Take the haze; sprawl; traffic; American fast food reataurants and wide, palm lined boulevards of LA.  Add Singapore’s plethora of fancy shopping malls; its official encouragment of the growth of a “modern” city; and a pinch of it’s subtle authoritarianism.  Then season with a bit of middle eastern culture and Arabic writing.  This ought to give you a bit of an idea of what our UAE experience was like.

Atrium in the Burj al Arab

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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…)

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The need for provisions arose from our next destination: the famous desert region of Wadi Rum.  Site of many of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)’s exploits in WWI (and of the film Lawrence of Arabia) Wadi Rum consists of a series of sandstone and granite peaks rising up off the flat, sandy desert floor.

The main valley of the Rum area, Wadi Rum itself

We arrived in Wadi Rum at about 08:00 and paid our admission fees for the protected area.  The most popular methods of visiting the 720 square kilometres of the Wadi Rum protected area are four wheel drive trips and camel treks, often with overnight stops at Bedouin camps in the desert (though these days, most of the camps remain intact primarily for the tourist trade.)  We planned on doing things a bit differently by walking through the desert and sleeping in our own tent. 

Camels in Wadi Rum.  Though none of them are wild, many are left free to wander by their Bedouin owners who know that they will always return home

In keeping with the seemingly common practice in Jordan of overcharging tourists and/or encouraging them to use the most expensive available options, the folks at the visitor centre (the same ones who organize the competing tour companies) informed us first that this wasn’t possible, and then that it would cost us 25 Jordanian Dinars each (about $32) to pitch our tent in the desert.  After re-checking our guidebook and consulting the tourist police we decided to ignore them and just wander off into the desert.

A canyon that wound its way through Jebel Um Ishrin and formed the first portion of our walk in Rum

Gourds on the desert floor.  Compared to the desert around Petra, life (both plant and animal) was much more sparse in Wadi Rum

Wadi Rum was hot.  By 09:30 the air was already uncomfortably warm, and by 10:30 the sun had us feeling ready to melt, especially when the sand grew deep and soft underfoot and walking at all became something of a trial.  Thankfully the sheer sides of the stony jebels (mountains) provided plenty of shade, and so we were really only exposed to the worst of the heat during short spells of walking between our numerous breaks, and during the odd trek across the valley floor to meet the next mountain (the presence of such large, obvious landmarks rising out of the featureless desert actually made navigating Wadi Rum fairly simple.)

Some of the many spectacular red sand dunes that are scattered throughout the valleys Wadi Rum (and which make walking very difficult at times.)

Fears of spontaneous human combustion aside, our time out in the desert was quite pleasant.  The scenery was epic and though we couldn’t actually find one of the designated campsites, a Bedouin gentleman (who lived in Rum village, but kept his tent up for occaisional family trips back to their roots, and for tourists to stay in) cheerfully suggested that we just pitch our tent near his, well away from the noise of the main 4WD routes.

A valley alongside Jebel Um Ishrin.  Much of our first day’s walking was spent passing through this.

To our astonishment the dried out husks of mushrooms occaisionally appeared on the desert floor.  These are testament to the survivability of the spore…

And, though you might not expect it from a place like Wadi Rum, there was quite a bit of noise.  And this was what kept Wadi Rum from being the superbly magical place it could have been.  In many sections of the protected area we were never out of earshot of an engine for long, and virtually everywhere one went, several sets of tire tracks were visible on the desert floor nearby. 

Sandstone mountains rising up off the desert floor

Camel Trekkers near the popular lunch stop where we had our afternoon break

A 4WD on the desert sands with the toe of Jebel Um Ishrin off to the right

The sun’s final rays settling on the Jebels down the valley from sunset point (our campsite was at the base of the small hill from which this photo was taken.)

This meant that that our very best experience of the place came on our second morning there.

The only bus from Rum Village to the nearby city of Aqaba left at 07:00, which meant that, camping out in the desert as we were, a VERY early start was in order.

The mountains of Wadi Rum by moonlight as we saw them while walking through the desert well before sunrise

We woke at 04:00, packed up the tent, and allowed the bright light of the 3/4 moon to guide us along the valley floors back towards town.  The vastness of the peaks silhouetted on the horizon and the silence and stillness of the early morning were exactly what I’d dreamed of Wadi Rum being.  Between them and the blanket of stars that covered the sky before moonrise the night before, I was convinced that night time is THE time to enjoy Wadi Rum.

