A Jordanian Journey

They say that “life’s a journey, not a destination.”  If that’s true, then we certainly are living.  In just over a week-long trip to Jordan, we spent more than 20 hours on buses,  6 hours in taxis, and 5 hours on ferries.  It was all worth it though for the breathtaking trip.  We couldn’t possibly share all the details and sights, as we don’t have the time to write it, nor do you have the time to read it.  Here’s the highlight reel:

The Dead Sea

We visited the Dead Sea on our second day in Jordan.  It is unique in two ways.  Firstly, it lies at the lowest point on the planet.  More entertainingly, it is about ten times saltier than the ocean, so you float on it like a cork.  The feeling is just unreal.  Even if you try to sink (cannonball position and all), you just bob.  When I tried my hardest to get my entire body underwater, I managed to get my entire body underwater for a couple of seconds before bobbing back up.  Tom liked floating much more than swimming in the actual pool.

Petra

This was this site that drew us to Jordan in the first place.  Petra is an ancient city, primarily carved out of mountains.  Instead of bringing in stones to put up buildings, the Nabateans literally carved lodgings, temples, tombs, and the famous treasury right into the mountains.  Later the Romans built some temples in the more traditional way, and the contrast is quite interesting.

Our first Petra experience was “Petra by Night”, a candlelit walk through the Siq (natural gorge leading into the city) and Bedouin story-telling and singing session in front of the Treasury.  It was quite beautiful, despite some obnoxious tourists interfering with the quiet mood.  We went to Petra the two following days, arriving before 6:30am both days in order to beat the crowd.  Even on repeat viewings, the architechture never failed to take my breath away.  For a view from above, I followed Tom through some Indiana Jones type climbing on the second day.  We found an empty plateau and watched the sun come over the mountains onto the treasury.   Stunning!

Wadi Rum

We spent our last few days in Jordan doing one of our favourite things:  camping.  Unfortunately we’re unable to canoe camp here (#1 – it would have cost a small fortune to fly the canoe here, #2 – it’s the desert).  We did the next best things; we camel camped.  We met our guide and got on our camels around 9am one morning, and headed into Wadi Rum, a large mountain desert.  We stopped at several sites including sand dunes, natural springs, and rock bridges.  We drank a lot of tea, ate a lot of pita, and eventually made it to the Bedouin camp where we would stay the night with about a dozen other campers.  The best part of camp was letting our thighs rest.  Canoes don’t give sore thighs.

The following day we headed into a less “tourist” part of the desert on our camels, saw a few more sites, drank plenty more tea, ate more pita we have in the past year, heard “camel ghost stories” (which were actually not about ghosts at all, just about camels rolling over on people during their sleep), then camped under the stars with just a mattress and blanket on a large flat rock.  I can’t imagine many things that would be more spectacular.  Don’t worry, the camels didn’t come near us in our sleep.

We came back on the third day and slept on the tour company’s office (don’t ask!), and got up bright and early to catch a bus that we had to sit on the floor of because it was full.  It got us back to the ferry cheap though!

After a lot more travel and the most disgusting bathroom I’ve ever seen, we are back in Cairo to start our first week of school.  Hopefully that will not provide too many adventures to write about!