Amman and Home

13 July:
Our decision not to drive to Wadi Rum before heading back to Amman was vindicated when we drove back to Amman from Petra. Saber (saber.alhamad@yahoo.com ) picked us up at 8.30 for the four hour drive back to Amman along the desert highway.
With a stop off for a visit to a souvenir stall and lunch at Tawaheen Al-Hawa (The Windmill) restaurant in central Amman we didn't get back to the hotel till 3.30pm.

Woman making breads for customers at Tawaheen Al-Hawa Restaurant

If we'd done the Wadi Rum side trip we could have added an extra five hours to the day which would have made it somewhat exhausting especially as we had to repack our bags in preparation for the long trip home the next day.
The meal at Tawaheen Al Hawa was beautifully prepared and presented - a generous platter of "starters" - hummous, pickles, salads, olives... followed by a mixed grill of chicken, lamb and beef and topped off with coffee and water-melon which proved the theory that taking a long, lingering lunch is one of the pleasures that needs to be cultivated and practised often!
Back at the hotel we repacked our bags for easier travel - especially as we had picked up a few more souvenirs of our travels than we'd started with. Joy had had great fun bargaining for a silver arabic styled mirror and several other tangible memories of our trip at different stops along our way which meant we needed to ensure that our packing allowed us access to our immediate needs while protecting the articles.
Outside our hotel the street was hosting a wedding which, like the others we'd passed by in our first days in Amman and, later, in Petra, meant a parade of cars as the groom and his family set off to bring the bride back to the ceremony, lots of excited chatter as the guests arrived and prepared for the arrival of the couple and, as the call for prayer echoed over the street, lines of men facing Mecca praying before the wedding celebrations began in earnest. Then, as the wedding neared its end a series of firework displays climaxed the evening.
The next day it was on to Dubai for an overnight before the 15+ hour trip home to N.Z.

Our brief stop-over in Dubai allowed us to take a walk through the Mall of the Emirates - one of the huge shopping malls that provide tourist destinations in the city-state. Here the attraction is the ski-slope which provides the chance for people to go skiing in the middle of a desert! Otherwise the mall was like every other shopping mall one can see and experience anywhere in the world. So, unless one was a shopping mall addict, as far as we were concerned this was a good excuse to enjoy a walk in air-conditioned comfort after sitting in an airplane constraint for much of the day.

The next day we flew on in the Airbus 380 to Auckland and home and the organisation needed to allow us to return to the Gulf sometime in August.

The Welcoming committee

We were welcomed home by a boisterous and enthusiastic scrum of family and grand-children who draped themselves on our legs and arms as we existed the customs hall and entered the winter damp of an Auckland afternoon.

Now begins the setting up and organisation for a new experience in the Gulf later in the year.

Jordan Tripping, Amman to Petra.

10th July:
This was to prove a long day - a journey that took us from Amman to Mt Nebo to Kerak and then on to Petra. This part of the trip forced me to dredge down to my childhood Bible lessons at Sunday School to recall the Old Testament histories of the Israelites and their wanderings in the wilderness as they moved out of Egypt in search of the “promised land.”

We drove to the Citadel being shown, on the way, that Amman was built on seven hills that surround the valley in which the Greeks and Romans had built their houses and theatres. The hill that dominates the central city is topped by the Citadel which looks down onto the Theatre in the valley below.


The Citadel hill appears to have been settled from neolithic times as the Archeological museum show-cased flint knives,pottery and other artifacts covering every period through to the Islamic Empires which culminated with the Ottoman in 1916.

The Citadel is dominated by the ruins of a temple to Hercules and the remains of other Roman temples. The Hercules Temple must have been huge if it was to accommodate the statue of the god as the fingers, the sole remains of the statue, are enormous.


The site is a record of the successive waves of occupation and history of Jordan as there are the ruins of a Byzantine Church and the restored Omanyyad Palace - the remains of the christian and early islamic occupations of the site.

We explored the site and the associated archeological museum before heading off to Mt.Nebo,Madaba, Kerak and Petra.

Mt. Nebo is presumed to be the site where Moses died and was buried so it has religious significance to most Judeo-Christian religions as well as Islam.

The site was one of the important ones on the 7th century pilgrimage route from Jerusalem , Jericho, Ayun Moses and Mt. Nebo and recently for Pope who celebrated mass there. However, when I walked through the gates the roosters, who were lording it over their flocks of hens, promptly crowed three times... something they probably didn’t do when the Pope entered the site.

The remains of the Byzantine monasteries that had been built there from 393AD have revealed mosaic floors and other fragments from what would have been a large religious site.

Before we headed off to Madaba we stopped in at the Arts-River Mosaic centre where Joy bought a mosaic of the Tree of Life as well as a few pieces of glassware and pottery as souvenirs of our visit.

