Day 2 Sunday 30th May 2010, Madaba-Wadi Musa.

'Ahmed and the big fat stitch up'

Breakfast was an interesting mix of pitta bread with cold scrambled egg, jam and Nescafe, which here as in many parts of Asia is thought of as a kind of coffee rather than a brand. Its either Nescafe or Turkish coffee!

After breakfast we arranged to rent a car with the help of the very nice lady in hotel reception, from reliable rent a car. They offer a great service, dropping the car off at the hotel and when we are finished we just leave it in the airport car park. Its so easy it should be called Easyrent, but I think that already exists elsewhere!

There really isn't much to do in Madaba; there's the church with a really old mosaic map of the middle east on the floor, an archelogical site with more mozaics and shops full of yet more mosaics! I suppose its a good place to come if you like mosaics, so we left!

We headed of on the kings highway to Karak in our dark red Skoda Sushi (or something like that) We stopped there to visit the fort which was from the times of the crusaders and bloody massive!

Afterward we decided to have some tea and a bit of humous, with Mr. Fat 'you are most welcome' Ahmed. What a stitch up, he tried to charge us 19.50 dinars, which is £20! Eventually after some discussion we negotiated this down to 14 dinars but still this guy is taking the piss! It seems this is going to be an expensive trip!

From Karak it is a longer than anticipated drive to Wadi Musa and Petra, made even longer by getting lost two or three times on the way! Eventually we arrive about two hours late to find our reservations have been totally screwed up and Cris and Keith have a triple room (no we are not with child yet!) and Margot and Iwona a very dodgy twin room, at least its clean though!