Hike and Camp in Petra and Wadi Rum

Unlike most trips to Jordan, on this adventure with Explore, I got to camp Bedouin-style in both Petra and Wadi Rum in the desert!  So not only did we all enjoy magical night skies away from the bustling crowds in town, we also got to hike in to Petra before the mass of tourists arrived.  On today’s podcast, I tell you all about my Jordan adventure, including a week in the capital of Amman, eight days hiking and camping in Wadi Rum, Petra and Little Petra, plus a soak and mud scrub in the Dead Sea, a stop at Mount Nebo and more!  Discover why Jordan is considered one of the friendliest countries in the world!

Where is Jordan and is Jordan Safe?

Jordanian Borders

Jordan, officially called the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, is an Arab country in the Middle East.  It is located on the East Bank of the Jordan River (and has a 26 km coastline along the Red Sea further south) and is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the south, Israel and the Palestinian West Bank to the west, Iraq to the north east and Syria to the north.  

Is Jordan Safe for Solo Travel?  Is Jordan safe for women to visit?

I found Jordan to be extremely hospitable and safe!  While I was with a group for half of my time in Jordan, I also traveled as a solo female for a week and had nothing but pleasant experiences.  While I traveled solo, for ease of transportation, I hired a private driver to take me to an interesting place for several days and stayed in a wonderful apartment in Amman at night.

The tourist areas of Jordan are safe, but of course you need to take standard precautions.  It is not recommended to go anywhere near the Syrian or Iraq borders.  The locals know so always ask if you aren’t sure.  You can also get update from the US State Department here.

My friend, Sherry Ott of the Ottsworld travel blog assured me before I went that the Jordanian people are the friendliest she’d ever met and I couldn’t agree more!  I had the opportunity to meet several locals during my week in Amman, and even got invited to a birthday party.  I hired the man who managed the apartment I rented in Amman to take me to the airport.  To make sure he didn’t oversleep, he spent the night on the terrace under the stars.  You can read Sherry’s post about the friendliness of the Jordanese people HERE.

Hiking in Wadi Rum

One of the highlights of my trip was our two day hiking and camping adventure in Wadi Rum, made internationally famous by Lawrence of Arabia. Wadi Rum is also known as the Valley of the Moon.  ‘Wadi’ is Arabic for valley, and Wadi Rum is Jordan’s most famous wadi for good reason:  the desert valley is punctuated with striking rock formations of sandstone and granite.  It looks otherworldly and the photos simply do not do it justice!

We hiked in the desert sands, so we got to get up close and personal with the landscape.  At night, we camped in a remote campsite.  With zero light pollution, the night sky put on a show for us every evening.  Those that don’t want to hike can always take a jeep or all terrain ATV 4×4 tours of Wadi Rum, but if you are capable and don’t mind camping, this is the way to go.  You can also take Arabian night horse or camel treks, or go rock climbing on the massive and jaw dropping cliffs and rock formations in Wadi Rum.

Camping in Wadi Rum

I was lucky and got to spend two nights Bedouin-style with the Zalania Bedouins in a traditional bedouin tent.  These tents are horizontally black and white striped fabric of woven black goat fur and white sheep’s wool and are decked out with comfortable cots, a Persian rug to keep the sand out of your bed, and even an electric light at night!  Even though a couple of hundred tourists were camping in Wadi Rum while I was there, the area is so vast that we couldn’t see anyone else from our stunning horseshoe-shaped canyon.  We felt like the only ones in the desert!

Abdul, who set up our camp and made our meals (he would meet us out in the desert in time for us to enjoy a picnic lunch!) always made sure we were comfortable and well fed with traditional bedouin dishes.  Our local tour and hiking guide, Saleh, is also quite knowledgable and enhanced our experience. 

Somehow in this desert, Abdul always manages to find brush so we can enjoy a campfire every morning and night. 

There is always traditional mint tea whenever we are resting and with every meal.  To properly prepare our pita, Abdul teaches us how to bake it on the coals of the fire pit until it’s properly crisp.  He shows us, too, how a burning branch when transforming into coal ash, forms a circle as it dies… the circle of life.

Sitting around a campfire with locals like Saleh and Abdul, we get to know their culture better than we would otherwise.  I learn not to ask a  Bedouin a direct question, like, “Do you have children?”.  They prefer that you learn from each other indirectly through inference the answers to personal questions.  So I learn to wait until a child is mentioned in a story.  One of the things I most love about travel is seeing how different cultures think, feel and do, but also I love finding the common ground. 

Hiking Petra

Whereas Lawrence of Arabia introduced Wadi Rum to much of the world, Indiana Jones did the same for Petra. 

One of the great things about my trip with the Explore tour company is that not only did we get to hike and camp two days in Wadi Rum, but also in Petra!  Most tours only spend a day in Petra and by the time they arrive, it’s very crowded.

In contrast, we camped in a bedouin-styled tent that Abdul had to tear down each night – Abdul even going so far as to move all the camp fires rocks back to where they belong so that there was no sign of our visit.  

On the second day, we got up early and walked in to Petra to the Monestary coming in from the rear, so we got to enjoy much of these incredible structures without other tourists.

In 1985, UNESCO named it a World Heritage Site claiming Petra as “one of the most precious cultural properties of man’s cultural heritage”.  Not surprisingly, Petra, also known as “Rose City” for the rose colored stone, is Jordan’s most popular tourist attraction, getting over a million visitors each year, so camping to avoid the crowds made us doubly grateful!  

Petra itself is a world wonder!  This area has been inhabited for about 7000 years and Petra was a main commercial trading area along the Silk Road.  

This area became the capital for the Nabataeans around the 4th century BC.  The Nabataeans were masterful carvers as evidenced by the Treasury and the Monastery, which were carved into the sides of the sandstone rock mountain and remain visible today. 

In addition to trading and carving skills, the  Nabataeans was masters at collecting the water in this desert landscape.  You see evidence of the canals use to collect the rainwater as you enter Petra from the main Visitor’s Center.  You access the city of Petra via  a 1.2 km (0.75 mi) gorge called the Siq.  The side walls of the gorge dwarf the visitor, and then eventually open up to the “Treasury”, Petra’s most famous site.

The Treasury is believed to be the tomb of the Nabatean King Aretas IV during the 1st century AD.  It is a magnificent structure carved out of the side of the mountain.  Locals Bedouins believed it contained treasures, thus giving it it’s nick name. 

Is Jordan Expensive?

I found Jordan to be very economical!  While I think I overpaid for my private driver those few days, my Explore tour was very reasonable as was my time in Amman.  My first meal, at the popular historic downtown restaurant, Hashem, cost under USD $5 – and it was a sit down restaurant and twice as much food as I could eat!

Can You Drink Alcohol in Jordan?

Alcohol is expensive as technically alcohol is forbidden for Muslims and is heavily taxed.  There are liquor stores where you can buy wine, beer and booze.  For whatever reason, you can find the easiest by looking for a green Amstel sign.  Just don’t be an ugly tourist and get drunk or unruly.  Like the dress code, please just be respectful of the culture.

How Long to Visit Jordan?

Plan on at least a week if you can.  Shoot for at least two days each in Wadi Rum and Petra, a couple of days exploring Amman, a visit to the Dead Sea and if you have time, also plan on hiking in some of the National Parks.  You will need a guide as I never saw any marked trails and you sure don’t want to get lost in the desert!  Your hotel or tour company can hook up up with one.

