Sawa Egypt to Madaba Jordan

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16 April 2010

After two days at Petra we left early morning to head to Madaba. We had a huge day of sightseeing and driving which included Kerak Castle, swimming in the Dead Sea and finally Mt Nebo.

Kerak Castle has been built over previous structures by crusaders from the 2nd Crusade around 1100 to 1200AD. You can still walk through some of the underground passage ways and look down from the impressive stone castle walls. Next stop after couple of hours drive the Dead Sea. It is 400m below sea level, about as low as you can go. Pretty cool experience, not all as pleasurable as you would think. After about 15minutes in the water, you get the feeling you are actually swimming in petrol. However the floating experience is fun. The Dead Sea is extremely salty and this causes extreme buoyancy. Those with larger bums tend to flip over. This did not happen to me - just for the record. We then went onto Mt Nebo. There is a church here built around 300AD with an amazing mosaic floor, which we only saw a small part of as the church is under renovation. This is supposedly the site where Moses saw the Promised Land and he then supposedly died shortly after but his tomb has never been found.

We had a lovely boutique hotel in Madaba with internet in our rooms - big bonus. The girls were in a room right opposite us so we had a lot of fun running across the corridor from room to room in various states of undress and dress ups. Madaba is a smallish town, approximately 30kms outside of Amman, the capital of Jordan. On our free day, we headed off to see Jerash, which are amazing Roman ruins. It contains a spectacular colonnade, complete with roman chariot wheel ruts; two magnificent theatres and lots of columns and structures still very much intact. We also saw lots of wild red poppies growing in amongst the ruins which made for some great photos. We also went to the Amman citadel, where the museum houses some of the Dead Sea scrolls. This was amazing to see these and also in the museum was the oldest human figurines, about 8000 years old. On the way back to the hotel, our driver for the day, Ali, asked if we would like to see his house and stop for tea at his home. Of course, we were all up for this. It was really lovely, his wife made us tea and his two sons, both very shy, tried to make conversation.

The next day left Madaba in Jordan for the Syrian border and onto Damascus. Our mode of transport was international taxi and then on the outskirts of Damascus we changed into local taxis. The border crossing was a long series of checks and re-checks. We found Damascus a wonderful city. It is supposedly the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world and spent most of our time in the old area and the Grand Souk, which seemed almost a kilometre long and full of people so you could hardly move. Tim really enjoyed his day shopping with us girls. We visited a couple of mosques which involved us girls dressing up in monk like (even a bit Harry Potter style) outfits. We were pretty surprised to be let into this place and to witness the intensity of devotion we saw in there. The Mosque houses the remains of John the Baptist and also the grandson of Mohammed, who was killed in battle. We saw people crying and literally throwing themselves at the tomb. It was quite an experience to be in amongst the scrum of pilgrims.

In the Grand Souk we fought long and hard in the Bakdash ice cream shop for a vanilla and pistachio cone (Rachel - chocolate) which is an institution in Damascus.

We sadly left Damascus this morning after a last minute sprint to the Grand Souk again, for a silver charm and painting for Rachel. Tonight we are in Palmyra. We arrived by local bus (3 hours journey). We were surprised to see road signs with Palmyra straight ahead and Iraq to the right. We are only about 200kms from the border. Tomorrow we are looking at the Roman ruins here in Palmyra and they look pretty impressive.

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Comments

[Whoo Who]

Swimming like ducks
Tim Must have been pretty quick with the camera to get the Dead sea shot. Head down bottom up. You could have just gone to Mt Nebo in Brisbane. It all sounding like good fun. Happy travels Love The Whos