Madaba has been settled for over 4500 years. It was the centre of the Moabite kingdom and is mentioned in the Old Testament as Medeba. When the area came under the rule of the Romans the site became an important christian site and the centre of a bishopric. It’s importance in the present comes from the mosaic map of the biblical lands inlaid in the floor of the Greek Orthodox Church of St. George.


The map shows all the important towns and geographic features from the River Jordan through to the Nile delta in a mix of linear and figurative detail.

We were also shown an icon that was the object of local veneration as it had been the focus of a local miracle. Apparently, when the icon was being displayed to the congregation a shaft of light had struck the picture leaving a hand reaching up to touch the infant Christ. So now the icon was kept in the crypt and was the object of worship for the local Greek Orthodox congregation.

From Madaba we drove to Kerak Castle. The ruins of a Crusader Castle dominating the trade and pilgrimage routes along the Kings Highway.

The castle could cater for a garrison of 3000 men with 17000 other families living in the town below so it was a substantial power base for the Crusaders.

Kerak Castle, which appears on the Madaba map, dominates the hill above the town with its battlements running along the rim and providing a sheer drop to the rocks below. Apparently one of the Crusader rulers,Chatillion, of the place used the drop as a convenient way of disposing of his enemies. He put a wooden box over their heads to ensure they remained conscious while falling to their deaths on the rocks below.
His cruelty was rewarded when he lost in battle with Saladin in 1187 as Saladin personally beheaded him.

Joy and I could imagine Carl roaming the walls and rooms busily working out the defenses and purposes of the site as he relived the history of the place in his imagination.

The drive from Kerak to Petra was along haul through the unrelieved desert down into the sandstone valleys that surround the site and its town of Wadi Mousa.

Here, too,we found ourselves the sole guests at the Petra Diamond Hotel... a mixed blessing result of touring Jordan in the off season!! There is nothing more daunting than being the sole breakfasters in a restaurant. The hotel proved to be friendly and comfortable with a helpful staff who were prepared to make conversation with two solitary guests.

11July: Petra:
Wadi Mousa, the town that services Petra, is, reputedly, the place where Moses struck the rocks and brought water to the Israelites as the wandered in the wilderness. The town is built on the sandstone hillsides with narrow, winding streets that follow ridge lines into the valley which is the entrance to Petra itself.

From our hotel window we watched horses, hens and goats wandering over vacant lots and meandering along the streets while local residents pruned their grape vines or checked their fig trees as their children perched themselves along the walls to watch the animals scratching in the dust below.

The summer heat may have all too short a day but in Jordan it proved to be exhausting and served to put a crimp on our original plan to spend two days exploring the Petra site before heading to Wadi Rum and Little Petra on our way back to Amman.

On Saber’s advice we left the hotel at 8.30 for the entrance to the walk into Petra and, perhaps, dodge some of the heat of the day.

Tickets duly bought we set off along the 1500 metre path through the siq or fissure in the sandstone cliffs that winds its way into the ruins. Above us the rock reached up over 100 metres to shade out the sun while allowing a cooling breeze to flow around us.

As we neared the siq evidence of the Nabataean civilisation became obvious in carved sandstone blocks - the Djin Blocks that,apparently, represent the Dushara God of the Nabataeans and the Obelisk tomb which appears to marked the starting point for the mortuary rites that were the centre of their culture.

Shortly after we entered the siq itself along which processions of travelers have clattered and chatted their way for thousands of years. At several points along the path evidence of Roman occupation in the form of cobble-stoned paving appeared while the Nabataean water system carved into the cliff faces showed us an earlier time and culture.

Eventually the siq does its final twist to open out into an Indiana Jones moment - the revelation of the facade of The Treasury.

Legend had it that this royal tomb, carved for the Nabataean King Aretas III, was the hiding place of pharaonic treasure from Egypt which had meant that the local Bedouin had been highly protective of the site even though they had tried to shoot out the urns that decorated the facade in the vain hope that royal treasures would spill out.

We paused there to both summon up the energy to head off into the sun to explore the site and to marvel at the artistry of the tomb and the time taken to carve out this 40 x 28 metre facade and the vast empty room inside.

The path led us past the facades of buildings that might have been both homes and government offices towards the theatre and the tombs of Petra.

Here the Urn tomb and the vaulted chambers below dominated the cliff face. This building had been converted to a church in 447 AD until Petra faded from the trade routes to be forgotten until its rediscovery in 1812 by English explorers.


All around the site the local Bedouin had set up trading stalls and shades for hot and weary walkers for which we were much relieved as the valley was a heat trap as the morning drifted into afternoon. Joy found comfort and conversation in one stall while I climbed the carved out steps to the Urn Tomb and the associated Silk, Corinthian and Palace tombs.