The moon above the jebels as we approached Rum village with the sun just sneaking above the horizon behind us

Our final stop in far southern Jordan was the city of Aqaba or, more precisely, the beaches south of the town.  Naturally after two days wandering the dunes we were anxious for a bit more sand ;) 

The lovely central park in was our first stop in Aqaba. The city itself was so pleasant and relaxing that it almost seemed strange after many of the other middle eastern cities we’d visited

Aqaba itself is the largest city in the country’s south, but we only spent a short time looking around before catching a taxi south (shared with a couple of friendly Germans… There are loads of European tourists in Jordan, but relatively few from elsewhere) towards the beach camps.

The beach in central Aqaba.  Beaches on the gulf had a way of promising much from a distance, then not really living up to the promises when inspected up close.

We arrived, set up our tent, and proceeded to do very little for the next couple of days.  We read a lot.  Hung about in the shade, avoiding the mid-day sun.  Enjoyed some traiditional Bedouin food cooked in an underground oven (rather like a Maori hangi.)  And we went to the beach.

The beaches themselves, while nicer than the one in Aqaba city, still weren’t up to all that much.  The sand was a bit coarse and got blisteringly hot during the day.  And they suffered from many of their users treating them like a garbage dump, and consequently were full of cans, plastic bags, and broken glass.

Me galaxing in a lounge chair in the beautiful comfy areas of our beach camp (The Bedouin Moon Village)

The real point of visiting the seaside at the Gulf of Aqaba lies offshore.  The coral that makes the Red Sea such a famous SCUBA diving spot also makes its way further north to Jordan’s tiny piece of coastline, and is conveniently near the shore to boot.  Once we got past the young men leering (and occaisionally grabbing) at Sarah (who was clad in a pair of board shorts and a long sleeved top) and into the water, the on-shore unpleasantnesses just vanished.

The coral in the snorkelling sites we visited was probably the prettiest I’ve ever seen.  There were lots of varieties, from huge apartment-block looking things, to delicate stuff that looked like a cross between a fan and deers’ antlers, to vivid purple and blue outcrops, to magical looking soft coral.  The fish were great as well, with huge schools of small and medium sized swimmers surrounding us, and spectacular individuals (like the puffers, rainbow wrasses and lionfish) putting on a show.  The two small negatives were the fact that a (little) bit of the on-shore rubbish had found its way onto the bottom, and the swarms of micro-jellyfish that gave us surprising (but not quite actually PAINFUL) stings.

Feesh!  I THINK this was one of the coral outcrops we snorkelled around.  In any case, it’s one of the ones at a site we visited a couple of times and is representative of how pretty the reef was.  (Sadly, my camera’s days of waterproofness are long behind it, so this is just stolen from another website.)

With a nice mix of off-shore beauty and on-shore relaxation, Aqaba was just what we needed after five days of hard walking in the desert.

Chamel!

A long wait for the bus from Bosra to Der’a, Syria.  A shared taxi from Der’a across the border to Ramtha, Jordan.  Another shared taxi from Ramtha to Amman.  A city bus from the north Amman bus terminal to the southern one and, finally, a minibus from Amman down to Wadi Musa.  Including all our waiting time, the trip took us about seven hours and took us from southern Syria to northern Jordan, then almost all the way down to Jordan’s southern edge as well.

A (relatively successful, judging by his tidy dress) souvenier salesman near one of Petra’s tombs

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Our drive into town showed us at least a little of what we could expect from Damascus (in the new city at least.)  It was surprisingly clean and modern looking, and was at least on par with Beirut and Istanbul in both of these respects.  At the same time, it managed to look a bit sterile (in a metaphorical sense.  Despite its RELATIVE cleanliness, it was far from spotless.)  All of these impressions of Damascus would be turned on their ears by the time we spent in the Old City.

Our taxi dropped us off at Al Merjed, near the centre of Damascus’ new city, from where it was a simple matter to find our way to the lovely hotel (a former Ottoman mansion with a beautiful and shady courtyard) that would be our home for the next few days.

Me and the statue comemorating Salah ad Din Himself and his many victories

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A portico leading off from the gardens of Beittedine Palace