Jordan

On Day 12 of our ‘Road to Jordan’ tour we finally reached Jordan (that’s a looooooong road!) after a long ferry ride across the Red Sea. Well, actually, the ferry only took approximately 1½ hours but the delays were much longer resulting in us not getting to Aqaba, in Jordan, until late that night. Due to these delays and the fact that we weren’t really ‘clicking’ with our Jordanian tour guide, our first impression of Jordan wasn’t the best but luckily our opinion changed over the next few days!

The next day we drove the three hours North to the Dead Sea to test these waters and we had what many of us believed was the best day in Jordan! The Dead Sea was amazing, from the shore it looked like the people in it were just sitting in a foot of water but when you got in and you felt your legs rapidly float up from underneath you, you realised that it was all the salt and minerals in the sea that made everyone so buoyant. Apparently the water has healing properties due to some of these minerals but all we knew was that every cut sure stung a lot! However, we bathed in it in the hope of healing any ailments and then followed the advice of our tour guide to slather ourselves in the mud from the banks which is meant to be good for your skin. It was fun at least! The rest of the day was spent relaxing by the pool at the resort there and eating the best buffet lunch most of us have ever seen in our lifetimes let alone on the tour before travelling the three hours on to our hotel for the night.



Another highlight of Jordan was our trip to Petra, the amazing city carved into cliff-faces. You may know it from the movie ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’. Words cannot describe this city and not even photos can do it justice but I urge you to check them out! Massive buildings carved out of a rock-face and hundreds of tombs in amongst the natural caves and ridges – even a theatre!



That night a few of us took the opportunity to go to a Turkish bath-house where we were steamed, scrubbed and polished within an inch of our lives but we came out feeling refreshed and relaxed.

Our last night in Jordan was spent camping at a Bedouin camp in the Wadi Rum Desert however, before we got there, we had a hair-raising but extremely fun jeep safari through the desert, an amusing time playing on a huge sand dune, and an interesting visit to some ancient graffiti before watching the sun go down on the horizon. That night we ate a magnificent feast cooked by our Bedouin hosts, sang and danced to Bedouin songs around the campfire, and gazed at the millions of stars visible to us before going to sleep.



The next morning some of us even managed to get up and climb up a cliff to watch the sun rise over the desert – beautiful!



After breakfast some of the group chose to ride camels back to the bus whilst the rest of us rode in the utes. Once bundled onto the bus we started our long bus and ferry journey back to Egypt.

And although when Hani greeted us at the border with “Welcome home kids!” we cheered and admitted that we really did feel like we had arrived back home, we will always remember our time in Jordan, the amazing sights we saw and the incredible experiences we had.