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April 22, 2004

JORDAN

The desert of the bedouins.

AMMAN

I arrived at Amman, capital of Jordan, the 16th of April. Of course, and as usual, it was late night, dark as a monkey's ass, and I got again ripped off by a unscropulous taxi driver. As a matter of fact, I was so sleepy, tired, dirty and smelly that I could only dream of a bed to crash in, so I booked a room in the first hostel I saw. Man, you wouldn't believe what a shithole of a place. The bed was so dirty that I unrolled my sleeping bag and I decided to sleep on the floor, and the room was so dark and spooky that my camera flash wouldn't be able to light it up enough to take a shot. This hostel should be displayed in the dictionary under the entry: "aweful". The day after I switched accomodations of course.

Amman itself has little to show. Just like any other arab cities: smelly, messy, dirty, busy, dirty, trafficed, dirty and dirty.

General lookout of Amman. As you can see, it'a a shapeless mass of houses built up all over the hills
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After three days I couldn't stand that shit anylonger, so I decided to speed up my way south towards the Sinai desert (in Egypt) where I had spent a great week seven years ago with my friends Nicholas and Tomas Zlotnik. But before going further south, I spent a morning floating up by the Dead Sea shore. As you probably know, the Dead Sea is a 33% salt-satured substance, so in fact the water in almost solid. It's creamish solid, and when you get out of the water and get dried up in the sun, there is a greasy foil left covering your skin, just like if you'd dived into a huge Nivea pool. I had fun there, floating naked by myself without a soul anywhere at sight's distance, and then hitchhiking my way back to Amman. A truck driver picked me up by the highway and went on telling me about his three wives and 26 sons and daughters, but that's another story...

Bad picture of the Dead Sea. The shore you see across the lake is Israel (or Palestine, as you better say around here...)
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Anyway, like I said I was willing to speed up my travelling pace a bit so I went out for a last night out with couple of friends I met at the hostel (an American and a New Zealander heading north towards Syria), and I grabbed a bus early the next morning.

But there was a surprise ambushing me in the southern region of the country... oh yes there was...


PETRA

David Rico, if you're reading this text, let me tell you this: you don't know what you've missed out man. David is an old buddy from college, and he had been living in Israel for the last few months working for the blood-sucking... errr I mean consulting company Accenture. He was supossed to meet me in Petra around this time of the year, but he finally went back to Spain couple of weeks ago to get married (congratulations bro!).

Petra... oh man... Have you seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? Do you remember the last scenes of the film, where he rides a horse through a deep cannyon and, eventually, the cannyon opens up into an open yard hidding a rose-red coloured temple carved in the stone? well, that is Petra's entrance (also known as The Treasury)... And there is a hell a lot more to see further beyond...

You walk for over a kilometer through very narrow and very tall natural cannyons...
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And keep walking...
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And then... all of a sudden... BANG!
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It's so beautiful... and it was built 2000 years ago!
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Petra ranks up with Egypt's pyramids and Istanbul mosques as far as the Middle East jewels. Basically, it's a bunch of narrow cannyons where an ancient civilization called the Nabeteans created an extensive complex of temples carved up in the rock during the I century BC. Now a days, it's Jordan's number one touristic attraction. Petra had been forgotten by the whole world (other than the local bedouins and their cammels dwelling in the area) untill a swiss explorer called Jean Louise Burckhardt rediscovered it for our pleasure early XIX century. God bless ole good Jean Louise!

That thing is like a 5 floors building
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And they are everywhere!
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In the picture they look small, but the temple on the right (with the stair case) is like a 7 floors building. This picture was taking from a kilometer away.
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Close up detail
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You need two days to fully walk throughout the whole area, from The Treasury (entrance) to The Monastery (back-end). In fact, you've got to climb up 850 stairs to reach the damn monastery, but trust me it's well worthy. It was late afternoon when I got there, and I climbed up a hill for better views and a bit of loneliness (tons of tourists around). I had one of the best naps of my life there, with a wonderful scenary at my feet.

The Monastery
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The Monastery from another angle
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The view from up there. You feel like an eagle or something.
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On my way back, I was so tired that I rented a cammel for the 4kms ride back to the site entrance. Bad idea, bad idea indeed. The bloody cammel not only stank on God knows what, but was also the most unconfortable thing you could ride on. How can the bedouins ride across vast distances on those beasts? I suffered from an incipient pain right in my royals for the rest of the evening...