The Dead Sea in Jordan

One of the highlights of my trip was floating in the Dead Sea — AFTER I first scrubbed myself down in mud from the Dead Sea!  I swear I noticed an improvement in my skin!  Folks have flocked to the Dead Sea for its health benefits for centuries.  It was Herod the Great’s health resort!

The Dead Sea is the lowest elevation point on land on the Earth at 1412′ below sea level.  The Dead Sea itself is shrinking and Jordan is trying hard to build a Red to Dead canal (Red Sea to the Dead Sea) to not only save the Dead Sea, but to also foster relations between Israelis and Palestinians.

The Dead Sea is 32% salt, making it inhabitable for plants or animals.  Because of the salt levels, you float more than swim in the Dead Sea!  The Sea is ten times saltier than the ocean!  

Egyptians used asphalt from the Dead Sea in their mummifications.  Potash for fertilizer is still harvested from the Dead Sea.  I saw a Potash plant en route to my hike in one of the National Parks south of the Dead Sea.  

When to Visit Petra and Jordan

Deserts can experience extreme heat and cold, so the best times to visit is in the spring and fall:  March – May, and then again September – November.  I had lovely weather in October.  It was warm during the day but pleasantly cool at night.

Helpful Links

How to Choose a Tour Company

My tour company:  Explore out of the UK (be sure to use a No Foreign Transaction credit card!)

Solo Adventure Travel

Meet Saleh

Saleh was our guide with Explore! but he is also available for private tours throughout Jordan, whether strictly cultural or adventure touring like I did.  His English is excellent and he is very knowledgable about his country and its history, and loves to share it.  His warm smile and sense of humor also added to the joy of this adventure.  You can reach out to Saleh at JordaneTours.com.

Complete Transcript of the Jordan Adventure Podcast

Note that this is and unedited (AI) machine transcription and will contain some boo boos.  However, I offer this for those that prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast.  Please forgive any errors as I have only so many hours to devote to this show:)  Thanks!  Kit

Welcome to Jordan. Welcome to Jordan. Welcome to Jordan. I bet you I heard welcome to Jordan over a hundred times from the locals during my two weeks in Jordan last fall and my Jordan trip is part of this Epic. I went to four countries, Morocco, Jordan, Israel and Egypt, and out of all four of them, Jordan was my favorite. So if you’re like, Oh, I don’t think I could go to the Middle East. If you’re thinking Jordan in the middle East, Ooh, kit, too scary. I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to go there. I was like you. Once upon a time. I’m going to change your mind on that today. Instead of thinking scary, I want you to think Indiana Jones and Petra. I want you to think Lawrence of Arabia and Wadi rum, which by the way was my favorite. I want you to come in with this mindset because we’ve got it all wrong folks. Keep your mind open until you hear today’s episode and you’ll find out why. Not only do I recommend you go to Jordan, I think you had to move it up the list. It’s a great country to visit and the people are so warm and welcoming. My friend Sherry Ott from Ottsworld told me that Jordan, out of all the countries she’s been doing, she’s like been everywhere. I’m like 90 countries something. Jordan was the most friendly of all countries. I have to agree.

So welcome to Jordan and let’s get started.

So in today’s episode we’re going to cover my two week adventure in Jordan. We’re going to learn where Jordan is. Is it safe for you to travel solo? I was there so little half the time. I’ll be able to tell you my experiences there. There are some fabulous adventure opportunities there, including hiking and camping out in the desert like a Bedouin. It was absolutely so cool. We’ll visit some of the key tourist attractions. We’ll float in the dead sea. In short, we’re just going to have a grand adventure. So once again, welcome to Jordan. When I landed in the Amman airport, the capital city of Jordan, I wasn’t as twitchy as I was when I first entered the middle East about six weeks prior. So I was feeling a little bit comfortable and I was starting my trip in Jordan on a tour. I supposed to be met at the airport and I get there and nobody’s there and I’m like, Hmm.

All right. So one of the drivers waiting for another guest from a different company was kind enough to let me use his phone to reach out to my tour company who assured me, no, don’t worry about it, just hang out in front of the Starbucks. We’ll be there in just a few minutes to pick you up. I was like, Ooh. That was nice that people were very nice to let me use his phone. Complete stranger. So anyhow, so that was started my journey. I get to the hotel, which is quite nice in downtown Amman and I’ve been traveling all morning. I was wanting to go someplace for lunch. So I ask at the front desk where they recommend I go for lunch and they said, Oh, definitely go to [inaudible], which was located about a mile or so downhill in the historic district. He tells me to just keep going downhill and eventually I’ll get down to this dark district.

Sounds easy enough. However, I’m a little bit unnerved because the drivers in the middle East are a little bit crazy and you’ll hear more of that. This I’m sure as the story goes on, you know they just kind of do what they want to do lines or just kind of a an idea, but you’ve observed them or not stop signs observed with them or not. So the scariest part that day was just crossing the street to get onto the main side so that I would enter into the historical area. On my way down, I see a sign and one of the windows saying, visitors welcome to this gallery. That was not like an art gallery. It was, it was more like a studio. And so I said, wow. At that they said, visitors welcome. So I walk in and these two gentlemen are sitting there having tea and they could tell I’m a tourist because I stand out like a sore thumb and that’s where I was from.

And we start chatting, they invite me for tea and we just have a nice little conversation. They want to know how to North Carolina get its name. I was like, I have no clue. I’ll need to look that up. And so we find out all about that. And so we have a nice little thing and they, they concurred that Hasheem was the place to go for lunch. And they asked me first, you know, would I like to see the mosaics upstairs? I was like, Oh God, here’s the pitch. Like the Turkish shrugs, I go up there. It was not a pitch, it was just so I could see how they make the mosaics. They didn’t offer me a business card, they didn’t offer to sell me anything. I was like, Oh, that’s different. I’m not seeing that in most places I’ve been to. So I was like, huh.

A kudos to them. So I’ve been my dues and I head down to the restaurant and I get there and there’s probably like one 30 in the afternoon and the place is hopping. I mean it is packed. I never saw so many people trying to eat, just unbelievable. And just waiters and trays and people and wait lists and all that. And so I finally get a table. I think the menu was on the board in Arabic. So that did me no good. And my waiter couldn’t speak English, but he did say vegetarian. And I didn’t know if I was saying yes, I’m vegetarian or I went vegetarian. I just nodded my head and whatever came in, that’s what I ordered. And I had platters upon platters of food. It was all delicious. More than twice what I could possibly eat. I didn’t know how much it’s gonna cost.

I get the bill, it’s three DNRs, which was less than $5 I couldn’t believe it. And so I also felt bad hanging out this table, take it up a table and this place was so crowded. So I did indicate to one of the head guys that I wouldn’t mind sharing. And so another woman traveling solo ended up joining me at the table. So that was nice to have a little conversation. And she’d been there a little bit longer than me. And so that was a nice little exchange and so after lunch I had to back up and just kind of chilled out. Traveling is a little bit tiring, so anyways, I just had the buffet at night and got a good night’s rest. The next morning I meet my tour group. I can already tell instantly I’m going to like these people. I find them these adventure travel tours that you’re already preselected to be likeminded and so I always meet some really, really cool people on these trips and generally make at least one new lifelong friend.

But before I go further, let me just back up just a minute. I want to tell you why I chose Jordan in the first place. So maybe a year before I went on this trip, I get an email from this company that announces a hiking trip in Jordan where the leader of the of the tour is going to be the very first Arab woman to do the seven summits and the seven summits is the highest peaks in each continent. And I was like, she’s a badass and also to be an Arab woman to do it when I’m sure that’s not normal for women to go hiking there. I said I want to meet her. So I signed up for the trip and that was the impetus of this whole Mideastern venture that I was in the middle East for two months cause it was kind of expensive to get there as like as long as I’m going to get there I’m was going to bang out the middle East while I’m there and said that’s what I did.

