gear shift

I am all out of the Middle East. It was a brutally long day of travel yesterday, but everything went smoothly, so I have gone from Jordan to just about as opposite I can get. Today, I take on Dublin!

It was surprisingly difficult to leave the tour. I was lucky and ended up with a really cohesive group who genuinely got along and enjoyed spending time together, which was lovely, so as with any goodbye it was hard to say goodbye and all go our separate ways. But even more than that, I was pretty hard-hit by how much I was going to miss the fact of my tour mates. It was such a welcome relief to have people to travel with for three weeks. For the first part, to have someone so competent to take care of all of our details and travel concerns for us so we didn't even have to think about it. When things went wrong, an 8 hour ferry wait or an abysmal accommodation in Petra, we were in it together and would joke about it and get through, rather than me having to take it all on my shoulders alone.

I've had to remind myself the last couple of days that not only CAN I do this solo travel thing (remember, self? That's how you've been doing it almost this WHOLE TIME), but also that I would even want to. Today, though, after a good night's sleep under a comfy duvet, with a nice hot shower and a rainy, overcast Dublin through the window, I am much more excited about exploring. Besides, I am on the way downward end of my trip, so I need to make the most of it - love it or hate it, it won't last long.

Anyway, to wrap up Jordan: Meh.

I mean, Jordan was good - Petra was incredible, and of course I loved floating in the Dead Sea and getting covered by mud.

But overall, Jordan was just kind of all right. The food was the same sort as Egypt, but not as good; everything was easier and more Western, in terms of the bargaining and the baksheesh (tipping) and the like, but it was also less interesting and more sterilized. I just felt like I was there because the things I wanted to see were in Jordan, as opposed to any desire at all to see Jordan itself.

All right, enough rehash. I am in a place with lightening-quick internet, so I hope to have the rest of my pictures up later on, and get them labeled and ready to view. After that, my mind is 100% on pretty green Ireland!

dr. jekyll and mr.jordanian tour guide

So, I've been lucky, and had a really wonderful tour that I love.

I've now also been super unlucky and miserable and had a crap tour. Interestingly, they are the same tour.

I thought the ferry crossing was a blip, and that things would be smooth and easy, but it turns out that the Jordan leg of my trip is going to be radically different. In Egypt, the tour was fortunate enough to have a wonderful guide who was both a good guy and incredibly knowledgeable. He was a great guide, and we loved it. In Jordan...not so much.

Our tour guide here is pretty sleazy, clearly making his living by kickbacks, commissions and freebies courtesy of his tours; making seedy comments to the pretty blonde on the tour, and giving all of his information with a healthy dose of condescension. We had a problem when we arrived in Petra and went to a hotel different from the one listed on our itinerary - given to us two weeks ago - and significantly worse quality. We ended up kicking up a fuss and moving ourselves to another hotel - the one on the itinerary - and fighting with the local travel agency about getting reimbursed.

On the one hand, it's a nightmare. Whereas my Egypt tour made me thrilled with the company and excited about all the places in the world I could go with them that I was not comfortable traveling to on my own, if Jordan were my first leg, I would be in misery and trapped in every organized tour horror story you hear.

However, this is not a poor me bitch session. the thing is, after two weeks of traveling together and some genuine affinity, my tour has become 12 good friends, so we are all in this together. we are a pretty close group and we are all traveling together, so it's not so bad. We roll our eyes at the guide, or take turns fighing the battles we need to fight, and it works out really well. tit's a huge advantage to traveling in a group, honestly - even when things are bad they are not bad for you alone.

But enough with the bad - Jordan is also pretty incredible. I came to this country for Petra, and to Petra I have officially been:



Jordan may just be the country that cannot be captured by a camera, though. Petra is completely stunning, but there is no picture that can really get across the mind-bogling level of pretty at teh Siq, this amazing one-and-a-half kilometer long cavern that you walk through to get to Petra, with towering walls orf amazing rock, no can they get the magnitude and the colors in all of the carved out buildings of the city itself. It is honestly a wonder of ancient architecture and beauty, and nothing I took, or anyone else took, possibly did it justice.


