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Well the bus from Damascus to Amman didn't end up taking 7 hours which was a nice surprise!The bus was so cramped even my knees touched the seat in front, Greg had to have one leg in the aisle, which kept on getting knocked by people walking past much to his annoyance, and one leg partly in my leg space.The border crossing took a really long time with a huge security check before we could cross.On arrival in Amman we checked into our hotel, we had a room with a shared bathroom, which after three days in the hotel we were extremely glad to say goodbye to!!(Some people just have no toilet etiquette!!!)
The first thing we noticed about Amman was the number of other tourists there, we'd seen hardly anyone else when we were in both Syria and Lebanon but in Amman there were quite a lot.A lot more things were in English which was helpful and we didn't see any kids running around with toy guns or the sporadic noise of fireworks!Also there are far fewer political posters everywhere here, actually there are hardly any compared to Syria!A much less police and army presence too.One thing that was the same was the number of stray cats, everywhere we've been in the Middle East we've seen them, they look very wild, its really sad I wish they all had nice homes to go to!!
On our first night we had dinner in a really nice western type place up a big hill where they actually served alcohol; the food was really good too!The following day we visited some old Roman ruins where they had an incredible roman theatre that is cut into the side of a hill and can hold 6000 people; it was really steep and was built in the 2nd century AD.They sometimes still use it today for performances.There was also a citadel up a huge hill which Greg went to, I needed an afternoon nap after being kept awake the previous night from inconsiderate people at the hotel!
On our second day we took a day trip to the Dead Sea, which is the lowest point on earth.We left Amman in a taxi and after about half an hour we could feel it getting warmer, the difference in temperature was amazing and once we got to the beach at the Dead Sea only an hour later it was warm enough to take all our winter gear off and go swimming!!We arrived before all the tour groups got there so the beach was pretty empty which was great!The water was a little cold initially but once we got in it was nice, it was the most bizarre feeling, as soon as we got in just over waist deep our legs just popped up to the surface and we just floated there like a cork and it's impossible to sink, it felt really weird!The shore was crusted with salt and you could see it in the water, which was quite filmy and when I accidentally got some in my mouth it was so salty and disgusting!It was nice to just float in the water, you don't even move much, there didn't seem to be any kind of current and there were no waves.
There was a guy with a bucket full of mud which you could cover yourself with, so Greg and I both gave ourselves a mud bath, I think we looked pretty funny, we had to keep the mud on ourselves for at least 20 minutes then we rinsed off in the sea, our skin felt really smooth afterwards.By that time the beach had started to get quite busy and the sun had gone behind clouds so I think we were there at just the right time!We got dressed and then went back down to the beach and watched a band making their music video which was really interesting, they played the same song over and over again trying to get the video right, they were quite good.
There were a lot of people wandering around covered in mud which looked quite funny.The Dead Sea is only 17km wide so we could see the Israeli coastline really clearly.Because it's so close to Israel we had to go through a checkpoint where we got our passports checked and bag searched and as we drove off we noticed a massive tank on the side of the road with a man sitting inside with its cannon pointed right at the traffic!That evening we had dinner at one of the sweets shops, dinner was pretty plain but dessert was amazing!!We had a platter of Arabian sweets, all of which contained pistachio nuts and were incredibly delicious!!
The following day we checked out of the hotel in Amman and took a minibus to a town called Wadi Musa which is where you stay to go and visit Petra.We went to the hotel we wanted to stay at and they were very welcoming, we just wanted to know if they had a room for two nights but they insisted we sit down and have some tea, the staff were sitting around watching TV and no one seemed to know if there was a room or not, finally a guy arrived and after putting the heater on for us, saying 'g'day mate' a million times to Greg, telling us horror stories about other travellers then excusing himself so he could go and pray, we finally got told that they did have a room available and took us there.At least in our room there we had our own bathroom, it was pretty narrow though with about 5 inches between the edge of the toilet seat and the wall which meant some serious manoeuvring!!So far none of the hotels in Jordan have had wireless internet access so Greg has become obsessed with winning at Solitaire, and will repeat the same game over and over until he wins; at least the laptop is coming in handy for something!