And then about a month before my, my departure I find out that the trip’s been canceled because they didn’t have enough people. It’s like, Oh boy, what am I going to do? And I had travel insurance so I could’ve gotten my money back. But I was like, you know, I built this whole trip around Jordan and out of all the countries that’s the place I’ve most wanted to go to. So fortunately I was interviewing Margaret who you heard on the Antarctica trip and she happened to be going to Jordan right before I was going. And so she introduced me to a company called explore. And fortunately they did have a space available. So I was able to go the following week on the exact same trip that she did. And boy am I glad I did because I had a great, great adventure. So off we go and our first stop is Wadi rum, which frankly I didn’t even know what that was.

Why do you rom translates in English to Valley of the moon. And that’s a great name for it. It is other worldly and spectacular. Wadi rum first became known to the outside world from the movie Lawrence of Arabia. And this is where Lawrence of Arabia actually lived. So it’s this huge, huge desert Valley where you have these granite outcroppings, which kind of reminds me of Uluru or Ayers rock in Australia and just these cliffs and they just jet out of the flat desert sand and they’re just spectacular. And I get it. So we have a small group, there’s just five of us. There’s a couple that everybody’s from, uh, England, except for me because the company was England based. And so we have a one married couple, a solo guy and a solo gal and myself and our guide Salai who is great. And then the camps where we stayed are run by the local bedwin people and they were great too.

So anyway, so we get to Wadi rum and we begin our hike and it’s just jaw droppingly. Beautiful. I want you to go to the website today to look at these photos and district member. It’s like a 10th of the actual beauty because the cameras just can’t capture it. They can’t capture the light, they can’t capture the scale. These were just magnificent. And they, the thing of it is, is this area is so vast that even though there was hundreds of other tourists out there, most of them were on the ATVs. Cause a lot of people can’t hike or they might’ve been on donkeys or horses or something. We hardly ever saw them because we’re all just scattered like roaches out in this vast desert. And this is not something you can go do by yourself. You need to have a guide because there’s no trail markers and it’s easy, easy, easy to get lost.

So you want to go with somebody that knows what they’re doing. So we ended up that night in this horseshoe Canyon. And like I said, we had, it was just our bed too intense. And this rock cliff, we’re surrounded by these cliffs that were just so tall and just unbelievably beautiful. And our tens I want to tell you about that. So these are in the traditional bedwin style. They’re made out of there. It’s a woven cloth of the, the two main animals of the Bedouins, the sheep. So the white little stripes in it is from the sheep hair. Sheep’s wool and the black is from the goats because that’s what you’re going to see a lot of. You’re gonna see a lot of goats, a lot of sheep, and my favorite, the little donkeys, they’re used for transport. And so you have these, these square tents, and you think, Oh, is 10 not going to be very nice inside? We had Persian rugs, so we weren’t tracking the sand into our beds. We had these nice comfortable cots and even at night they would, we had access to an electric light in our tent. So it was definitely glamping. And like I said, we had in our eyes, we could see nobody else. So it was like our little group had the entire desert to ourselves. There was no light pollution. So when the stars came out, the stars came out. Beautiful.

I don’t know how I met, always managed to get a fire going because there’s very little vegetation out there, but he always found kindling. So every breakfast we had kept far going to cook our breakfast and dinner as well as when we’d have a picnic, there was always a fire. So we could Bruce him tea, always mint tea, take that back. Not always mint tea, sometimes Sage tea, but always delicious. And in our campsite they made a nice little seating area around the campfire that was really nice. And then they had these bench like areas that a lot of the Bedouins would sleep out and under the stars each night. But we were welcome to. We want to, that was a possibility.

Wadi rum was magical. Our campsite spectacular. And I felt blessed to have two nights there. I was like, this is the way the door is going to be. I’m going to love Jordan. So the next day, again we’re doing the hiking and even though you’re like, Oh, it’s more rock, every turn, every corner was just breathtakingly beautiful. And the time of year that we went, I was there in October was perfect. So it was warm during the day, but not, I didn’t find it overly hot and the nights were cool because in the desert, remember once that sun goes down, all that he can dissipate. So you can’t go there year round. The summertime it’s going to be way too hot and the wintertime is just going to be way too cold. So the times to go are March through may to catch that spring season and then it cools down enough that you can go starting again in September through November. So I got there right in the sweet spot of fall.

Jordan has been building its tourism industry for about the last 20 years and the Jordanians realize now that this is like one of their most important industries cause Jordan does not have oil, they have phosphate. So their main export, they got the short straw when it came to the middle East oil bounty. And so they are also more stable than a lot of the countries there. They act as a peacemaker in many ways and when we get to the dead C-section, I’ll tell you a little bit about that. I found them to be very family oriented and very much of the live and let live philosophy. Those that I met just want peace in the middle East so people could just get on with their lives. And have a nice bump. The same thing I see with most people I meet across the world. They just want their families to be safe, their kids, to get a good education and for the kids to do better than they did. And it was evident with all the locals that I did meet. And in this trip I did get an opportunity, particularly in my last week when I was out on my own to meet a lot of the locals and they’re just like you and me.

I just realized, and I forgot to tell you where Jordan even is. Okay, so Jordan, which is officially called the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, is an Arabic country located smack in the middle East. It’s on the East bank of the Jordan river. From there, South is the dead sea and even further South from that is the red sea down at [inaudible]. So it’s Western border is basically Israel, speaking of which, it is one of the middle Eastern countries that does have official relationships with Israel. So you can go back and forth. It’s bordered by Saudi Arabia, which I was close enough to the Saudi border on my second week there that I could see the signs to the border. So it’s got Saudi Arabia to the South Israel and the Palestinian West bank to the West, Iraq to the Northeast and Syria to the North and on the U S state department. Travel warnings, the only area they tell you to to avoid is don’t go anywhere near the Iraq and Syrian borders just because of the conflicts up there, but throughout the rest of the country.

That’s just normal. Your biggest fear is the traffic. So whoever you have driving, you want to make sure you have a nice safe driver because that’s the scariest thing because like I said before, the lines don’t really mean anything. If there’s three cars in the two lanes or three of them all just won their way down the road and the three lanes and you just learned that they, they know if they honk, they’re telling you that they’re coming in, you better move and the local people know what to do. So we never had any close calls. Just in the beginning it was a little bit of nerving, but after awhile I was like, they, they’ve got this figured out that I never saw fender benders. I never saw an accident. And they’ve just got their way of driving. It’s just not our way of driving, but it seems to be working for them.

After two days of hiking and Wadi rum, it was time to head out to Petra, but we did leave just on foot or with an ATV, although you could have taken the APV if you want to. We left via camel, so yep. Back on a camp. I was one on one in Morocco. You may have seen that if you’ve got my newsletter, you saw my lovely photo of me playing, but a woman this time I let Frank use my Bedouin scarf and so we got him all dolled up. So he trekked out on camel with the rest of us. Rock on that Lawrence of Arabia. Look, camels are so cute. They had these beautiful, beautiful long lashes to keep the sand out of their eyes. And also because they’re kind of clunky, they have a really weird and disjointed way that they have to bend down and get on the ground so that you can Mount and dismount.