Indiana Yague an the Last Pain in the Balls
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Just a beautiful picture of a donkey ridding through Petra
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WADI RUM

Anyway, two days later I booked a tour around the southern desert of Jordan: Wadi Rum. It is a national park, so nothing can be constructed within the area, and the only meanings to go inside is by hiring a 4WD car driver, which I did for a reassonable price...

I cannot describe what I experienced in Wadi Rum. I know I have used the terms "beautiful", "stunning", "awe-inspiring", etc on this website before, but nothing compares to that desert. It is, simply, the most beautiful thing I have seen in my 27 years of life. Petra is a mere passtime compared to this desert.

I will try to describe it: Have you seen a film displaying the Mars landscape? you know, with all that deep red sand covering everything, and high rocky mountains popping out here and there in the background? well, that is Wadi Rum. The sand is so reddish that it seems like contruction brick powder. The vastness and emptiness is so that blows your mind away, while you cannot help but stare at it and let your thoughts blow. In contrast, far in the horizont, a lonely bedouin rides across the land on his cammel.

Nop, I cannot describe it out. I will let you simply have a look to some pictures I took. I wish I was a proffesional photographer, as this has got to be the best place in the world for picture shooting. I could not help myself from shooting over two hundred photos is less than 48 hours. It's just that spectacular.

Look at the sand colour. These pictures have NOT been edited in any way
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Have you ever seen anything like this?
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Only one drawback: we got for two hours in the middle of a sandstorm (a mild one, mind you). We were covered with sand from head to toes, couldn't open our eyes, could barely breath. Everything fills with dust and sand, and you cannot see 20 meters away. Bad, very bad stuff. But afterthat, the sky cleared up, and we got to see the sunset... oh man... the red sand turned purple, and it was a whole new performance going on right in front of you.

Oh shit, the sand storm is coming! you can see the cloud of dust aproaching in the horizont
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Isn't it just like Mars?
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Like I said, simply the most beautiful places I have ever been
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Evocative on another worlds
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The sunset, and its array of colours, will stay forged in my mind forever.
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Jesus Christ! I just could not stop shooting photos!. I have over 200, all of them just as beautiful as this one!
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Or this one
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At night, the stars were bright as candles, thousands of them, as no artificial light nor polution was to be seen in dozens of kilometers around us. Terrific!

Without a single doubt, Wadi Rum has been so far the highlight of this around-the-world jorney. I have promissed myself I will bring my girlfriend Brani here one day. These type of things are meant to be shared.

So, and right now I am in Aqaba, a coast resorty town in the south tip of Jordan (nothing worth metioning about this place: beach and hotels, that's it), awaiting for my boat to sail off across the Red Sea to arrive tomorrow afternoon at the Sinai coasts, and thus entering in my last destination (Egypt) of this Istanbul-to-Cairo first stage of my trip.

Stay tunned folks, the journey continues...

Posted by Hector on April 22, 2004 06:50 PM
Category: The Journey
Comments

La madre que te p..... pero Hectolín tío, ¡vaya página que te has montado! Me dejas flipao además con tu nivel de inglés. I'm astonished with your journey, the photos, the people you're meeting...Man, you could work for Lonely Planet! Yeah, managers in Israel told me I was going back to Spain for Easter. In fact, I traveled to Dead Sea, Elat (Read Sea) and Negev Dessert, in a last attempt to visit this marvellous places and I did all that in 20 hours! (like our dear Japanese friends). However, after Easter they told me I should continue in Israel until July more or less. I'm screwd at work but tell me if you still think to come to Israel. You know you have a house here in Tel-Aviv! I'd like to go to lake Tiberias, Nazareth... Take care and enjoy this great opportunity to know the world! Disfruta de tu viaje cabroncete mientras yo me hundo aqui con el plan contable israelí. Recuerdas el turbante del Cea y sus lecciones de contabilidad?

Posted by: David Rico on April 23, 2004 06:26 PM

Zomo famozo!!!
Tengo una deuda contigo, esta parte del viaje la teníamos que haber hecho juntos pero te voy a tirar otra data. Cuando cruces de Aqaba, me imagino que a Tarabin/Nuweiba, si bajas a Dahab pide q t lleven al Blue hole y de ahí, rumbo norte, como a una hora y media de caminata hay un campamento beduino que se llama Ras Abu Gallum. Son cuatro tolderias en una pequeña bahía increible con una arena del mismo color rosado que el desierto que te impresionó tanto. Yo no me lo podía creer la vez que estuve. Si puedes pasar por ahí, no pierdas la oportunidad. Inolvidable.

Posted by: Nico on April 23, 2004 09:01 PM

hi man

Posted by: ihsan on April 30, 2004 04:25 PM
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