We went to Petra the following day, it really was incredible!We started out early and spent the whole day wandering though this ancient city carved into rocks, so amazing!There were so many tour groups there we couldn't believe it, I think it would have to have been the highest concentration of foreigners we have seen anywhere in the Middle East!By the time we got back to the hotel that night we were exhausted and had dinner there which was really nice, although the hotel was freezing cold and they had a gas heater with only one bar on, there was quite a large group of us in the lounge but they still wouldn't turn on the heating for us, seems to be the story for pretty much everywhere we've been.Back up in our room the heating had been turned on but we only had luke-warm water in the shower and the heater went off after a couple of hours so it was pretty freezing!
The next morning we took a taxi to Wadi Rum, we had decided to treat ourselves for Christmas Eve and Christmas night by staying at a hotel in the desert that looked really nice on their website and actually had a double bed and en-suite bathroom and even wireless internet, unfortunately that wasn't the case when we arrived.Despite calling numerous times to confirm and reconfirm our reservation, our room was unavailable when we arrived at noon, we sat around for 7 hours with the guarantee of the room we'd booked with double bed and ensuite until the couple in our room finally came back to the hotel and said they weren't moving.In the process of the argument with the manager that followed we found out that the room not only didn't have internet but didn't even have a bathroom, or heating! We had been told (it also said that on the website and pricelist) that we would have an ensuite bathroom, this was important as the last two places we've stayed have had really awful bathrooms! We were pretty angry, the manager tried to just put us in a crappier room with single beds but we were adamant that we should get the room we had booked, even if it didn't have an ensuite bathroom! Greg tried to resolve the issue diplomatically but I ranted and raved and yelled until finally he buckled and gave us what we wanted including two glasses of wine on the house.We're yet to decide whose method was more effective in getting what we wanted...although I do think that it was because of me that we got the free wine!We had dinner then retired to our freezing room that was nothing more than a box with a double bed, going to the bathroom involved getting fully dressed and walking about 100 metres outside where it was even colder to shared bathrooms!And to top it off we could hear the guy in the room next door snoring.We should have known there was something wrong with the place, while we were waiting for our room another family were seriously complaining about their jeep excursion into the desert that had been ruined, the manager just didn't care.
The next morning we left first thing, we just wanted to get out of there, luckily we hadn't paid anything in advance so we could just pay for the one night rather than two. We had wanted to do a camel trip into the desert on Christmas day that we thought we could arrange through the hotel but it turned out unsurprisingly that they couldn't help us with that either.We got a ride to the Wadi Rum visitors centre to arrange a camel trip through them for the day, they told us that they only do jeep tours, and that we had to go to Rum village and just find someone with camels and the only way to get there was to hitchhike.It was seriously starting to feel like no one was going to help us!!We had all our bags with us, so we went and stood on the side of the road and tried to hail a ride.Eventually someone picked us up and took us to RumVillage, we left our bags at a guest house there and then wandered up the road looking for someone with camels.We went into a shop to ask a man if we were going in the right direction, he told us to sit down and offered us coffee and said he would get a guide.Eventually we got a guide and sorted out a price, the guide took us to his house and we sat down on a mat and drank tea while he got the camels ready.
We set off on the camels for our 4 hour camel trip, Greg and I had a camel each.The guide gave me the rope for my camel which was the lead camel, and wandered along behind us. He would call out occasionally to let me know if we had to change direction and I would move my camels' head in the direction we were going.We walked for almost 2 hours past lots of dramatic rock scenery and some sand dunes and ended up at some Nabataean rock paintings that were drawn 2000 years ago.The Nabataean's were the Arabs who controlled the Frankincense trade routes of the region in pre-Roman times.They were really amazing, the pictures were mainly of camels, it was really nice that Greg and I were the only ones there, apart from our guide with the camels who had parked up next to some scrubs which the camels were eating.We started on our journey back and we switched camels so Greg could have a go on the camel that was walking in front, unfortunately the guide had changed the roping of the camels and it had made the camel I went on extremely uncomfortable!So for the journey back Greg and I swapped having turns on the uncomfortable camel (the other one was completely fine!), by the time we got back to the village I was on the bad camel and was in pain with each step taken, it was good to get off!!We are both in such pain now, it hurts for both of us just to sit down because of each of our turns on the uncomfortable camel!!When we got back to the village we paid the guide and found a taxi to take us to Aqaba.