So that was always the most exciting part of the camel ride was getting up and then getting back down. So now it’s time for Petra. Petra, which you probably recognize from Raiders of the lost Ark is carvings in the side of the mountain that are so intricate and so large. And this is hundreds and hundreds of years later and they still stand. These were old tombs, the one that’s referred to as the treasury is believed to be the tomb of a former nebbishy and King. The Nabataeans were the folks that settled in this area back during the silk road days. And this is their capital at one time. And they just were fabulous carvers. They were great at collecting the water. So in the desert that was super important. And so the Petra area was the main commerce center for people that were traveling through on the silk road.

Okay.

And so they carved on the side of this mountain, this humongous building structure. And inside you can’t go inside. He can only see it from the outside, presumably was the, the body of the King. And since the local Bedouin, people believe treasures were in there. That’s how it got the name of the treasury. So this capital is that we’re talking like the fourth century BC.

This whole area has been inhabited for about 7,000 years. Uh, the Romans came in later, did their little parts. You can see some of their aqueducts and all that, and you’ll see some of the Roman ruins in the area. So it’s just an amazing historical area, but it’s also extraordinarily beautiful to get to the city of Petra. You take this, it’s, it’s not even a mile long walk through this Gorge called the seek. And you’ve got this, it’s a slot Canyon. So this massive walls on both sides of you that you can just barely see a little bit in the front. And as you’re walking, walking, walking down, you’d turn a little turn and then there is the treasury and you’re like, Oh my God, it is so big. And when you open up and then you see this open area, it’s huge. And it is breathtaking. So the carvings of this Mount, and this is added like a Rose colored sandstone. So it’s got this other world that color about it too, that makes it cool. And that’s also what gives Petra its nickname, the Rose city, not for the flower, but for the color of the sandstone.

You can get your picture taken on a camera in front of it. We were lucky enough and our trip, because we were actually camping in Petra, they don’t allow a lot of people to do that. But uh, this company has got one of the few permits that it’s allowed to do that. So even on the next day. So we saw the treasure in the first day. Another important carving out there is called the, but it’s a lot further away. So most tourists don’t even make it down that far because they can’t walk that far. We were hiking outside of the Petro area and came in from the back. So when we got to the monastery, no one hardly was there at all. So that’s one of the few photos I have of me in front of one of these structures with no other people around. That was great.

I want to tell you another funny story too. I don’t know why. It just cracks me up. So there’s a little area that you can get some tea and sit down and look at it. So we’d go up to get a drink. And my favorite, because I said did the tea all the time cause it’ll keep me up, but I would, so I was partial to the pomegranate juice. I see this group, they had just gotten their drinks and they’re there, the tourist area, so that a little bit more expensive. They’re probably four bucks or something. So this group sits down to enjoy their drinks and overlooking the monastery and the seats and the tables are really low so it’s barely even knee high and they put their drinks down. So while they’re sitting there, up comes this gray Wolf like dog and you’ll see a lot of stray animals, usually cats.

But this happened to be a dog. The dog’s nose stands at perfect table height, looks at them, looks at the drinks and just does this snorty sneeze all over their drinks. And I swear every time I think of it, it still cracks me up. I know that’s childish, but a look of horror, confusion. And finally laughter was priceless. I still, it was so funny and just their face looking, it just is no way they’re going to drink this drink. Would that dog snot all over it? It was so funny. It was one hunker of a wet sneeze and anytime I need a laugh, all I have to do with thing is think of that dog and that sneeze. It was, yes, I know it’s childish, but it was funny. My eyes are tearing up just telling you the story cause I swear it just cracks me up every single time I think of it.

It’s like the dog did it on purpose. It was. It’s still, you can hear my voice right now it’s just hysterical to me. But anyway I got to drink my pomegranate juice and look out over the monastery and enjoy some side hikes from there as well. So Petra, when you go there you want to try to stay at least two days because the typical tourists are going to stay in the town. They got to take a bus there. They all tend to get there at the same time so it’s all really crowded cause they get like a million visitors a year. It’s the number one tourist attraction in Jordan. So if possible you want to hook up so that you can camp outside. That was great. Or else you want to try to get there as early as possible because it is crowded and do take the time to go down to see the monastery.

That was wonderful as well. On the way back to camp that day we took us, like I said, you need to have a guide when you get out in the desert because it gets, everything kind of looks the same. Even though each bra cropping is different, it would be really easy to get lost and so we head back through this dry bed that that just from cascading debris up against some of the, the walls and alleys of the bed looked subject to flash floods. When it rained, you would see evidence of previous flash floods where debris was just piled up into a corner against the walls.

And remember how I you, the donkeys were my favorite and I forgot to tell you too that if you can’t walk you can take the donkeys in and out of hetro for fee. Of course, I love the donkeys. You’ll see them carrying people, you’ll see them carrying goods. The donkeys are a huge mode of transportation for the Jordanians, particularly in the countryside. And they always had these really pretty blankets that were woven with cool patterns and the weavings and Jordan were quite good. In fact, I want to tell you that the crafts in the stalls, the quality was much better in Jordan than I saw in other countries. And it was noticeable. I could see it in the, in the clothing and the windows as well as in the craft. So even though I don’t have room to buy a lot of tourist trinkets and stuff, I had noticed that there was a quality difference there.

And so I see in where it must have been like a flash flood or something, a little scrap of a donkey blanket. Of course it’s covered in donkey poo and God knows what. And I was like, Oh I want that. And it was like, Oh that’s disgusting. So I just picked it up as maybe two foot by a foot and I was like, no, I love this. And so I stuck it in my trashcan back cause it was kinda gross and waited til I got back, check a wash it. And then I washed up early when I got home. But I love that now freshly laundered of course rests on top of my toilet bowl tank and I love it. It gives you a smile everyday when I see it. So Sean, I know you looked at me with horror when I stuck that on my zip bag, but that is one of my treasures from my trip.

I actually get more pleasure from that than I do have the fancy mosaic table I bought. It makes me smile every single time. It makes me think of those cute donkeys and my trip to Jordan. So anyway, so I digress. So Petra, you want to take at least two days if you can. Most tours only gonna let you go there for one day. So that was another reason I like explore and that’s why Margaret picked explore cause she wanted two days in Petra. And I think you really do need the two days to really get the full flavor of it. Take some little side trails, what a little sidewalks I went to is up where they used to do sacrifices. It’s like 500 steps up and that was worth it just for the views. Have you tried to do Petra in one day? You’re pretty much going down to the treasury of back. Um, so anyway, so I love the way that we did it and we’ve got to be in areas away from the tourists. That was great. And another funny thing on the way back, so we’re in this Canyon near where I found the donkey blanket and I see this writing on the sides of the rock and I’m thinking it’s going to be something sacred and profound. And so I asked the lead, what does that mean? And he’s laughed. He said, it says Muhammad was here. So graffiti is everywhere, even in the sacred sites of Jordan.

Also on the way back to camp, we had noticed it in the morning. It looked like some kind of a road that was on the sides of the roads were lined with tires and we didn’t really know what it was. On the way back, we see it was horse racing. The tires were outlining a horse track, and we’re out in the middle of nowhere. So at the end of the day, after work, the locals would come out and reach their horses. That was kind of fun to watch and that was a little bit different. I loved our dinner that night. It was one of their classic dishes. I think they called up Manasseh off, and it’s a a lamb dish with rice and almonds and yogurt. It’s, it’s the Bedouins company dish or special dish. And it’s quite the presentation when they turn it upside down and every night we had something really special and it was always so good. So I’ve really, really enjoyed the food in Jordan as well.

