Our next destination (and last main one for this trip) was Jordan. Think camels in the desert, Lawrence of Arabia and that amazing historical sight of Petra.
Before I begin, I just want to say that travel isn't always about stunning sunsets and pretty villages. I know that John's going to say that I sound like I'm whinging in this post, that we should be grateful for the experiences we've had. I am grateful, but that doesn't mean I'm going to say that a place is great when it isn't. I'm just calling it as it is. Not that Jordan's all bad - it's just not all good from our point of view.
I should add that we were very tired, having had a very early start to catch our flight from Rhodes and things always seem worse when we're tired.
We landed at Amman airport to transfer to another flight south to Aqaba. First impressions weren't good. The airport was terribly disorganised - it was so hard to find out where to go and we almost checked ourselves out of the country 20 minutes after we checked in! We weren't the only ones having this issue but, OK, airports are often difficult to navigate anywhere in the world. This was just one of the most confusing ones we'd been to for a decade or three.
We landed and caught a taxi to our hotel. The taxi driver was a maniac - he drove down the highway at 140kms an hour, straddling the centre line the whole time. When we reached the town and the traffic began to increase, he found himself caught on the middle line with cars on either side of him. He then proceeded to toot at them and abuse them under his breath as if this was all their fault! Then again, this isn't the only country in the world with maniacal taxi drivers.
We had pinned a lot of hopes on our hotel to help us organise things as they got a big wrap in Lonely Planet, but we had so much communication trouble in our emails before we arrived that we didn't have high expectations by the time we got there. A typical conversation: Us - "How long will it take us to drive to the desert camp?" Answer - "You can check in at noon." And there were three staff involved in that conversation. Then again, not everyone can be expected to speak English either.
Our concerns were well founded. Not only did we continue to have communication problems but our 'boutique' hotel was old and shabby. They opened the door to our room and the stench of cigarettes hit us before we even took a step inside. We were able to switch to a non-smoking room (only one floor out of six was non-smoking) but the room was tired, with white sheets turned grey with age and garish layers of silicone plugging up the leaks around the bathroom fittings. The nights were extremely noisy with other guests clearly not having any sense of understanding that other people might like to sleep in peace. This happened all through our first night and well into the 2nd night until the riot act was read out by John, scantily clad. They weren't going to risk that again.
Aqaba is on the Gulf of Aqaba, an offshoot of the Red Sea. We wandered along the main beach and were amazed at how easily we could see Israel. This is Eilat, just across the gulf.
One positive was that the food was good. We really enjoyed trying out the local dishes - wonderful spicy rice, meatballs, seafood, interesting salads, amazing dips and everything served with flatbread that's far better than anything we get at home. Everything's quite expensive though.
This is a fattoush. Fattoush is usually a vegetable salad but, at this restaurant, yummy vegetables come inside a toasted pita bread that has to be broken open by hitting it with the back of a spoon.
I'm going to say it straight up - apart from the food, overall Jordan was a disappointment 'til then. We knew we had to persist though.
The main reason we came to Aqaba was to go snorkelling in the warm waters of the gulf, so we tried to organise a trip. We spoke with three English-speaking guys in the one business and it was a nightmare of miscommunication. It's not that the people aren't friendly or trying to help, it's often more that they prefer talking to listening. They also have a habit of interrupting conversations to talk to someone going past, to take or make phone calls or to talk to potential customers arriving in the shop. Just when you think you're nearly organised, there's another interruption. This took John back to his days doing business in the region.
We did end up going snorkelling. It's supposed to be one of the best places in the world to snorkel and dive but it wasn't that impressive. The reefs and fish were nothing to get excited about but I did spot a well-disguised stonefish which was cool.
The Jordanian government deliberately dumped old tanks and planes within easy reach of the beach so people can explore them underwater and swimming over a tank was a first for both of us! There was a group of divers around the tank when we got there.
It was a bit weird coming across a plane underwater!
We often don't want to leave some of the places we visit but we were counting down the days until we could leave Aqaba and get out of that hotel. The problem was that our next accommodation was owned by the same owners so we didn't have high expectations.
We hired a car and headed to Wadi Rum. Wadi Rum is Laurence of Arabia country - flat red desert sands punctuated with spectacular rocky outcrops, called jebels. For those of you too young to have seen Lawrence of Arabia (myself included!) other movies that have been filmed here are The Martian (The Matt Damon one), Star Wars 4 and Zero Dark 30 but there are plenty of others too.
The thing to do here is to sleep in a Bedouin tent in the desert. We thought this sounded wonderfully romantic until we looked at Google maps and realised there were "Bedouin camps" scattered all over Wadi Rum. They were specifically built for tourists and were lined up in rows. We had booked our stay through our hotel as they have their own camp and, considering how hard it was to get info on these camps, we thought this might be easier.
