Hi All,
We headed off down the Kings highway reaching our first stop Madaba fairly quickily. This place is famous for it's mosaics and in particular the mosaic with a map of palestine and lower egypt which was uncovered in st georges chuch in 1897. We didn't go to mt nebo as the visibility wasn't good. Jamal started proposing trip options to our fellow passengers and didn't let up for the whole trip. They were too polite to tell him to shut up. I would have. He left us alone - lucky for him.
The road runs along some spectacular desert hills and crosses some deep gorges along the way. There is nothing much along the way. Just plently of desert and rocks and crusader castles. Yes. The cruisaders clearly had rocks in their heads to be hanging around in these areas. We visited Kerak which is about 50km from the spectacular wadi al-mujib. There are cruisader forts all the way from aqaba to turkey. The lonely planet has an interesting story of the castle. Saladin took control of the fort after the cruisaders had been booted out and took pleasure in throwing his enemies off the wall of the castle into the valley 450m below. He put wooden boxes around their heads so that they wouldn't pass out on the way down. Nice guy. How considerate!
We continued along the kings highway and it got a bit tedious with the same scenery along the way. Entered a region where caves ahad been carved out of hills and came to another cruisader fort called shobak but it was pretty run down. It was built by baldwin I in 1115.
This wasn't too far from Petra which is an amazing well hidden ancient city in some extraordinary mountains. The new city is not well hidden nor extaordinary. Jamal our driver was trying to get us to take accomodation at some expensive places but we just wanted simple packpacker and settled on a nice looking place called the peace way hotel. It was nice enough apart from one problem - no hot water - and no matter how many times I asked they just couldn't managed to get it going over 3 days. The bed was confortable and it was cheap so that was nice enough. Jamal also took us for a late afternoon tour down to the local bedouin community. bedouins are the nomadic people of the area who were living in the historic section of petra before being booted out for tourism.
day 2. Petra. We were up bright and early for our 7am breakfast. Only all the lights were off and had to look around to find the manager and get him up for breakfast. Eventually got our breakfast then asked about the ride that he had arranged. Hmmm. He took us down to the local roundabout and stopped a car, paid the driver, we piled in and got dropped at petra. When in petra do as the ...? Vanessa and I bought 3 day passes and they were expensive but the cost of 2 x one day passes was worse. Think it was about 23JD for one day and 31 for 3 days.
It is a fairly long walk to petra through some amazing cayons that are only about 2m wide in places. We saw a long stream of donkeys and camels heading along the way and by midday there were an amazing amount of them waiting for tourists. Petra taxis we called them. Despite the ridiculous amount of animals and bedoiuns and children trying to sell crap jewellery it was really exciting. The treasury is the first building that one sees when the canyon opens up and it is big. There is plenty more along the way and it opens up into a valley. Petra was also a roman town and their are plenty of ruins to explore and if you are keen, like us, climb up to another cruisader castle that is well hidden.
Vanessa was quite sick on the first day having picked up the head cold that I had in amman. Still she struggled along and we even walked up to the temple on the top of the hill in petra. Saw some poor tortured donkeys along the way carrying fat american tourists. They should have carried the donkeys on the way back down. The place is overrun with package tour people by midday.
By the end of the day Vanessa barely had enough energy to get out of petra and we caught a cab up the hill to the accomodation and of course no hot water.
day 3. Back to petra. This time we walked down a creek bed heading to what we thought would be the tomb of the roman ruler for the region. Instead we ended the most amazing canyon that we had ever seen. It was no wider than 50cm in places and 20m tall! Clearly it was a death trap if there was any water around so we hurried along which was a bit of a shame. It exited to a large valley which held the tomb and it connected back with the old petra ruins. That was enough for Vanessa and we slowly wandered back to the hotel and no hot water, booked a bus to Wadi Rum, ordered some hamburgers from next door and got ready to leave.
Bye.
David & Vanessa