And I want to talk a little bit about sitting around the campfire to PETA. The pita bread is common with every meal and they prepare it really interesting out in the desert. So like I said, we always had our traditional minty. That was nice. I could drink that up to lunchtime after that. It would keep me up at night. So, but it was very, very satisfying. So I can see why they do drink the mint tea. Sometimes you’d be Sage tea is delicious with every single meal. Every time we took a rest break we had tea, but to properly prepare our pitas, we’d take the the untested one and then we are shown how to put them right on the coals of the fire to the crisp up a little bit. And that was kind of sweet. The food was always excellent. There was always plenty of food. I was always really tasted and there’s enough variety that you could always find something to eat.

Once we finished with Wadi rum and Petra, it was onto the dead sea and the dead sea, if you’re not familiar, that is the lowest elevation on land on the planet. It sits at over 1400 feet below sea level and the water in the dead sea as 32% salt. And because of that, that makes it inhabitable for plants and animals. So that that’s why it’s dead, that nothing can live in there. And because of those high salt levels, you actually float. You can’t swim because it just bobs you like a cork to the top. So that’s kind of fun. So we will get there. You have a choice. You can just go in the dead sea to swim or you can go over and get the mud. And so everybody in that group, so I was with Hazel, Sean, Frank and Felicity. And so we decided we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to get the mud scrub.

So you could either have the guys there Southern or not. No, I’m in my bathing suit. I’m going to modest one piece. But I thought it was interesting that the guys could put the mud on the girls. I kept finding errors in my preconceived notions of what the middle East was going to be about. I was expecting to see everything really prudish, not that putting mud on somebody with a bathing suit is risque. I was just not expecting that men would be allowed to do that to a woman in a Muslim country. So I’ve found a lot of little surprises like that throughout my journey. Even when I was in Morocco, when I did the Mark, I’ll explain the story better then, but I was dancing around the campfire with the Muslim men and I didn’t know that. I was like, is it right that I was trying to teach them one of my dances where you actually, you’re touching the person and it’s like, Oh yeah, no problem.

You know, and I just thought that that was different. I’ll tell a little bit too about the birthday party. I would just, I just, I had an image, my head of how things were going to be, and it wasn’t like that at all. I only had to wear a head covering if I was going into a mosque or a church or something like that to show respect. But for the most part, if you’re a tourist and you’re not Muslim, you don’t need to cover your head. And the choice of covering your head is the choice of the woman. Many women choose to, I found because they, they prefer the modesty, but it’s not enforced. They must do it.

And in fact, did the birthday party I went to, the mom chose to be uncovered, even though the daughters chose to be covered. So it was a personal choice that the women were allowed to make for themselves. And I asked a Ahmad about what about how can I remember wears black a lot where a lot of them do it in the cities you’ll see more colors, but for the most part people were black and he told me it’s because they believe it makes the women more alluring not to hide them. Well, it was to show them off more to show off their faces more. And so I had some preconceived notions about the middle East and Jordan that I found to be completely wrong. And that’s one of the, again, one of the things I love about traveling because it opens your eyes to different ways of seeing things to different ways of doing things.

And it also teaches you that maybe your way’s not always the right way or the only way to do something. Speaking of the ladies in their dress and the black garb, I want to tell you a funny story. I believe this was the last night we were in Petra. They had to go to town to get some supplies and said anybody want to go to town and do something? So some of us opted to get a hum on and Amman is a Turkish bath, which I had never done that before. And so I was sure I wanted to try that. So you go in and they usher you to the male locker room or the female locker room, give you a towel, give you some sandals and you’re to undress and then go into the steam room. And this steam room, it’s got different temperatures depending on how close you are to the jets, but super, super hot.

And so you would move around as you try to keep your body from getting fried and you would go in and out of the steam room. And here’s another thing I found surprising. The men and the women could share the steam room. So here we are naked outside of a towel. I just found that just not what I was expecting at all actually. I can’t remember if it was a towel or a bathing suit, but regardless, there’s a lot of skin exposed. So after your pores are thoroughly opened up incomes, the man in charge and he directs me to the slab to lie down to get just a little bit more steam. So I got fried a little bit more into this other steam thing. Then he comes and says, are you ready? I was like, Oh yeah, I’m ready. I mean I was really hot.

So I go into the room and I’ve got two ladies that are going to give me this bath and so they take off the towel and so I am standing there stark naked in front of these ladies and then they start to scrub me and they use this black soapy scrub stuff and they just rub me down. And when I get massages a lot, but you’re always covered in your private parts. This isn’t no covering here. I mean, and I’m getting scrubbed, my boobs are getting scrubbed, everything’s getting scrubbed and so once I’m thoroughly scrubbed down, then they take bowls of this warm water and they just kind of slosh it all over you to get rid of the soapy water, soapy scrubbed stuff. And then they put me up on the massage table and I didn’t mention to you that these women are in the black coverings.

It’s like, like I said, I don’t know what I should have asked what the name of it is, but it’s, is there a tire? It looks like a burka, but without the, I had cover on it so they don’t have scars in their heads as I recall, but they have the full long sleeve flowy, like a kaftan outfit on and there is water everywhere. I just can’t imagine what their bodies must’ve felt like at the end of the day they had to be like prunes under there. There’s no way they could get dry. So anyhow, so I get my massage, which that was underwhelming because it was a very pansy kind of a massage and so I happened to get out the same time Sean was. So all of our out in the lobby drinking our tea, Shawn tells me his was really intense. I was like, man, I wish I had had the guys do it because I like a really deep tissue massage. And mine was just like a feather light. Why bother kind of a thing. And if you go there, I do encourage you to do the [inaudible]. It’s fun.

So let’s get back to the dead sea. So Hazel and I Mudd each other up rather than having the guys do it cause we didn’t want to wait in the line for that anyway. And so I’ve got a photo of us on the website. That’s hysterical because all you see are our shoes and my blonde hair. Hazel has dark hair so we look like two dark things in front of the water. That’s just ridiculous. Human Cheshire cats. So after we’re all mudded up then you let it dry cause that way it, I guess it’s letting the mineral soak in and then once it’s all dry then you go into the dead sea and you just float around until it kind of comes off or until the sun gets you a little bit. And it was just a nice relaxing getaway from there. That was really cool.

And as I mentioned before in the dead sea, it’s really hard to swim because you are bobbing like a cork. So you’re basically floating and moving your body around a little bit. It’s really kind of fun. I’ve never been to salt Lake city so I’ve never had that experience before and I really enjoyed it and I want to tell you too, if you happen to have the time, like I went back down to this area once I was off the tour, there’s some national parks just South and near the dead sea. Take the time. Did to hire a guide and go hiking in them. The cliffs, everything is just beautiful. You know it’s, I had this picture of the middle East just being flat desert. It’s not, they’ve got mountains, they’ve got beautiful beautiful scenery in certain parts of it, not the whole place and a lot of it is desert. But like I said, if you go on that coastline going from the dead sea South, it’s striking. I’ve got a photo that’s just the Gaga that you gotta look at it on the website, which of course is active travel adventures.com/jordan and on the photo that I posted, you can actually see how the dead sea is evaporating because you’ll see this crustacean of salt at the base of the water. So if you do have the time, take a couple extra days to go down to that area. It really is quite beautiful.

