Jordan - A New Country with New Friends

August 7-11, 2023

As-Salaam-Alaikum, or hello, friends and family,

I left with Kip, Michael, and Alex from Jerusalem to Jordan on August 7. It was sad saying goodbye to friends in Jerusalem since we’d met such good people, but I’m grateful for the time we had together. Some people were even talking about coming out to Hawai'i, which would be really cool and exciting.

The travel to Jordan was somewhat hectic, since our first plan was to get a bus from Jerusalem down to Eilat, an Israeli city four hours south of Jerusalem. When we got to the bus station, we asked around for a while before someone helped and informed us that the bus was full. We changed plans and took a taxi to the Jordanian border and another to the capital city of Amman once we’d crossed. The crossing was annoying since we had to pay an exit fee and take a bus across the bridge before getting into another taxi, but it went pretty smooth overall.

By the time we’d settled into the hostel, it was about 6:30pm and we decided to walk around the city. It was a cool experience for me since I’d never been to an Arab city before. The downtown area was very popular and there was much more color and light in the city than I was expecting. The city was predominantly Muslim and almost all the women, besides a few tourists, wore clothing that covered most of their body and sometimes face too. We ate dinner at a swanky rooftop restaurant and enjoyed some traditional Jordanian food.

We looked for a bar on the way home, which was a struggle because alcohol isn’t part of the culture at all. We didn’t find a bar, but we heard live music coming from a place so we wandered in and hung out there. The big thing in many Arabic places is smoking shisha (often called hookah in America), which is a contraption for smoking smoke that’s been drawn through something to flavor it and water to cool it off. I’m not exactly sure why this is so prevalent in the culture while alcohol is frowned upon, but it’s ubiquitous. The venue was all locals besides us and the music was great, so we were happy to have stumbled upon it. It was a nice hole-in-the-wall spot that we wouldn’t have found if we’d looked on Google Maps, and it was fun to have found it by hearing the music by chance on our walk home. Back at the hostel, we played some cards on the roof.

The next day we took a walking tour of Jordan. We met our guide in a hotel lobby and he started the tour with about an hour of history of Jordan and Palestine, which was really interesting. He covered a lot of content, dating back thousands of years and he had extensive knowledge of the details of the history, culture, and current conflict. After lecturing, he walked us through a couple historical sites and several markets. At each of the vendors we stopped at, we got to try foods, ranging from dates to spices to baklava and sweets to pickles. The guide was intense but entertaining and we all enjoyed the tour tremendously.

Afterwards, we ate lunch at a restaurant called Hashem with this Australian named Dylan we’d met on the tour. Dylan was a character; he designed his own equipment and was wearing this hammock backpack he’d made himself, and he had plenty of interesting travel stories to share.

After lunch, we took a taxi to our hostel to pick up the rental car we’d use to explore the rest of Jordan. After four hours of driving we made it to Petra. We were pretty tired so we had the dinner buffet at the hostel and played cards on the rooftop before going to bed.

The next day we ate the breakfast buffet early in the morning before going to the historical city of Petra for the day. We got there pretty early, around 8am, but it was already teeming with tourists. We walked along the main path from the visitor center to the Monastery at the end. The first stretch up to the Treasury was nice because there weren’t any vendors, even though there were plenty of visitors.

Once we hit the Treasury, it felt like there was a salesman trying to sell us access to a viewpoint, a ride on a camel or mule, or jewelry every 30 feet. The walk had lots of cool sights, both natural and manmade, but it was incredibly hot by midmorning.

We took a few stops on the way up to the ultimate sight, the Monastery, a big building carved into the mountain. We took a lunch break up there and found this chill view spot that didn’t have any other tourists.

On the walk back, I was interested in buying a bracelet or necklace but the prices at the first vendor I asked were too steep; they wanted 45 Jordanian Dinars (about 60 USD) for some necklaces. I told them it was too expensive and they pestered me for a while before I walked away. I tried my luck again at another vendor and he said the bracelet I wanted cost 25 JOD. I told him that was too much and he said I could get two for 45 JOD. I told him that was too much and that I was only interested in one. I counteroffered 5 JOD for the bracelet and he said no and kept trying to get me to agree to a higher price but after a couple minutes he agreed on 5 JOD for the one bracelet. I felt pretty good about my haggling in that exchange even though I still probably overpaid.

