Matt & Kate's travel blog or: Matt & Kate's bogus journey

From Amman we took a one-way daytrip to Petra via the Dead Sea and others. First stop was Madaba to see a supposedly famous mosaic map of the middle east, it was fairly impressive but not overly. Next stop was Mount Nebo, the biblical resting place of Moses where he died (at 120) after being shown the promised lands that he would never enter. A good view but a bit hazy. Next up was the Dead Sea, something we had been looking forward to for a while and it didn’t let us down. I really didn’t think it would be quite that floaty, but it was amazing. It was almost impossible to not float, it took a lot of effort to put your legs straight down. A lot of people got covered in mud from head to toe (quite a sight) before getting in, but we decided against it, but we did indulge in the other thing to do of posing for photos reading a book or newspaper. A funny sight. Next up we followed the coast to a mountain range and we stopped at a few more things but the view was obscured by the haze. Our last stop was at Shobak castle which was fairly standard for the desert castles (we’ve seen a few now). We then went on to Petra for the night.

We spent the next two days clambering over most of Petra, I say most as it is a huge place and we could have spent a whole week there and not seen it all. The first day we did the main tourist “pilgrimage” through the centre of town seeing all the sights along the way including the most famous treasury and monastery (after a long hike uphill), the second day we took a more indirect route and hiked through an amazingly twisty canyon and then back down to the centre before climbing up to the top of the “high place of sacrifice” for lunch and then down the other side seeing many tombs and things along the way. Altogether an utterly unforgettable two days, an absolute must do for anyone in the area. I guess we aren’t the only ones who thought so as it was packed (the main route was anyway) with tourists, horses, carriages, donkeys, camels and of course souvenir stalls every 10 metres or so. Still, it doesn’t detract from the place and the second day was almost the exact opposite, we only saw two people for the first 3 hours. Amazing, but we eventually moved on to Wadi Rum.

Wadi Rum is a great little protected area of desert where hundreds of local Bedouins take tourists out on jeep/camel safaris of the desert to see some random sights, but really just soak up the amazing scenery, and then to camp overnight out in the desert. Most of the sights had some connection to T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), but were not that great. “Here is Lawrence’s House”, he lived there for a few months and is now just one wall and the rest fallen over. A great experience that was marred by two things. The first was more camera trouble – in between taking photos of the sunset the camera said “picture error”, it then changed to “card error” and wouldn’t work no matter what we did. Luckily photos had been downloaded after the first day in Petra so “all” we lost was the second day and all of Wadi Rum. That was annoying enough but then we were on the tour with a couple from France with Arabic heritage so they spent the whole time talking with the guide in Arabic, despite the fact that all of them spoke perfect English. Later on another French/Turkish couple showed up who also spoke English/French/Arabic. After a short group conversation they suddenly switch to French at rapid speed and so completely ignored us. After staring at them for a while I walked off and went to the tent. Damn Europeans (this is not the first time this has happened but it never gets any less annoying). One positive was that I got all the photos that the French couple had taken of Wadi Rum (thank goodness for having a laptop with a card reader), which will explain the lack of photos of us.

From Wadi Rum we took a minivan to the intersection of the highway, a minibus from the side of the road to Aqaba where we bought a new camera card and called our credit card company who had left a message saying there was a problem, but after a very expensive 12 minute conversation the result was “there is nothing wrong with your card and you don’t need to do anything” – thanks! We decided to go straight on to Egypt so we took a minibus to the port and then a very expensive and time consuming ferry to Nuweiba and then a minibus to the bus station, then a bus to Dahab and then a ute to the hotel. A long day of many varied transports but we got to Dahab in the end and were so glad to be there as the place was and is great. We are staying one more day and then going to either climb Mt Sinai (biblical references again – but great views) or go to Suez to watch boats go by or go straight to Cairo. Then on to Alexandria, maybe an oasis town and then down the Nile (incorporating some water transport in there.)

[A lot of] Photos now (obviously the photos from our second day in Petra are absent and the Wadi Rum photos aren’t ours – but we were there, honestly).