Travel from Aleppo to Madaba

Our train arrived late in Aleppo but our connection towards Jordan unfortunately departed punctually. The next train went only a day later, therefore we had to choose the bus to Damascus. One of our fellow travellers helped us to catch a taxi to the bus station and he also warned the driver not to deceive us. After we arrived at the station, a soldier came to the car to check the driver for the same.

I really like in Syria that everybody takes care of foreigners in order that they don't have any bad experience about their country. It often happened that somebody on the street stepped to us to ask if they can help or just to ask how we are.

This time we arrived punctually in Damascus from where we continued our trip to Jordan by service taxi. At the taxi terminal there were a lot of drivers to Amman, so we made a quick auction to find the cheapest. The winner was Hussein.

We asked him to stop somewhere where we can change some Jordanian dinars since we needed them to pay for our visas. He told us that he'd take us to the best place to change money. Before the border he stopped at a shop next to the highway. The owner was our driver's uncle. It can be imagined how "good" the rate was, therefore I took a bag and began to put some fruits from the shelves in to compensate our loss. Everybody was laughing at me but we made the deal.

It took two hours to cross the border and it was getting late to find the bus station in Amman towards Madaba, still we were lucky. On the way to Amman we heard the word "Madaba" in the conversation between Hussein and a passenger in the taxi, so we asked our driver to query the passenger, who didn't speak any other languages than Arabic, if he also goes to Madaba. Hussein answered that he is a Madaban and he'd drop us at the town. We got off at a car park where our saviour's car was parking. We dropped our backpacks into the boot and got in the car but it didn't start. The car had been parked all day in the sun, so it's accumulator ran down. First, our saviour tried to fix the car but he wasn't a handy man. Fortunately, some teenagers saw our problem with the car and they came to help pushing it in.

At around 9 o'clock we arrived at our hotel in Madaba. We asked the driver how much we shall pay or how we can thank his help but he accepted nothing.
Earlier on the way it turned out that although our saviour was born in Madaba, today he lives in Al Zarqa which is located 20 km far from Amman in the opposite way than Madaba. He just saw that we needed help and he helped us because he could.