(I’m sure there’s a good pun to use with Amman somewhere, but I’m a bit sick and unable to find it right at the moment.)
The trip from Aqaba up to Amman (our last inter-city travel in Jordan) proved to be far more challenging than we’d anticipated. We were hoping to go from Aqaba back to Wadi Musa (Petra) to collect a bunch of stuff we’d left there, and then on to Amman.
The first roadblock came when we arrived in mid-morning and discovered that there were no more buses until 14:00. Then we discovered that the 14:00 bus had been cancelled. When the 16:00 (last bus of the day) arrived, a swarm of people ran for the boarding doors as it pulled into the station and only those most willing to toss politeness aside and shove got on board (though later all of the young men who’d got seats were asked to get off and cede their spots to ladies who were lacking the brute force [if not the attitude] to get aboard.)
Frustrated with all this, we managed to get close to Wadi Musa by travelling to the town of Ma’an, where we spent the night. The next morning we got a service taxi (and were, unsurprisingly, overcharged) to Wadi Musa. Our bus-boarding experiences there were very similar to the ones in Aqaba, though by now I’d stopped caring about politeness and was more than willing to use the extra weight of my now-refilled pack to batter my way to a spot at the front of the queue. Which meant that we got aboard the SECOND bus leaving town that morning.
All of which, finally, at long last, led us to Amman, Jordan’s capital and our final stop in the Hashemite Kingdom.
Snoozing on the Dead Sea. (Sarah wasn’t ACTUALLY asleep, but in this one place I can almost see it as a possibility…)
[read on]