The desert around Wadi Rum was so busy, there were a lot of tourists doing camel trips and heaps were doing 4WD trips, we couldn't believe how many jeeps were speeding through the desert full of tourists.While we were there we overheard quite a few people complaining and heard some pretty bad stories.I think unless you're on a package tour then Wadi Rum is a real tourist trap, it is quite difficult to get around unless you're on a tour or you have your own car.Most of the other tourists we saw were tour groups, I think a lot of places aren't used to catering for the independent traveller which certainly made things more difficult for us!
We were quite glad to leave Wadi Rum after our bad experience at the hotel, and dealing with people there was quite difficult, it was just one of those places you inevitably go when you're travelling that is constantly bombarded with tourists so it really affects the atmosphere of the place, especially when people there just see all tourists as walking wallets, if you're travelling independently you notice it a lot more because you are always dealing with people for everything, rather than the people in the tour groups who have their tour leader to do all that kind of work and prices are set by travel agencies back home.So we left in the taxi to Aqaba which is a port town near the border with Israel on one side and Saudi Arabia on the other and across the Gulf of Aqaba is Egypt, which was our next destination!
Since it was Christmas day we decided to stay in a slightly nicer place in Aqaba and have a nice meal out, we checked into a hotel that was nice - by Jordanian standards - and had a nice view and spacious room.There was a place recommended in the Lonely Planet that sounded really nice for dinner, finding it however, was impossible.We wandered around the streets trying to figure out the map in our guidebook and eventually decided to get a taxi, the taxi driver couldn't speak English but kept nodding when we said the name of the restaurant so we got in with high hopes of just turning up at the restaurant, also he turned his meter on and said we'd get the fare from the meter - most taxi drivers refuse to do that for tourists as they can just pretend not to understand you and say the meter is broken, then negotiate a higher price.It turned out the driver didn't know where the restaurant was, he stopped and asked people a couple of times and even called someone on his mobile who spoke some English and put Greg on the phone to them!We were driving around in circles in an area that had lots of restaurants so eventually I said we should just get out and go to one of the places we could see rather than trying to find the nice place and having to pay more for the taxi.At that point the meter conveniently broke, and the driver refused to give us change, telling us that the meter was broken (a bit of a circular argument).This was breaking point for Greg and he just threw the money and stormed off.We found a place to eat that was full of tourists so we figured it must be good, we just wanted to go somewhere that had English menus, helpful staff that spoke English, good food and we were both in desperate need of an alcoholic drink!The place we went had all of that, of course all by Jordanian standards but it was still good, we had a really nice meal and some lovely wine and walked back to the hotel, it turned out after all that we weren't even that far away from it!!So what was supposed to be a bit of a splurge for a couple of days over Christmas turned into a total disaster, no amount of planning could have changed it, it was just bad luck.
That night we finally had a good nights sleep in a warm room in a comfortable double bed with en-suite bathroom that actually had hot water (after we made the standard phone call to reception and asked them to turn the hot water on).In the morning we took a taxi to the port for the ferry to Nuweiba in Egypt.From the moment we arrived at the terminal things were pretty confusing, there were a few other backpackers around that we briefly chatted to and exchanged any knowledge about the ferry.We had to get our tickets from one counter, then go to another counter to pay for them, then back to the first counter to have them stamped.Then we had to pay the departure tax from an office downstairs, then go to the passport control desk and get our passports stamped, it was all very confusing over what counter did what and where we had to go first.The ferry was supposed to leave at noon but we were later told that it would now depart at 2pm, so we had about 3 - 4 hours to wait.There were a lot of stray cats running around the terminal, I can't believe how many there have been throughout the places we have visited in the Middle East!One cat was trying to be really smoochy to me and wanted to play, I felt so bad for it!!Later we watched the same cat climb into a couple's backpack and drag out a black plastic bag that obviously had food in it.After alerting them to the thieving cat, it ran away, and a staff member chased it out of the terminal.The cat ran off with the bag though, he was pretty determined to keep it!!