But even before then, we went to Wadi Rum, in the desert to the south, and spent a day four-wheeling around and then a night in the Bedouin camp, and I took picture after picture, but nothing got the craggy, jagged, gorgeous rocks and the sweeping deserts really well. This is apparently a country that cannot be got really well on my wee camera.

more middle east

Egypt is officially no more for me.

Since we left Cairo, we have done the following (assume all is said with some disbelief that this is my life and this is all for real, because that's how it felt):

We got on a private bus on Friday to drive down to the Sinai Peninsula. A lot of the tourist routes in southern Egypt (Aswan-Luxor, Aswan-Abu Simbel, etc) have required convoys buses need to travel in for "safety reasons," but Sinai does not have this; they do, however, have mad check points all over and lots of scary military with scary huge guns. Sinai is pretty much a rocky, sandy moonscape that is pretty in a forbidding way. We also drove in the tunnel under the Suez - unreal!

It took several hours, but we got to St. Katherine's "City" (it is a few stores and hotels...) midday, and got toeat and rest before we climbed Mt. Sinai. No joke. The climb was long, but not terribly hard until we got to the last set of steep, rocky, uneven steps - I counted 763 of them. But the view from up top was just astronomical, and we watched the sun set from Mount Sinai before climbing down. Incredible.

The next day we went back to St Katherine's Monastary to tour around, and saw the burning bush and the Eastern Orthodox chapel, which was gorgeous, and navigated our way through some serious throngs of tourists. I am not really one for religious monuments as my top impressive tour sights, but something about St. Katherine's was really moving. Honestly, I think that it is because, in Egypt, there is this ancient monastary worked by a group of Greek and Russian monks, and the place is cared for and run by a particular Beduin tribe, a tribe that is 100% Muslim. There is even a mosque at the monastary for the Beduins to pray in. I just find it so compelling that the different religions and histories are all able to work with this respect for one another that is larger than any differences.

After Sinai, we went on the road again to Nuweiba, a little cluster of small resorts on the Red Sea. Can you say spectacular? I spent the last two and a half days staying in a thatched hut about 10 meters from the water, lounging in and by the water, and eating calamari. It was the perfect holiday in my holidays, and I got a bit of my tan back from Thailand. I was surprised a bit, but honestly the Red Sea is up there with my best beach spots ever, and apparently the Scuba was fantastic.

Of course, the relaxation was all to lull us to a sense of security, I can clearly see now. We have local leaders for each leg, so our Egypt guide left us at the port at 2 for our ferry, where we proceeded to wait in a seedy, dirty, gross port with no signs or announcements in English and air conditioning for only a little while. And we waited. We thought the ferry was at 2:30. Then we find it is at 4. Then it may come later. Then it is here, and we will load in an hour. No, another hour. We are shuttled from one door to another. We wait. At 7:30 they put us on buses to go to the boat. At 8 we are still queued up to get on the boat. Then they try to tell us that the boat is full, but we will not be dissuaded. Then they pull everyone from the back of the line and let them on and leave my group and about 25 other international tourists fighting to be allowed onto the boat, which we eventually are, but without seats. The ferry leaves at 8:45. We finally browbeat them into letting us onto some of the empty business class seats after sitting in the aisled for the first half hour. We get to Aquaba, Jordan about 10, but wait and wait and wait on the boat. They collect our passports, and we are unnerved by this fact. The disorganized, ramshackle, tedious immigration process takes about another hour. We have an Intrepid person waiting to get us to the hotel, which is wonderful. We finally make it, and I fall into bed and sleep like the dead at about 1 am.

It was a long, terrible day, and really tiring - I just about regretted being up to watch the sun rise over Saudi Arabia that morning.

But we are in Aqaba, which is so much more clean and polished and modern than Egypt - it reminds me a lot of Singapore, really. And we are officially in Jordan. The internet is slow-ish, and there are no USB ports to upload photos, but its here. Though tonight, we are going to a Beduin camp, so you know, probably no WiFi.

And we are offically done with Egypt. I have a lot, lot, lot to say on Egypt, but this has already gone on long enough, so I will add it soon.