While I marvelled at the intricacy of the carving and engineering of the tombs Joy got into conversation with the young woman, who had been born in one of the caves in Petra, running a stall from whom she learnt about the way the local Bedouin live in the caves and ruins herding their sheep, goats, horses, donkeys and camels around the area in search of fodder as well as providing opportunities for tourists to ride in early explorer style from place to place within Petra.

We wandered past the remains of the Nymphaeum or spring in honour of the water nymphs towards the temples of the gods Dushara and el-Uzza, the remains of the Winged Lions Temple and the museum where we sat and contemplated climbing to either the Monastery or the Place of High Sacrifice in the afternoon heat.

In the end we decided to begin the walk out of the site rather than risk heat exhaustion on the side of a sandstone cliff.

The walk out convinced us that returning the next day to climb to either site would be pushing our luck as there was little real shelter and our legs were beginning to stiffen up from the climbing and scrambling we’d done that day.

Jordan Tripping Amman, Jerash & Dead Sea.

7th -8th July:
Long day of 16 hours of travel and shifting time zones. Left Swansea at 11.30 on the train to Paddington - arrived around 2.30- then by tube to Heathrow to check in for Dubai. We had a four hour wait around Terminal 3 until our seven hour flight which, of course, meant a time zone shift of three hours effectively lengthening our day.
We then had to amuse ourselves for seven hours before flying on to Jordan. This meant that with the lack of sleep on the trip over the day was punctuated in periods of dozing amidst our luggage which doesn’t make for a great sense of completeness!
Arrived at Amman Airport at 4.00 p.m. to be met by our AtlasTour guide inside passport control and ushered through the routines rapidly and smoothly only to discover that our luggage was to be the last bags off the rack.

Once we were luggaged up our host introduced us to our driver, Saber, and escorted us to the Hotel where we discovered, somewhat disconcertedly,that we were the only guests for the night!! Being the sole guests meant extremely generous meals - the evening meal of chicken, rice and vegetables was bigger than we would otherwise eat as, we found the next morning, was breakfast.

9th July:
Next morning we set off to visit the first of the sites on our itinerary - the Greco-Roman city of Jerash which is on the outskirts of Amman.

We also discovered one of the advantages of touring Jordan at this time of the year.... few tour groups blocking the entrances and sites for when we arrived at Jerash there were about six cars and a mini-van in the car park.

Jerash was one of the ten important cities in the Roman Empire - the Decapolis of Philadelphia (Amman), Damascus, Gadara until the collapse of the Roman Empire.

The city ruins were entered through a triumphal arch built to honour Emperor Hadrian in 129AD into a huge oval plaza which leads into a street of columns that seems to stretch to the horizon. Along this street we could see the remains of temples to Zeus, Dionysius,Artemis and other Roman deities. The temple to Dionysius was converted to a christian church in 359AD which, to my mind, seemed an ideal god’s temple to use as a church as it inversely parallels the way some libraries have been converted to pubs in New Zealand.(Galbraith’s, in Auckland, is a good example of this sort of cultural inversion).

Beside the temple of Artemis stands the Nymphaeum built in 191AD and dedicated to the water nymphs. This building was an impressive one with niches for each representation of the nymphs in the wall opening onto the street and the remains of a fountain in its courtyard.

I explored the South Theatre of the city before heading back to the hippodrome to watch a reenactment of a Roman legion’s drills, a gladiatorial combat and a mock chariot race.

The South Theatre seats 3000 and has what appeared to be perfect acoustics as I, sitting in the top centre of the auditorium, could hear every word spoken by tourists standing on the stage and in the pit below. The theatre was being prepared for a month long cultural event with famous singers and players performing every evening under lights so there was a constant bustle of technicians and sound and light directors mixed in among the few tour groups exploring the site.


The re-enactment group was an enthusiastic presentation of Roman drill manouvres and demonstrations of fighting techniques performed by the 6th Legion of Jerash in full armour. They were followed by Gladiators from the local Gladiatorial school who demonstrated the different types of combat used in such exchanges all to loud calls from a couple of young boys of “Kill Him!! Kill Him!!” as each exchange reached its climax.
They were followed by three teams of charioteers who raced around the hippodrome at great speed in clouds of dust and loud cries of encouragement to their horses.

We left Jerash and drove,literally, down to the Dead Sea for lunch and a float in the heavily salted water. We picked our way across the hot sand and sank into the warmth of the salt lake to watch other groups liberally coat themselves with mud, let it dry into some sort of black armour then wash it off and repeat for as long as good humour held out.

Feeling the heat we retreated to the coolness of the Resort’s swimming pool before driving back to Amman and preparation for day two of our adventure.