Getting onto the ferry was an interesting experience, no one knew what was going on and everyone was just standing around, then the buses with the tour groups all drove towards the ferry so everyone started walking, some people started running, then a bus arrived so we just got on that and it took us to the ferry.The ferry was filthy, despite the fact it had been docked in port since we arrived there before 10am no one had bothered to clean it.We didn't end up departing until 3:30pm, we were told the journey would take one hour and it took an hour and a half, we were quite pleased with that as we were thinking it might take anywhere from 2 to 5 hours from stories we'd heard!
When the boat docked we all stood by the exit doors for about half an hour waiting to be let out and wondering when we would get our passports back (we'd handed them in when we got on the boat to get our Egyptian visas).Finally they opened the doors and we got off the boat, there was a bus that looked like we had to get on, so we jumped on that and it took us to the arrivals terminal.We had bumped into some other backpackers while waiting to disembark the ship, there were about 6 of us, we all went into the arrivals terminal and went through a security checkpoint, then we stood on the other side where we were told to wait for 5 minutes to get our passports back.After a couple of minutes a guy who spoke Arabic as well as English told us all we had to go back outside to get our passports, so we went back through security the wrong way and followed him.We ended up going into all these different banks and offices and in each one being told to go somewhere else, it was very confusing.Eventually we found the right one and we paid some money and got a visa, then we had to go around the corner to another building where we got our passports back and they stuck the visa in the passport.After all that we had to re-enter the arrivals terminal and go through security again which by this point was chaos with people everywhere all pushing to get their bags on the conveyer belt.Once through, we got called back over to a bench where a man asked us if we had whisky, at first we thought he was offering us some then it came clear that he was just checking if we were bringing alcohol into the country.
After that we finally made it out the other side of the building, the 6 of us all shared a service taxi to Dahab, luckily we were all going to the same place and could share the cost.Once in Dahab we were just dropped off on the side of the road and it took a bit of walking and asking questions until we figured out where we were and how to get to the area where the hotels are.Greg and I found the hotel we wanted to stay at only to discover it was fully booked, our second choice was also full.So we settled for another hotel which was less than perfect but we were getting desperate at that point as it was almost 9pm.The room was pretty gross and the bathroom was really bad.Earlier I had been telling Greg stories about when I travelled in South America and in all the toilets you couldn't flush toilet paper, you had to put it in a bin next to the toilet which Greg thought was the most repulsive thing he'd ever heard and couldn't believe everyone didn't have the plague!So it was quite ironic after we'd checked into the hotel and we realised that you couldn't flush toilet paper and had to put it in a bin!!We went out for dinner with the other backpackers we'd met on the ferry which was nice and sat in a restaurant right by the waters edge and toasted to finally making it to Dahab!
The next morning we went wandering around the other hotels looking for somewhere better that had a room available, we found a perfect place with a nice room with double bed and a clean ensuite with a toilet that can handle toilet paper!!So we checked out of the other place and checked in here, which is where we are now.It is right on the beach which is nice, the beach isn't all that great but it's nice to hear the waves.We're planning on spending the next 3 nights here, there are lots of restaurants and places that serve alcohol which is great.It is very much just set up for tourists, especially people who want to go scuba diving or snorkelling, when we arrived we thought it looked more like Brighton than somewhere in Egypt, but at least it is a very easy rest stop before we head to Cairo.We take a bus to Cairo on the 29th and spend 3 nights there over New Years.We hope you all had a really nice Christmas, we were thinking of everyone back home eating yummy food and being nice and warm!!Our next update will probably be after New Years, so hope you all have a great New Years!! xx
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