building, which is quite untrue, as this was a major city along the Silk Road around 1st Century AD, with a population reaching 35,000 people at times. So there are many more buildings than just
Dead Sea 4
Strange mud people emerging from the Sea of the Dead the treasury, some of them also in very good condition. The site is in fact so large that ideally more than one day is required to properly explore the site. This is not normally something I would say about a 2,000 year old city ruin, however Petra is such an incredible place, with so much to see, and such beautiful structures, and mountains, and vistas, and rock formations, that it deserves to be explored in detail. We unfortunately only had one day here, but it was a very full day and we saw just about all of the major structures, etc. The highlights were the Treasury (of course) and the Monastery, which is reached by hiking up a path for about half an hour to the top of one of the nearby mountains, and there is the Monastery up in the middle of nowhere high up in the Jordanian desert mountains. There is a viewpoint even higher up which gives an absolutely spectacular view of the surrounding area. So needless to say, Petra was one of the highlights of my trip. Unquestionably the best ancient ruin I’ve ever seen. So yeah, that was my day there.
That evening we
Petra 1
The siq (canyon) opening up to the Treasury continued driving south to the desert Bedouin camp in the Wadi Rum desert, where we had a night of Bedouin cooked food followed by a night sleeping in the Bedouin camp. It was a little bit tacky, as this was not so much a Bedouin camp as it was a tourist camp run by Bedouins, but still pretty cool. The desert is the same in any event, and it was quite nice to sit out in the desert and look at the stars. In preparation for the event most of us brought alcohol from Amman to drink, my choice being a Jordanian wine entitled 'Wine of the Holy Land', which for whatever reason given my peculiar sense of humor I found quite amusing and proceeded to work the phrase into about every second sentance that I spoke for that evening. I am unsure as to if the other people in my tour group found this amusing or annoying. Probably both. In any event, that was our evening, and the following morning we went out on a one hour camel ride not long after sunrise before it got too hot. My camel's name was Leila, it was a male, and alone
Petra 2
The famous Treasury, although it is currently thought to be a Temple of Worship. among all the camels it was making strange sounds the entire trip for unknown reasons. After that it was a jeep safari through the desert, highlighted by one of the jeeps breaking down in the middle of the desert and the people having to be rescued by the other jeep. It was bound to happen at some point given the age of those jeeps and the stress that gets put on them by the Bedouins who run them at full speed up and down sand dunes with thick sand.
So that was our time in Wadi Rum, after which we headed down to Aqaba, for the end of the tour through Jordan. Aqaba isn't really a very interesting city, but it is very useful as a transit point, as it is located at Jordan's only bit of coastline, wedged in at the northern point of the Gulf of Aqaba, along with Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia. So very crowded real estate. At this point I am preparing to make the border crossing over to Isreal, to the Israeli port city of Eilat, and from there up to Tel Aviv. So that's it for this blog, I will make another
Petra 3
The Royal Tombs. Used I believe as burial structures for important Nabatean people. entry for Israel, probably once I have Jerusalem photos to show everyone.
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rrruss
Russ Pearce
That brings back memories
Great blog! Really brought back a lot of very good memories.