And speaking of the dead sea and the fact that it’s disappearing, it’s evaporating. I mentioned earlier that the Jordanians are trying to be facilitators, a in the area. They also have a stable government and appeared to be a relatively well managed country. They’re trying to address the dead sea problem and so what they want to do both to help save the dead sea but also to to foster relationships between the Israelis and the Palestinians, is they’re working on an initiative called read to dead. They’re going to do a canal from the red sea to the dead sea to help bring water to the seas so they don’t lose this magnificent landscape. And in doing so, they hope to also foster relationships between the Palestinians and Israelis in this project because remember Israel and the Palestinian territory is on the episode of the sea. So I hope they can make progress on this initiative.

And next up we go to Mount Nebo and Mount Nebo is where Moses first sees the promised land. Also from this point you can look out over the Jordan river where Jesus was baptized. So there’s tons of historical and religious significance to this area. So Mount Nebo is super high Ridge. That’s uh, it’s over 2000 feet, over 700 meters high. So it gives you a great panoramic view. [inaudible] and when we’re there, we could see that something was going on because they started a, like a caravan of, of fancy vehicles came in, turned out to be a motorcade. And we were kind of ushered aside. We weren’t allowed to leave until this caravan came through. It turns out was president Bush. And so I thought it was cool. They didn’t even clear out the area of the tourists when the president came. So I thought that was kind of interesting and so that’s, it’s a nice place just to go see and look around all that.

That was one of the few touristy kinds of things that we did most of the time we were hiking and then we also went to the town of [inaudible] that’s known for its mosaics and that was kind of nice. That was to a like a little touristy thing to kind of finish up our trip and so when the rest of the group goes off, now I have got another week on my own and so I arranged a couple of Airbnb experience tours and that’s the first time on this trip I’ve used those Airbnb experiences. I got to tell you, I really liked those because on each case I hired a local person as they would make up their own little group and did their own tour or do whatever it is. We took cooking classes that way. I did some walking tours, so in Amman I signed up for two walking tours.

The first one was with the detour with Diana for the day and hers was just like a neighborhood tour to take you in into some of the residential areas and some of the favorite places that locals like to go to. And so I found that interesting. And so on this tour, the other couple that was on the tour had to leave early. So then it was just she and I, and she was going to take me to a traditional Jordanian luncheon place. But when she found out I’d already had that meal, she said, Oh, let me take you instead if you don’t mind. If she wanted to take me to a traditional bedwin restaurant. And she was pleasantly surprised to find out that I’d already had that Manasseh off that famous lamb yogurt rice dish than I am. But the almonds that I already mentioned to you about.

So then when she found out that I had not had the special dessert, which is a, I think she called it a, it’s like a caramelized sugar with some cheese in it and it’s just delicious. The line was out to the street to get it and she insisted I had to try this on her nickel, which I thought was really sweet as well. The locals really want you to know and love their country the way that they do. And I felt it with everyone that I met [inaudible] and the other tour I did was with the nos on the alternative downtown tour and I thoroughly enjoyed this as well. He shows you the contrast between the rich and the poor and a lot of the poor are Palestinian refugees and some of the old refugee camps and all that. Even went up and looked at that and met some of the local people that their families had been there like forever as they tried to resolve what to do with this Palestinian situation.

And I think he thank, he told me 60% of Jordanians are Palestinian of pass of Palestinian descent. Anyhow, so that was a fascinating tour. And so with an illness, I turned out to be the only person that signed up for the tour that night. So we’re walking around and all that and he’s showing me the different things. That was fascinating and it was nice to have the, the one on one where I could just ask whatever questions I wanted to. And I found both he and Diana very forthcoming about, no matter what I asked, you know, what was it like for a girl to go dating? How did you meet the guys? All and all kinds of things. I was able to ask them and they were most helpful. And so anyway, [inaudible] gets a phone call and I can hear he’s trying to plan something for after the tour.

And so I just casually asked him, what’s going on? I said, Oh, it’s my mom’s birthday. So we’re trying to, you know, figure out the birthday cake and all that. I said, unless I could come on your tour any other night this week, go visit your mother on her birthday. You don’t need to be with me. And he said, well, let me just show you a couple of things and why don’t you come to the party with me? And I said, well, that would be great. I mean how often it’s like being invited to go to my friend, Jamie’s Scottish birthday party is like, I often get to go to a birthday party with a bunch of Jordanians. So of course I jumped at the chance. And so after his brother secures the president and the cake, he comes and picks us up and don’t go get all worried about be getting in a car with a strange man.

In fact, two strange men because a, I’d gotten to know an OS over the last couple of hours and felt completely comfortable with him. And B, the car is loaded with the children. There’s nothing’s going to happen to me. And mom lived quite a ways away. I probably, there’s about a 30 minute drive outside of the city so we get to the apartment and I thought it was really funny. So between the two buildings he had 40 cousins. He’s like, that’s why I had to move out because I could never get any of my work done cause there’s always kids or chaos or something because all the family like lived right there in and out of each other’s houses and apartments and all that. So I thought that was kind of interesting because traditionally the man would not move out of the house until he did marry. So what an OSS was doing was very unconventional.

So I’ve got everything set up for the party. We’ve got the cake, the decorations, the party food. And I could see across the alleyway two of his younger cousins were sitting in the window, which fortunately did have a little like the cage bar around it. So one of my favorite things I saw at these kids just with their legs through the cage, watching the birthday party until somebody felt sorry for what and got the kids so they’d come join the party. So just picture, just tons of kids and people and chaos and seeing and dancing and yes, they were singing and dancing. Even though music is forbidden in the Muslim world, everybody knows all the songs and everybody was having a great time hugging the mama’s house, leaving the mom said, I now had a Jordanian family. I even got an invite to come visit next time I’m in Jordan. It’s really sweet and I was honored to be a part of it.

So those are my two of my favorite independent things I did. And then also I asked the lead, like our guide on the tour, could he arrange for some other activities because there’s distances between everything and it’s hard to to coordinate the logistics sometimes when you’re traveling by yourself. He arranged for me to have a driver that would pick me up each day and to take me some points of interest for some of the touristy things. I also went to a national park to do some hiking where they also arranged for a private guide to take me into some beautiful, beautiful countryside. Like I said, the landscape is so varied that you’ll, you might be out in the desert highway and yes it is desert and then you take a turn and you’re like, Oh my gosh, I’m in the mountains. So really cool and that, and you can see Jordan in about a week.

I think it’d be how of the time you want to go two weeks because then he can go more in depth. So plan on at least a week and preferably two. Would you go to Jordan and all my hiking, the national park, my guide made a really nice lunch for me that I wanted to share that with you because makes a great hiking dish or backpacking dish. So I took a super thin tortilla and then he covered it with olive oil, sprinkled it with time, Sesame seeds and goat cheese. Yum, yum, yum. All rolled up. Oh my gosh. It was delicious.

So in the city of Amman, I got an Airbnb and I tell you what, it was nice. I’m right next door to the Italian embassy as I’m in a super safe neighborhood. That’s usually how I pick a place. I look forward the neighborhood first. I try to find out what are the best neighborhoods to stay in for my style. I don’t like the real fancy, fancy, I just want safe and cute or maybe like the the not edgy, that’s not the right word. It’s something like the Soho neighborhood or something like that. Something that’s, that’s got a little quirkiness to it that has been gentrified. Usually I guess the word I’m looking for is hip, even though I’m the furthest thing from hip. And then from there I look at the price ranges and then find a reasonably priced one. And from there then I always looked to find somebody that’s got lots of reviews.