We then drove 1.5 hours to the village of Rum and had a driver meet us where the road turned to desert to drive us to our Bedouin camp in the Jeep. It was about 7pm at this point and the dusk lighting was so beautiful in the desert. The guy who ran the camp showed us to our rooms, which were just tiny little rooms with a bed and a single light bulb.

We dropped our stuff in our rooms and walked a couple minutes into the desert and sat on some benches, taking in the views. Wadi Rum is called the desert of mountains, and I think the name is fitting because there are so many mountains among all the red sand. The sand was the reddest I’ve ever seen and with the mountains scattered throughout, it looked like Mars. In fact, Wadi Rum has been used as the set for movies that are supposed to take place on Mars. Sitting out in the desert with the gorgeous views and silence was very peaceful.

At 8:30 we went to the communal tent for dinner, which included many mini salads we’d eaten in Israel and chicken, potatoes, and zucchini that had been cooked with hot coals buried underneath the sand. The head chef did a big reveal where he pulled the metal structure they’d been cooked in out of the sand and it looked (and tasted) so good.

After dinner and dessert, we went and sat around the fire with the Bedouins and the other tourists at the camp for a couple hours. We were in the middle of the desert so there was virtually no light pollution and the star visibility was excellent; I was lying on my back and saw several shooting stars. Eventually we got sleepy and went to bed.

Before going to sleep, I wandered back to the place we’d sat when we first got there just to enjoy some more solitude and calm in the desert. The camp was so minimalistic, which I liked, with just beds in each hut, a main structure for eating, some cushions around a fire pit, a bathroom, and a couple other buildings, probably for cooking and possibly laundry or storage.

We were awakened the next day by the sun turning our rooms into saunas, but it was time for breakfast anyway so we didn’t mind. After eating, we went on a four-hour Jeep tour around the desert with many stops for brief hikes, photo ops, and, my favorite, sandboarding down a dune. It was the first time I’d ever sandboarded and it was a cool experience that felt similar to snowboarding, I imagine, but slower.

(Not shown is the absolutely grueling trek up the sand dune. The sand was so deep that each step took an immense amount of effort but barely made any progress up the dune. I was still recovering from the climb when I fell off the sandboard, hence my lethargic response to get back on.)

The tour was really cool but also scorching hot since it was the middle of the day, so we were happy to wrap things up in the afternoon and get some lunch before driving to Aqaba, our final stop in Jordan. We were naïve to think it was hot in Wadi Rum; in Aqaba, we were sweating just sitting around and my weather app was saying the temperature was 104 degrees Fahrenheit at 4pm. It didn’t help that our hostel had no air conditioning.

We were right on the beach so we dropped our stuff off in the hostel and went swimming in the Red Sea. The beach was privatized and there was nowhere to sit except for tables controlled by locals. We set our stuff down and swam for a bit and when we came back this guy brought us menus and asked if we wanted anything. I asked if they had beer and he said no and we told him we weren’t interested. He brought us three waters anyway and told us to pay him and we said we didn’t want the waters but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. We didn’t have any cash so we offered to pay by card but he said it was cash only. We explained the situation and he went and talked to someone in our hostel next door, probably trying to make sure he could collect payment for the waters we involuntarily purchased. It rubbed us the wrong way since nobody told us we had to pay to use the beach when we walked in and it felt like a scam. Besides this, Jordanians had been so friendly and hospitable.

After that fiasco, we planned some logistics for Egypt and went to dinner in town. We ate at a nice place with a balcony and view of the sea while playing several rounds of hearts. Since it was our last night, we picked up some drinks on the way home and played more cards and had our nightcaps before going to bed. We were sad that it was the last night with all four of us since Alex had to get to Cambodia to meet her dad for more travel. Still, we were grateful we’d met each other and happy to have shared the experiences together. Four days was a good amount of time in Jordan; we felt like we got to see everything we wanted and didn’t have too much time we needed to fill. Jordan was my favorite place in the Middle East and possibly even my favorite stop out of all my travels this summer. The group was awesome, and we all got really close with each other, so that certainly played into Jordan being a memorable time. The next day, August 11, Kip, Michael, and I made our way to Egypt, which I’ll write about next entry.