To get there we drove up the Desert Highway. What a cool name! For days we couldn't get "Hotel California" out of our heads though ("On a dark desert highway....").
We turned off the highway towards Wadi Rum and the landscape immediately started to look really striking. Those rocky jebels started appearing and soon we were driving through a spectacular, other-worldly landscape.
All through Jordan police can check you at any time when you're driving to make sure you have proper paperwork for your car or something. I really don't understand the point of it all. We were expecting to get checked and, as we approached Wadi Rum, a policeman waiting on the side of the road pulled us over. In good English, he told us that he was here to help us. He asked where we were staying and then informed us that we had to go to the visitor centre to get our tickets stamped then explained how to get to our camp. This was the most straight-forward and useful info anyone had given us since we arrived in the country!
En-route to the camp we drove through one of the most miserable looking towns we've seen for a long time. There was nothing attractive about it at all.
We arrived at our camp and were shown to our tent and it was actually quite good. The tents are permanent and have an en-suite built onto the back. Ok, the curtains were falling down, decorations on the ceiling were falling off and the sofa was stained and torn, but it was comfortable. And the bathroom was far better than the one in our hotel!
The tent held a surprise for us though. John hopped into bed that night and found there was only a single sheet on the bottom!
We then realised there was another single sheet and had to decide if we wanted to sleep partly on the mattress or lay the other sheet over the bottom of the bed and sleep on the join. We opted for the join and it was fine.
We had booked a 4WD tour. You can't go in the park without a driver/guide. We seemed to have little say in where we wanted to go but what they suggested seemed reasonable to us so we went with it. Most of the vehicles are twin cab utes and you can sit either inside or outside. We started off inside thinking that we would learn more that way but our nice young driver didn't speak a lot of English so we spent the rest of the trip on the bench seats built into the back of the ute. It was fantastic!
The scenery was incredible. Jebels towered over us as we drove beneath them. It was wonderful sitting in the back with uninterrupted views of our surroundings.
We were taken to various sites - we walked up a sand dune and ran back down it.
We saw ancient inscriptions on rocks, natural rock bridges and the remains of an old house that T.E. Lawrence supposedly stayed in.
Camels waited at various places to give rides to tourists.
When we arrived at each site, there would be dozens of other vehicles there loaded with tourists seeing the same things. After a while we wished that we could just do our own thing so, when we saw an interesting-looking canyon, we asked our driver if we could go there. We had to explain that we didn't need to see the sunset with heaps of other people so he was happy to take us to the canyon. It took him a few goes to get up a dune to the start of the canyon but he did it. John and I then scrambled up the gorge and had a blast. You can see John in his blue shirt in the bottom left of the pic.
In the sand we saw many interesting animal prints. I would love to know what some of them were but our driver didn't know the English words.
We drove past many camps. Some made some attempt to look Bedouin by using their dark brown and white "goatskin" (hessian) style of tent but others went more down 'The Martian' track and had futuristic-looking white dome tents. These ones went more for the Martian style.
Some places had white water tanks perched on the jebels which stood out like sore thumbs but we realised that the desert dust and sand soon coated them which helped them to blend in.
At one site, people built cairns to commemorate their visit and the cairns were quite striking.
A tour group were staying for dinner at our camp (but not staying overnight) and we were all told to come to dinner early to see the meat being pulled out from an underground oven. We followed the hordes outside at the appointed time and a couple of guys cleared sand off an area. Together they reached down and carefully lifted a large lid off to reveal a tray of chicken underneath. "Oooooohhh" went the crowd in unison. The men then reached further and, much to our surprise, lifted a three-level tray of meat out of the ground. "Aaaaahhhh!" went the crowd. The meat was served up as part of an extensive buffet and the buffet was wonderful!
A guy made fresh Bedouin flatbread in front of us. It was cooked on the dome on the right. It was delicious!
Our tent was very comfortable but packs of dogs wandered around all night sorting out their pecking order every five minutes, it seemed.
There was a gorgeous sunrise the next morning.
We found a walk that we could do without a guide the next morning. We had directions from a guy at the tourist office and our guide book described it in some detail. It was weird just walking out into the desert. Sadly, there was plenty of rubbish around near any settlement and this often blew a long distance across the bare landscape..
We scrambled through a long gorge which was good fun.
After that, we never found the trail again! We knew roughly where to go through and made our way back. Along the way we found a dead camel. It was decomposing and we could see what appeared to be the contents of its stomach. It was all plastic! If that really was its stomach contents then there's a serious problem here.
Although Wadi Rum was fairly touristy, it's a large area and people were scattered across it so it wasn't too bad as far as crowds go. We really enjoyed our stay there!
Heather and John
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