So I don’t have any of the bad instances that sometimes you read about in the news. So anyways, so I get this apartment, it’s a one bedroom apartment, get the place all to myself. I didn’t see another soul in the apartment the whole time I was there. And so they had this rooftop terrace that was my absolute favorite. So I’d go up there at sundown each night and I was to get a bottle of wine. I will tell you about that in just a minute, but I could get up there and listen not only to the call to prayer, which they do the call to prayer I believe five times a day and it’s one of my favorite things. I just like the pausing to check in with yourself, check in with your God and and, and just take a breath.

Fact in the background, you’ll hear a recording I made of the call to prayer that is going on simultaneously with the church bells. I apologize for the wind blowing that you can hear in the mic. But anyhow, it was just a very special time for me. So you’ll hear that in the background as I continue with this next segment. I hope you enjoy it. So I’m really drawn to the call to prayer as a time to pause, reflect, give thanks. Although I’d never outside of a few times saw somebody actually stopping what they’re doing to go do it. I would always pause during the call to prayer and just be quiet and within myself at that time. So on the sunset one it was particularly nice because you could see the sun going down. I was on top of the city and not just the call to prayer, it was also the church bells were also ringing cause they were very open about you can believe whatever you want.

And so you would hear the church bells clanging and the call to prayer. And it was just one of my favorite memories of Jordan. And so I made sure to do that every single evening. And I don’t know if it’s sacrilege, but I did it with a glass of wine. So let’s talk about alcohol. Okay, so in the Muslim religion, alcohol is forbidden. Most do not drink. Some do. And they just say they know that they’re not supposed to, but they do anyway. And I always thought it was funny because if it’s illegal, how come they have liquor stores? But they do. They’re not very common. But they’re out there usually for some reason they have an Amstel, not Amstel light bunny and Ansell green sign up front. I was like, ah, there it is. And you could ask anybody and they could tell you where it was.

And you know, each neighborhood usually had one. So I’ve found that because it’s illegal or frowned upon, it’s very heavily taxed. So, uh, the beers were expensive and the wa the wine was expensive, but I found the wine cheaper than the beers are for the most part. I just drank wine so I could go down and I could get actually pretty decent bottle of wine for like 12 bucks or so, which is reasonable for America. But when you look at the prices of what I paid for, for meals in my apartment, that was expensive for Jordan. Like I said, I had that great lunch for like $5. My apartment was very nominal and I’m in a really, really nice apartment with that gorgeous skyline terrace in a outstanding neighborhood. So relatively speaking it was expensive compared to Jordanian costs. Cause Jordan is a fairly inexpensive country. So any way I could get a bottle of wine and there was no problem if anybody came up and I was drinking wine, you know they, I asked the guy that was managing my apartment, he said, no, no problem. People do it all the time. I said, okay. So I didn’t worry about having a glass of wine up there and watching the sunset.

So that’s the story of alcohol there and my probably forbidden mix of alcohol and the call to prayer. I hope I wasn’t being sacrilegious because it sure felt like a sacred time to me. On a lighter note, here’s a cultural difference between what I’m used to. And Jordan, while they have Google maps, nobody uses it. They don’t use addresses either. It’s all landmarks. This makes for an exciting time trying to find things, particularly if your cab driver as no idea where you’re going and you don’t either. I want you to picture a Mon. It’s very steep on both sides of the main drag. And so you’ll have these switchback roads that zigzag up to the mountaintops as you get further and further away from the city center. And so what looks like it might only be a half a mile to you when you’re looking at your Google map with a bird’s eye view, you don’t realize that you’re going up, say a thousand foot elevation gain.

And so it might be, you know, five miles of road. It’s really hard for you to tell. So I wanted to go, I forgot what I wanted to see a museum or something like that. And so I decided to take a cab. That was funny cause he couldn’t speak English. I can’t speak Arabic and he doesn’t use Google maps and neither one of us have a clue as to where I’m going. And they don’t seem to use addresses. It’s all about landmarks. Oh it’s this over by the Toledo hotel. It’s catty corner across from there or it’s just one block from the Hamus restaurant or whatever it was called. And so I could tell on my phone that I was getting really close to the place I wanted to go to, but we just couldn’t get there because the roads were either one way or we’d get to where we wanted to get closer.

And if it zigged back the other direction again. And so finally I just said forget I, I just paid him. I said I’ll just get out. I can figure it out from here because I figured it had to be easier for me to walk than it was for us to keep zigzagging up this mountaintop. And it turns out that between the different levels of the, of the roads, cause remember you got a zigzag up the mountain, you’d find these stairwells that the locals could use so they could walk in rather cause you don’t want to walk back and forth. It might be, you know, a hundred steps up, but saves you two miles of walking for example. So I had one encounter where I just couldn’t find the steps most of the times that, you know, I’d walk a little ways and I could find some way to, to go in the direction I wanted to go to.

And so one of the few times I ever had to a pantomime, I go into this one newspaper stand and I didn’t know, of course, I don’t know how to say stairs in Arabic. So I just used my arms and I just kind of propelled them up to indicate stairs and I saw the light bulb go off. He’s, Oh yay. He points me in the right direction. And I was very proud of myself when I made it back to as it’s still stick at the Toledo hotel, then made it back there cause they were holding my bags until I was able to get into my Airbnb. But anyway, so that was kind of funny. The fact that they just don’t use Google maps. I hope that next time I go there that they will because it’s got to save them a ton of time. But anyway, I found it humorous story.

So when I get back to the hotel, I decided it’s probably a good idea since I’m moving to an Airbnb and I have to leave at five 30 in the morning, uh, later in the week when I’m departing that I’m going to have the hotel arranged for a driver to pick me up because the area I’m going to is residential. There’s not gonna be taxis going around in the morning, particularly that time of the morning and this where I want to be really sure that I’ve got somebody to get him to the airport so I don’t miss my flight. So I explained to the man, I write it down Friday this time, this address, blah blah, blah. And because like I said, addresses are a little bit iffy there. He even has the driver come out and find the place later that day just to make sure that we’re all on board of where I’m going to get picked up.

So I thought that was great. I was like, alright, I got this down where I’m got my driver and so he assures me everything’s okay. We agree on a price and so everything’s good. The next day I wake up and then I turned on my phone. I see that I have all these texts at five 30 in the morning saying that the drivers outside waiting for me. I was like, Oh no, they’ve got the date all wrong. I could understand. Said, I said Friday, I wrote Friday, how come he’s coming here on Tuesday or whatever the case was. And that made me nervous. And I was like, I called them. I said, no, just cancel it. I’ll make my own arrangements. So I had talked to the, the gentleman that was running my Airbnb Fadi super sweet. Every time I walked into the building, big smile. Like I was the greatest thing that ever happened.

Walking into the thing and just just lovely people and frankly thought is the only person I ever saw in the building. It was just he and I all the time. I don’t know who else was in this big apartment building, so I don’t want to say he agrees to take me to the airport and say, every time I saw him, was it Friday? It’s five 30 yes, Friday five 30 I’ll be there. It turns out he spent Thursday nights sleeping on the rooftop terrorist to make sure that he was there on time for me and just just, I can’t emphasize enough how helpful and friendly everybody was to me. And Jordan, just super sweet. They Don my driver, literally, he would have taken a bullet for me and he was so sweet and every always impeccably dressed, very formal and couldn’t do enough to make sure I was happy.

Was this, Ooh, this is the right this, is this the right temperature, is this the right place to go? Is this whatever I wanted? He could not have been more accommodating. Just lovely, lovely people. Jamal, my guide and the national park. Just a lovely young man. I can’t emphasize enough, just the kindness of the people and how welcomed I felt and at no time did I ever feel unsafe with the possible exception of getting used to the driving and Jordan, and mind you that was only in the cities when you’re out in the desert highway, it’s not an issue there. It’s mainly in the congested when there’s lots and lots of cars battling for a very small amount of real estate.

