Dead Sea and Mt Nebo

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Swimming in the Dead Sea.

This morning after a breakfast of pancakes we drove north through Jordon to the Dead Sea. As much as I had read about the salinity nothing can prepare you for the actual experience. The Dead Sea levels have been dropping for a number of years and I read that there is a proposal to pipe water from the Red Sea. We parked about 15M above sea level. That is the Dead Sea level which is 400M below true sea level. We had to walk over 100M to commence our swim. There is so much salt along the shore and sticky black mud that the walk was tricky. The sea bed is like a short spiky coral and very sharp. It was really weird floating ½ out of the water and being able to lie on your back and read a book. Swimming was quite difficult with backstroke being the preferred method.
Quite a few of the group covered themselves in black mud as you can see from a couple of the photos. From the Dead Sea we drove a short distance to a Canyon Reserve where we were able to swim in free running water for 1JD - which is $1.40US. The Canyon is like a monster slot canyon similar to what we saw in Arizona.

Mt Nebo
This brought up to about 2pm and we continued to Mt Nebo which is 800M above true sea level so a climb of 1200M from the Dead Sea. That is where our camp is tonight. Most of us are sleeping on mats out in the open again. It was windy and lots of haze and as the sun set we were able to see the lights of towns in Jordan and Israel.
From Mt Nebo we drove to Aman which is arguably the most modern of Jordon’s cities. It was time for another supermarket visit and a coffee. Today would be a long day as we passed first through Jordan departures and then Syrian Immigration control points. The highlight of the day was the duty free shop at the Jordanian border. It was amusing to watch dozens of Taxis hiding cartons of cigarettes under the seats and in the wheel arches behind the front bumpers. There was an enormous bin of empty boxes that was so obvious. I imagine the Syrian border guards are aware of this and choose to look the other way. At the Syrian border there were over 100 cars pushed into a yard, all had flat tyres. We were told that they we impounded from people trying to smuggle goods into or out of Syria.

The border crossing was tedious and in all our passports was looked at 8 times over a 4 hour period. We arrived at our campsite around 8pm and although it was very basic we had 8 shower rooms with lots of hot water, functioning and clean toilets and a camp fridge to chill our duty free beer.

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Photos

I am so Lucky said John
John gets to help Simone with her mud covering.

Head Rinse
Luke and Sean show us how to effectively wash hair