I've been in Jordan now since Sunday, traveling from Aqaba to Petra to Amman. We left our hotel in Dahab around 10am on Sunday to head to the bus station. There we waited for the 10:30 bus, which showed up around 11:30am to take us up to Nuweiba (that's Egyptian time for you...). Once we arrived in Nuweiba, JM and Lindsay went ahead while I hung back with a few guys we'd met in the bus station (Joe, who's American and Christian, who's German) so I could stop at the bank to get some American dollars to pay for the ferry. Once we finally found the ticket office, which was a challenge, we bought our tickets and headed over to entrance to the port. JM and Lindsay were already inside. Someone who worked at the port saw the tickets Joe, Christian and I were holding and rushed us through all the lines, just in time to wait a few hours. We were originally told the ferry left at 1:30. Then 2. Then 2:30. It left after 4:30. Once again, Egyptian time.
We arrived in Aqaba and checked in with immigration, then found our way to our hotel. The hotel was much nicer than we had expected, especially considering how cheap it was. We ate dinner and went to sleep, having had a tiring day of travel.
The next morning, we woke up around 8am to get ready to leave Aqaba for Petra. We were originally going to take a bus there, but our cabbie convinced us that we should have him take us all the way up to Petra, which turned out to be only a bit more expensive and we were able to stop and see a lot of sights along the way. It was definitely worth the extra.
Once we arrived in Petra, we checked into our hotel, then headed to see the ruins in Petra. Petra was absolutely beautiful; it was the capital of a society around 100 BC and consists of several buildings built into the side of the mountains.
Toward the end, we accidentally climbed a mountain... in flip-flops. We didn't realize we were climbing a mountain until we were a significant way up and we weren't done climbing; we thought it would be just a few stairs up to a higher area since we were walking through a valley and there were other places built higher than the path level but not on the top.
Once we reached the top, we were absolutely exhausted, that having been the second mountain we'd climbed in 3 days. We vowed not to climb any more mountains this vacation, descended and made it out of the park just after dark.
Once again, we returned to the hotel, having little energy to do much outside eat dinner and sleep, but we ended up spending a few hours over dinner and tea, sitting with the owner of the hotel and chatting about all sorts of topics. He had lived in PA for a few years and had some very interesting perspectives about the Middle East and the viewpoints of Americans.
This morning, we got going a little later than we had hoped, but we made it to Amman via mini-bus (well, medium-sized bus) at around 2pm and checked into our hotel. This hotel is actually run by the brother of the owner of the hotel we stayed in last night; he had recommended it to us and made a call to get us reservations. It's not quite as clean as last night's, but it is a bit cheaper and definitely still worth it.
Next 24 hours: dinner in Amman, probably Dead Sea tomorrow morning, flight at 7pm to Beirut!
Kevin
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