And welcome to Jordan. Welcome to Jordan. That was the weekend. I would hear constantly from everyone I encountered. And one thing I really appreciated is while I would certainly be invited to come check out their shop, I never was pressured. I was never hounded. Some places you go to, it’s really unnerving because you’re just getting constantly barrage to come in, buy something, buy something, buy something. And I never got that pressure in Jordan at all. People were just welcoming, friendly, inviting. But there was absolutely no pressure and I really, really appreciated that about the Jordan, these people, each country that I go to and each trip that I take, I usually adopt at least one new habit of the locals and add that into my life because it not only brings back fond memories, but it’s usually because there’s something I truly enjoyed. So a couple of things from Jordan I really liked is they would have a lemonade with mint that was delicious. I’m going to add more Carmen to my diet. I bought these delicious preserves of quince and Carmen. That was just outstanding. In fact, I’d like to learn how to make that. I want to add mint and Sage teas. To my diet, preferably in the afternoon, maybe I’ll try to find some decaf tea that I could add the herbs to.

In fact, my tea habit changed the first time around when I went to Tanzania and I had the clothes and the cinnamon in it, which I added to my tea with ginger. So now I have the best wanting tea ever. So now I’d like to add in the Jordanian Teague with either the mint or the Sage. I could never drink the Turkish coffee. It is so strong and so thick. I like the bottom. Third of it is just like mud and I mean it will put hair on your chest. So that was something I was never able to adapt to. Although a lot of my travel mates would drink with no problem if I drank a couple of that, I’d still be awake and want to talk to you about what to wear in Muslim countries. Modesty is a virtue and so this is not the place to be wearing your tank tops.

This is not the place to be showing cleavage. You should be wearing long sleeve shirts and cover your elbows. The women should not be showing their knees. I both for some protection and also to respect the local culture was always in a long sleeve shirt and long pants and that was just fine. I did bring a hajib, a headscarf. I only wore it throughout my middle Eastern journey when I was in a mosque or in a church and the rest of the time it was just in my bag. If you choose to dress more provocatively, it’s going to create some unwanted attention and it’s going to signal to locals that you might be easy of. One of the women that I traveled with in Egypt was wearing clothes, fitted tee shirts and short sleeves. She also had the complexion that made her look like she could be local then, which I think added to the fact that the men thought that she was a local who was just dressing risque and so she got some unwanted attention. Nobody, I mean, nobody, nothing bad happened to her, but she didn’t like the people staring at her and talking to her and all that. In ways that she felt was disrespectful and I was like, well, why don’t you just dress like I do? Now, granted, I’m 20 years older than her, but I never had any of those issues whatsoever.

And you could say all you want, Oh, he should be to wear whatever you want. Well, to me, when you’re in another country, you should respect the customs of that country and if you’re not willing to, then maybe that is not the right country to go to. There’s plenty of countries to go to, so that’s my 2 cents on that. I had no problems doing that. In fact, like I said, for the sun, I like to keep the sun off me. Even if I’m hiking in North Carolina, I’m in long sleeves and long pants because I want to keep the sun off my skin to try to protect my skin. When I look back on my trip to Jordan, my favorite memories are always the donkeys. I love those little donkeys. They’re just so cute. I especially enjoyed hiking and Wadi rum and our little camel Trek. That was a blast.

Of course Petra is something to be seen, but I actually liked body run better. I loved being in the Bedouin camps, but if I had to pick the number one thing I love the most is the Jordanian people. They’re wonderful. They’re warm, hospitable, friendly, fun, loving. You can’t beat it and apparently they’re pranksters too. I had a little incident on my checking out before we started our tour that day, so I’m going to check out and he asked for my papers. I’m like, my papers, what are you talking about? He said, you were given some papers when you arrived yesterday. Where are your papers? I’m like, I don’t know. I look on my passport. I look in, I can’t find him anywhere. He said, you’re not going to leave the country unless you find your papers. I’m like, Oh yeah, I do remember they gave me something.

I’m frantically looking and I can’t find my papers and after it makes me sweat a little bit, he starts laughing. He said, here are your papers. You gave them to me by accident yesterday. I was like, Oh, so when you get your papers, make sure you put them in your passport so you don’t lose them because they will not let you leave the country unless you have your papers. This is the same man that arranged for my driver that showed up on the wrong day, but I’m pretty sure that was an honest mistake and not a prank. He apologized profusely for the driver misunderstanding and certainly one of my fondest memories is the call to prayer. I find it haunting, I find it beautiful and I came to really, really appreciate that even though I don’t share their faith. My biggest takeaway from my trip in the middle East is that we get a lot of bad junk in the news that does not represent the people. The governments might be fighting with each other, but the people are just like you and me and in fact they’re friendlier than you and me.

[inaudible]

so I hope if nothing else, whether you go to Jordan or not, that you do have an open mind when it comes to the middle East. Because I, I truly do think that we getting only a very small part of the story when we hear about the middle East. Is there a chance of terrorism? Yes. The impact, the place where president Bush was, they did have an incident a couple weeks after I was there. But we have incidences here in the United States all the time now. So having a bad thing happen,

is it become a fact of life no matter where we travel or even where we live, would I travel to the Syrian border? No. When it comes to safety, I look at the state department guidelines, but I also found in Israel that allow, that is so conservative that yes, read that. But then ask the locals they know and they don’t want you to get hurt. They’ll tell you whether or not it’s safe to go somewhere or not. You want to go do my Israel episode. I went to some areas that the state department said don’t go and it was fine. So, and the P, like I said, the people know. So I went with the advice of the locals over the state department. On a couple of instances in Israel. I mean, they’re offering tours at the hostel I’m staying at. How dangerous could it be?

They don’t want their guests getting hurt and they know they’re on the ground. They know what to do, they know where it’s safe and where it’s not safe to go in the state department briefing. It’ll have this big broad area, but the tour companies know the safe sectors of town or regions, et cetera, within that broad area. That might be perfectly fine. So while I certainly can’t advise to ignore the state department guidelines, just realize they can’t pinpoint every single different neighborhoods. So there is a broad brush stroke instead of fine tuning some of those recommendations

and I’m having a feeling that’s the same thing in Mexico too, and I’m going to be investigating that as well. So I hope that this episode has opened your eyes a wonderful and fascinating region in the world that’s been neglected by tourists and the region, I believe unfairly maligned in many ways. It was a wonderful trip. I would highly encourage you to do it if you do do it. Do the camping. That was so fun and that was so nice to be away from the tourists. And because you’re spending the whole day in the evening and the meals and all that with your guides and with your Bedouin.

Yeah.

The, the better ones are the ones that run the camps. So you get to get to know them and get to ask them questions. They become your friend.

I had a footwear malfunction in Israel when I was in some gloppy BHAG that peeled away my hiking sole from my shoe. And so here I’m hiking in the desert. The front part by the toes had peeled away and so all the sand was coming in and liable to cause a blister. And so bet he was worried about me. So I, what did I have? Oh the one day we were doing it, a touristy thing. He went and he got my shoes resoled and fixed and they put tar or something on. But those shoes are still working fine today cause he was worried about me. He wanted to make sure that I had a great time and these people would take a bullet for you. I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about my adventures in Jordan, and I’d like to hear from you. Please email me@kitatactivetraveladventures.com and let me know, did this show change your mind a little bit about travel to Jordan or to the middle East? I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. Until next time, this is kit parks adventure on.