Arrived 7/05/19.
Queen Alia International Airport at Amman has a large shiny new terminal with lots of empty space. The car rental firms have offices on the arrivals floor and the cars are just outside. All very convenient. My Toyota Corolla was pleasantly larger than the car I expected and drove well enough once I’d worked out how to get the automatic out of first gear. I don’t know what the rental guy thought as I accelerated away with the engine racing.
My first time using Google maps to navigate in a car was not entirely successful. I had a few wrong turns but they were possibly due to the phone sliding off its precarious perch onto the floor. More seriously when it told me I had arrived at my destination there was no hotel in sight. I stopped and asked a man watering his garden for directions. He immediately invited me into his house for breakfast, which, while a slightly odd choice of meal for 6.30 pm, was a welcome and kind introduction to Jordanian hospitality.
It had been a long day and I wanted to get to the hotel, so I gratefully declined. I managed to find the hotel, partly through his directions and partly by luck.
Dinner at the hotel was a buffet of traditional Jordanian dishes which I think the Jordanians enjoyed more than I did. I settled down for the night, only to be awakened at 4.00am by the call to prayer from the mosque.
The next morning I headed for the Dead Sea. By chance I came across Mount Nebo and stopped to take a look. It is a site venerated by three religions as the burial place of Moses. Judging by the quality of the constructions, materials and information boards a lot of care and money has gone into the site. Strangely, for a place crawling with tourists, I felt a sense of peace and sprituality.
Leaving Mount Nebo, I drove down to the Dead sea, whose shores, at 430m below sea level, are the lowest land on Earth. It was a good 10 C hotter than up in the hills, the thermometer hitting 29 C. Remarkable as this highly salty sea in the rift valley is, it is not much to look at: rocky, barren shores, the entire hilly landscape beyond the sea largely featureless in the haze. I did not stop for a paddle because once past the very commercial looking Amman Tourist Beach there wasn’t anywhere convenient or inviting looking to stop by the sea; the road was always a little above and away from the shore.
I headed back into the hills and visited the hugely impressive Karak Castle. Built in ancient times and rebuilt over the ages, it was besieged by Saladin for a year before the Crusaders holding it were defeated.
My day’s journey ended at Wadi Musa, the modern town outside the ancient Nabatean city of Petra. At the rather basic hostel my friendly host and his girlfriend cooked up a tasty traditional chicken and rice dish which we ate in the appropriate manner, sitting on the floor and eating with our fingers. Note that although the picture below shows me holding food in both hands, I only used my right hand to take food from the communal plate. It is not done to use the left hand since this is considered to be used for another, more personal, function!
The next morning (8/05/19) I was up early for the big event: visiting one of the ‘7 New Wonders of the World’, Petra.
No one is quite sure when Petra was first settled, but it prospered as an important trading centre in the first centuries BC and AD. The Nabatean builders were masters of working with solid rock to create not just marvellous buildings but the infrastructure needed to support it. In a desert where it rains very little, but is prone to dangerous flash floods when when it does, they constructed dams, water channels and cisterns.
A devastating earthquake in 363 AD, combined with changing trade routes, led to the city’s decline; it was eventually abandoned in the 7th century and hidden from western eyes until 1812.
Petra is of course famous for the Treasury (featured in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, but the city is far more than that. It is big! I just about covered it in 6 hours hard walking. Everywhere there are tombs and temples carved into the cliffs. The freestanding buildings are mainly piles of building blocks and layers of temple columns, but there has been some reconstruction in places like the Great Temple.
The deep winding wadis, cliffs and mountains alone would make a stunning hike; with the ancient city as well it every bit deserves its reputation as one of the wonders of the world.
Reluctantly leaving Petra, I drove with my new Brazilian friend Marcus back to Amman airport, passing the 2 hours and 45 minutes in pleasant discussions about travel, religion, spirituality and economics.
Despite the Jordanans relaxed atitude towards such things as no overtaking signs and traffic lights, driving was mostly a pleasaant experience – without doubt less scary than southern Italy. The long stretches of well surfaced, quiet highways could, however, lull one into a false sense of security. Cruising happily along, without waarning there is a large pothole, or an overtaking truck coming towards you in the middle of the road. Worst of all are the unmarked speed humps. They are not just on slow residential streets, but also on high speed roads, sometimes in the middle of nowhere, often with no warning sign. I lost count of the times when travelling at 60 or 70 mph I had to slam on the brakes at the last moment to minimise the impact.
Surviving these hazards we reached our destination safely, I dropped off Marcus and it was time to end my brief visit to Jordan and take an evening flight to Cairo. What would be waiting for me there? A taxi? An owl? I sat on the plane with baited breath…
Rob's Roads 