Back to Jordan

Hey y'all! Lots of travelling lately. Last week for the 3eed break (the first days after the fasting month of Ramadan) me and a few of my newly found language school friends headed off to Jordan to check out Wadi Rum, the Dead Sea and some other stuff...

Day 1


We arrived with the ferry from Nuweiba in the evening and immediately headed off to the desert of Wadi Rum, where we spent one night before doing a jeep tour of the place the next day. It was a bit different from the last desert trip around Bahariyya, since here the bedouins had like ready-made camp sitting around and just waiting for us. Here's Aly checking out our camp.


A lone camel and a mountain in the distant greeted us the next morning on our jeep tour. Wadi Rum is actually some kind of semi-desert, which is why you see a lot of changing types of terrain, with bushes and mountains here and there.


The three fancy girls from the trip, Kira (Alex's roomie), Alex herself and tiny Aly (the poor thing isn't even 18 yet). This happy triplet was escorted by myself and Austen.


...though Austen seemed to be more interested in just climbing around everywhere than anything else. But I guess we all have a little monkey in us.


Panorama pics have become my latest favorite. :-P


Of course Austen, the idiot, couldn't help but scribbling some Arabic graffiti on the pretty rocks.


When he spotted me catching him in the act he quickly fled the crime scene...


Two people that were very hungry and REALLY wanted food at lunch time. Wouldn't want to meet these two faces in a dark street at night... ;-)


Yet another piece of desert.


Aly the quail spreading her wings and getting ready to charge off the rock.


All the bushes and rocks made for some pretty sweet shadows when it got close to sunset.


Aly the quail decided she was better off on the ground.


Austen shows off his best side to the world.


Mysterious Kira in late afternoon sunlight.


And.... another sunset shot! Way too many of these on the blog already... After this we directly continued to Petra and slept there during the night.


Day 3

If you wonder what happened to day 2, our day in Petra, I just decided to take that day off and relax since I had already seen it and didn't really have anything else to do. The most interesting thing that happened there was that Kira and Alex decided around lunchtime they had had enough of Petra, went back to the hotel and took off for Amman instead. And despite some efforts to meet up later on we never managed... Alas...


For day 3, however, me, Aly and Austen took a cab along the King's Highway to go to Madaba and spend the night there. We also made several stops along the way to check out some interesting sites.. One of the more impressive was the old crusader castle called Shobak.


Who knows what it says here? When I can read it, I will feel content with the Arabic studies. So, most likely I never will. :-P


It was the castle of arches this one...


Pretty cool location at the top of a mountain too. If I had been the enemy I sure wouldn't have tried to attack this place...


Overlooking the Dana Nature Reserve from Dana Old Village. The village wasn't that much fun though. It's main attraction was the Tower Hotel, which was some crazy backpacker hangout where people had left photos and all kinds of other stuff on the walls...


We stayed for an exquisite lunch in the hotel. The two unknowns in this photo is our cab driver and the cook. It is amazing how many people from Asia you see both in Egypt and Jordan working as cleaners or housemaids or in other low-paying professions...


Between Dana and Mount Nebo we stopped at the Dead Sea to take a short swim in the disgustingly dirty and crowded waters. But it was quite fun with the saliency which was much more prominent than I had expected, if you tried to do brest strokes for example it was impossible to do leg kicks as your ass and legs would just pop out of the water and be above the surface. (It could be this was only for my big fat ass but I will leave that unsaid.) Even getting back to an upright position in order to go ashore was pretty difficult and I spent quite some time was tumbling about until I managed to get my body into a vertical position.


Mount Nebo. Supposedly from where Moses viewed the promised land before his death. Can't say I thought it was very impressive, though, despite all the documentation of the previous Pope's visit there and the olive tree he had planted. :-P


Big round stone with two big dorks in front.


This land looks pretty darn promising to me... ;-)


Inside the church there were some pretty nice mosaics as well. After this we carried on the Madaba where we pretty much just had something to eat and stayed in a hotel overnight.


Day 4

This was really our last day in the country before we had to start heading back and so we made our way up to the very north of Jordan, to a tiny place called Umm Qays close to the border between Israel, Syria and Jordan. There was a lot of riding in cheap minivans this day...


Umm Qays in maybe for us Westerners more known as the biblicial city of Antiochia, which is supposedly where one of Jesus's miracles took place. It is told that as Jesus and his disciples were having a quiet evening stroll on the shore, a man possessed by demon by the name of Legion jumped out of nowhere. Jesus, however, clever as he was, had a chat with the demons and managed to convince them to instead go and possess a poor nearby swine herd that was feeding on the mountain. The possessed pigs then allegedly "ran violently into the sea". And hoooray, the man was saved!! :-)


Colonaded street in sunset...


The sea of Galilee or Lake Tiberius as it is also known as... (Genesarets sjö in Swedish.) Can you see the possessed pigs still floating around down there??


The rest of the night we just took it easy and prepared mentally for our long journey back home the next days. By the way my US$1 investment in a travel chess and backgammon board turned out to be a big success during the whole trip.


Day 5

The following day we just spent travelling, with the rain pouring down the whole way from Umm Qays to Aqaba, where we spent the night before catching the ferry back over to Nuweiba the next day. Aly, the strange and crazy Vermonter, was thrilled and exstaticly happy the entire day thanks to finally seeing some rain. But I guess it is not her fault, living in Vermont will probably do bizarre things to you..


Day 6

We left for the ferry early in order to be sure to get tickets and then tried to get breakfast in the ferry terminal. It was pretty funny, none of the places seemed to have all the ingredients to make a falafel sandwich so in the end we just ran around and collected a piece of bread here, some tomatoes there, some falafel at a third place. But there was a real sense of accomplishment when we had eventually compiled our dry sandwiches. :-)


Never tasted better in his life...


After the shitty replacement ferry we ended up on when going back, there was another fun surprise for us in Nuweiba. For whatever obscure reason they had decided just to take everyone's stuff, bags, boxes, backpacks, everything, and just dump it into one big pile of luggage outside the customs hall. So this was the not so pretty sight that met us where arriving with the buses from the boat. It was not very comforting to see all the torn apart bags and people's belongings lying around everywhere. But fortunately we did find our bags after some serious searching for them. Crazy shit. Still don't understand what the point of it all was.


Since we hadn't been able to get food on the ferry as we'd expected the bus ride back home was a long and hungry experience and eventually the savage in Aly took over. This is the last photo of Austen still having his left ear intact and also the last photo from our little Jordan adventure. ;-)