Holidays in Jordan

Posted on 2009/08/20 14:02:35 (August 2009).

[8th August - 19th August 2009]

This year the holidays have been decided at the very last moment, and until the very last week they were not sure either for a problem that Chiara had at work and that was dealt with only at the very last.

Still we did manage to go on holiday which I guess it's a very positive thing, to Jordan to be more precise.

To me it was the very first time in the Middle East, and I must say that we have had a very good time, and everything went well, despite our worries before leaving.

I will post the pictures at a later stage, but the trip saw us going to several places with a rented car and then ending with 2 days spent in Aqaba just to relax.

We landed in Jordan on the 8th with a flight from Rome, at dusk. It wasn't too hard to find our car fortunately, and soon after collecting our baggages we were on the way to Madaba, a city near Amman (the capitol), where we established a sort of "base camp" for the next 3 days.

In the northern part of Jordan there are several things to see but we had to narrow down the selection to:

-Roman ruins in Jerash (the biggest in the middle east)
-Ajun Castle
-Bethany over the Jordan (Baptism site of Jesus Christ)
-The DEAD Sea (one of the greatest and funniest experiences of my life, water is TRULY salted, and you do float with hardly little chance to go underwater)
-Ma'in Hot springs (wow truly restoring site despite some pools being around 50 degrees Celsius!!)
-Madaba and all its mosaics and churches
-Karak and Shobak with its Crusader Castle and Mukavir that has the ruins of another castle that apparently belonged to Herod where Saint John the Baptist was beheaded.

Then we moved to Petra for 2 days, that was certainly the highlight of the holiday. The site is truly stunning and it deserves the 7th Wonder of the Modern World award. There is a lot to walk around Petra, we ended up walking up and down the mountains and hills for more than 12 kilometers every day that we were there.

The Wadi Rum, the desert, where we spent the whole day travelling around the desert with a Jeep and in the night we slept in a camp right in the middle of nothing, where we could see a marvellous sky at night. One of the things that I like best of the desert is the silence. You can almost touch it, smell it. It's great and sometimes I wish I had the chance of switching off all sounds and noises around me...

After the night in the desert we moved to Aqaba where we stayed at this resort just to chill out and rest, the whole trip has been pretty "heavy duty" stuff, we had a lot of early morning wake up calls and we drove almost 1000 kilometres around Jordan in 8 days.

The food has been marvellous, people are really welcoming and apart from Petra (where they try to sell something all the time) people were never a problem at all, much better than Morocco for example.
There is this thing that foreigners have to pay more than locals, it's right in your face, Jordanians have different tickets and different fares, but all in all it's something that we could live with.

Fortunately the small restaurants where we went to eat were too shocked at seeing some foreigners to remember to overcharge us, so at least some of the food was bought at "decent" prices.

All the trip was organized by the renown "Adventures with Lorenzo" company, and actually I was quite satisfied with the schedule that we made, there could have been a couple of sites worth checking out, but the important thing is that we had fun and that the holiday was good!

Jordan is certainly a place to go and see, I strongly recommend it!

Just to let you know other people do read your site and occasionally leave comments! i look forward to seeing the pictures of Petra. We visited a pink village in France called Collognes le Rouge but I bet it wasn't a patch on Petra.

Posted by John's Mum at 2009/08/20 17:38:28.

JM: Thanks!! Well I am sure that I do not have half of the readers that John has, but it doesn't matter, as I wrote on his post I write because I like it (although I have been a slacker recently). Anyways! Pictures are going to arrive soon, there are far too many to add on the site so I need to run a selection on them first. Thanks for reading and posting anyways! Comments are always appreciated! :D

Posted by lox at 2009/08/20 17:44:35.

Looking forward to seeing the pictures, Lox - sounds like you had a superb time!

Posted by Bryan at 2009/08/20 20:09:29.

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