Jordan

Well I've just got back from Jordan, two whirlwind days in Petra and at the dead sea... I've only just started recovering from it, we had the night dive on Wednesday which lasted until about midnight and then we had to be off to Jordan at 4am the next morning. The bus drivers here are like something out of a cartoon strip, bouncing down the road at high speed taking corners on two wheels and cruising over hills on the wrong side of the road. I'm really surprised that more people don't get killed... But that's Egypt for you, so we (Hayley and myself) arrived at Taba in small town just before the Israeli border where we got onto a ferry to Aqaba in Jordan, which is one of the most modern cities in all of the middle east. Here we met Barbara, an English lady from Cairo who was going the same way as us so we joined up and got on a bus to Petra that just happened to be full of french tourists and their tour guide who seemed to like the sound of his own voice. So once we arrived at Petra and finally gotten off the bus and their self enamoured tour guide we spent the next couple of hours wandering around the city and checking out the places where Indiana Jones was filmed and the main city square in Petra. We had organised to stay at hotel in Wadi Musa which is the town just outside of Petra but the hotel had a problem with one of its floors and had to move Barbara (aka Jan) to another hotel down the road.

So the next day we were to head off to the Dead Sea with a driver who didn't seem to know if we were the right ones he was meant to pick up or not and so spent a good part of an hour arguing with the somebody on the phone in Arabic. So once we actually got moving we took the 'Kingsroad' north through the mountains which are spectacular and took us to the bottom of the dead sea where they mine potassium from the water in the dead sea. The driver took us to a hotel situated on the dead sea which had its own beach and aquatic center, this was pretty handy for washing off. The dead sea is phenomenal, the clayey bottom of the dead sea looks like marble and is meant to have heathly properties so we followed everyone else and caked ourselves in mud and headed in, its surprisingly difficult to stand in the dead sea and you feel like someone keeps pushing your legs out from under you. It was only then that we realised that the salt burns like fire if you get it in your eyes and makes even small cuts hurt, bugger that I decided to shave that morning. Once we realised we dashed up to the aquatic center to get in the pool and attempt to clean off some of the salt, then once we finished up we had lunch and headed off to make the return journey to Dahab in Egypt.

So it was a four hour drive back to Aquaba where we had a another hour wait, so we went for a bit of a wander around the area to enjoy some of the local sights. During this little wander we went past a little outdoor cafe where the guy running the place wanted to get us to sit and eat something, we didn't but not before he had gotten us to try one of his felafel's. I have to say it was one of the best I have ever tried and thought nothing more of it until the next morning. So we got back to Taba via the same ferry we had taken the previous morning and hopped onto yet another one of these crazy Egyptian buses. It was here that Hayley started to feel a little sick, just as we got on a two hour bus ride back to Dahab. Just as we where coming into Dahab down comes the window and the bus driver gets some new decoration on the side of his bus, just as he dropped us off he asked for a tip and I'm sure he got one he hadn't bargained for. So Hayley spent the rest of the night either on the toilet or in bed and I had a quiet night with a few drinks, the next morning we needed to be up for a diving trip. So as Hayley was looking more and more unlikely on going I said goodnight and headed up to bed, it was about 4am when I realised I needed to reconsider as I found myself driving the porcelain bus. With the cost of the 50 quid diving trip driving me to get out of bed I pushed myself to get upat 6.30 and join the trip, the boat was the last thing that I needed that morning and spent the next few hours on the way there trying to hold down my stomach. The diving helped, but lunch only made things worse it sent me back to the bus, anyway I'm feeling a lot better at the time of writing this post and am looking forward to heading off to cairo on the night bus this evening.
Stay well all...