Hi All,
Aqaba is on the red sea or better put on the gulf of aqaba. Our plan was to catch the ferry to Nuweiba in Egypt but Vanessa and I needed to stop and try and shed our colds. Vanessa was weak and on antibiotics. Boy they were expensive in jordan.
We were met by a charming taxi driver who drove us out to bedouin garden village about 10km away from aqaba. It is right near the water and also a storage point for overland trucks for oasis and kumuka. The place was like a tiny resort and we got a room for 20JD, a bit expensive, but it had a TV and 200+ channels of rubbish but felt like home for a bit. The other super feature was access to some fantastic snorkeling. We hired some gear and were swimming around in beautiful warm blue water with coral and bright coloured fish within 20m of the shore. Truly like swimming around in a computer aquarium screen saver. Didn't swim for long as it was a little cool.
day2. Went into town for a look and to grab some food. Caught a ride back out with some guys for 2JD. Nothing for free but it feels pretty safe to do so. Spent the afternoon in the room watching movies and relaxing.
day 3. The ferry. Got our friendly taxi driver to drop us off at the ferry terminal about 2hrs before it was supposed to leave. The place is total chaos and as a foreign tourist very confusing. We went upstairs to buy tickets (US$70 each!) for a 1 hr fast ferry trip, paid our departure tax 5JD each and got a stamp which the lazy person didn't put in our passport then went to immigration upstairs. Then finally figured out by ourselves that there was a bus to catch to the ferry. There was a big cart where luggage was being chucked but there was no way we were putting ours on it. We walked onto the ferry and got told to dump our gear inside and against the way. Worked for us. The ferry is quite nice and we got going without any trouble but felt cheated as it went at slow ferry pace for the trip. There also was the matter of checking into egypt. There was a stream of people going to the front of the boat and eventually we figured out we were supposed to get stamped into egypt there. Went and got our passports held as we didn't have visas! They said we could have them back after paying for visa at the incoming port. We would be met by the tourist police. Fine.
We got to port. There was a long delay and a scramble of people getting off the ferry. We found our bags without a problem and after a bit of asking found out where to pay for our visas and got our passports back. Immigration was a massive scrum with egyptians trying to press tonnes and tonnes of gear through a single xray machine. We just walked past them, being ignorant tourists, queue jumped, and squeezed our bags through the xray machine with a bit of help from the immigration officers.
I was really cranky on the ship and also going through customs. Think that I wasn't ready to leave aqaba but didn't realise it.
Bye.
David & Vanessa
