With a five hour wait at the ferry station (which resulted in the creation of my first blog entries) we finally made it to Jordan. We met up with a bunch of French Canadians and some Finnish people. We ended up sharing a cab with the Finnish people for a 2 hour ride to Wadi Musa (Moses Valley) outside of Petra. The cab ride annoyed me (perhaps lack of sleep) with the Finnish guy and the Arabic driver attempting to speak English to eachother... Neither of you are doing it right, kept running through my head.
Our taxi driver refused to take us to our chosen hotel and took us to his friends hotel. We are no fools. The Lonely Planet warned us about this. It also said that the hotel operater would then tell us that the hotel we wanted to go to had burnt down. When we arrived at the suggested hotel, they told us the other hotel had burnt down. This is where things got weird, Yode implied that he was lying. He then told us to leave as he was a Muslim man and did not lie. In fairness to Yode, we had not found this to be universally true. However, as he had offered us good deal, a broken English apology session then ensued and we ended up staying at the hotel. We later found out the other hotel had burnt down.
Petra-What can we say? No really, what can we say? We would need a thesaurus to accurately describe this incredible site, now voted one of the new wonders of the world. We spent 10 hours walking/hiking/exploring this park. The only mild set back was not packing a lunch as the Lonely Planet had told us, it is not like the Lonely Planet is always right... There was the taxi driver incident. So we hiked this world wonder on one snickers bar and a banana each.
Since we had finally established some trust with the hotel, they arranged a private tour of the rest of the sites in Jordan that we wanted to see. First stop, bathroom on the side of the road, do you guys think Yodi is ok? Dairn? Second, third and fourth stops, castles and pretty things. Apparently some Christian Soldiers came through her on some sort of "crusade"?
Fifth stop THE DEAD SEA!! They say this is the hottest place on earth. I don't think "they" have been to Luxor. This is the saltiest sea in the world, with 33.7% salinity and growing. As we had chosen to visit the Dead Sea on the Jordan side, wearing our bathing suits caused a bit of a stir. We also covered ourselves in dead sea mud, we are not sure why, but we no longer dared doubt the Lonely Planets advice. Although everybody knows you can float in the dead sea, our first words to eachother were "hey you really can float in this!" A very weird sensation.
A few girls wanted to take our picture and practice their English. Which was good, but consisted of " Where are you from?" and " What is your name?" and "Welcome to Jordan!" I loved the Jordanian people, they were so friendly and welcomed us every chance they got. We later found out that they use welcome as hello and good-bye.
We left the Dead Sea, after a quick stop by Mt. Nebo to view "The Land of Milk and Honey" Moses style, we proceeded to the town of Madaba. There we discovered even buying beer in this country was easier. The liquor store clerk gave us some excellent advice: " When we drink we get drunk. When we are drunk we go to sleep. When we sleep we don't sin. When we don't sin we go to heaven. So we should all drink and go to heaven." Any guesses on what religion he was? I don't know, I would have picked Calvinist if that didn't seem highly unlikely.
The next day we proceeded to Israel...
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