Tag Archives: Holiday travel

Days 7 & 8 – Coralation

Saturday 21 and Sunday 22 May 2022 – Reader, I offer you a respite from having to wade through dozens of photos, similar to the respite we’ve had over the last days from having to Do Stuff All The Time. This entry will be mercifully short.

For the week up to and including yesterday, my Garmin Vivosmart calculated that I had exerted myself for 762 minutes at moderate intensity and 138 at vigorous intensity. This has been the hardest week since September last year when, you’ll remember because you read these pages, Jane and I were walking a couple of hundred miles around Menorca. However, yesterday and today registered a big, fat 0 on the Garminmeter mainly because we’ve not done much. Here is what we have done.

Before our departure from Wadi Rum at an entirely reasonable 9am, I took a few more snaps of the site, including the view through one of our bubble’s windows.

You’ll notice that the silver sun-deflecting coverings have been taken off the bubbles – they are put on during the day and staff remove them in the late afternoon. The site has expanded over the last few years; Jane found a couple of aerial photos which show its growth from pre-pandemic

to now (I’ve ringed the one we slept in).

There are reviews from May 2019 which mention (OK, complain about) construction work being done, which gives a good idea of what’s been going on. I guess it must have taken quite a lot of confidence to carry on the development during the pandemic and hope that the tourists would return. I don’t think the site was anywhere near full, but one hopes that the owners have made the right call for the future.

We were transported back to the entrance in Rum Village and managed to find Saeed among the slightly shambolic goings-on that inevitably surround trying to reunite punters with drivers over a reasonably large parking area. And then we were off to Aqaba. The countryside we passed through was granite and striking.

Saeed gave us a quick driving tour of Aqaba, which is a small city, but busy because it was the weekend (the Arab weekend is Friday and Saturday, remember, so it’s chaos arriving on Thursday evening and leaving on Saturday evening or early Sunday). One thing we noted was the ubiquity of a wonderfully colourful tree by the roadsides.

Jane looked it up and confirmed her theory that it is called a “Flamboyant Tree”, for some reason or other. We also noted an unfamiliar thing:

a bag of bread left hanging on a tree. Saeed explained that people often hang their left-over bread like this for others to take if they need, for example to feed animals, which is rather lovely.

He then dropped us off some 16km further south, at the Mövenpick Tala Bay Resort, which is very substantial and very resortish.

We checked in and had the luxury not only of having nothing to do, but also of knowing we had a relaxed morning the next day. So we headed almost immediately for the lobby bar and had a welcome injection of gin before stumbling about until we found a restaurant for a late lunch – it really is quite a large place – the walk from reception to our room is (according to Garmin) 0.16 miles – and we found it a bit confusing trying to locate the best route from A (where we were) to B (where lunch would be). But we managed it because we’re triers and had another welcome injection of western food – steak and chips in my case. I like Jordanian food and have enjoyed eating here. But – steak and chips, you know?

The rest of yesterday was spent bringing this blog not quite up to date and we got a reasonably early night with, as I say, the comfort that comes from not having an alarm set for the morning.

A small diversion: please excuse the schoolboy ignorance in me that caused me an inward snigger when I saw this at the breakfast buffet.

Today’s activity, agreed with Saeed on the way down from Wadi Rum, was a trip out on the Red Sea on a glass-bottomed boat to look at the coral for which the sea is renowned. Saeed has a friend with a boat. Who’d have guessed, eh? So he took us to the harbour, just by the fish market,

where it became clear that glass-bottomed boat trips are definitely A Thing in Aqaba.

We met Omar and his boat

and headed out at a gentle pace, consistent with not tearing the glass bottom out of the boat which would have been regrettable. There is plenty of coral growing naturally along the coast here, but The Powers That Be have undertaken a rather unusual initiative to give the coral extra places to grow. Because it grows well on steel, they have dumped various objects – ships, old military tanks, that kind of thing, so that coral can grow on them and also in some cases as targets for divers to visit (Aqaba is also a big diving centre on account of it being rather nearer the sea that almost anywhere else in Jordan). So he headed out to the first one and told us to grab our cameras. At this point, it became clear that all was not clear.

It was very difficult to take decent photos with my Nikon through the glass on the bottom of the boat.

In fact, it was easier to get an idea of the ship and its coral by, erm, looking over the side.

When we got to some coastal coral a bit further on, I tried also using my mobile phone, and this was the best I could do

so I tried some video which at least gives an impression, even if the quality is, frankly, poor.

We had lunch on the boat – Omar had brought fish and chips (Jordan style) for us all with him, and the fish was sea bass, which was delicious. After that we headed back to Aqaba and I took one or two more snaps on the way:

this, for example, is Eilat, on the opposite shore of the finger of the Red Sea that reaches up to Aqaba. To me and Google Maps, Eilat is in Israel, but Saeed and Omar described it as being in Palestine. I offer no further comment, mainly because the sensitivities and complexities are beyond my ken. From Aqaba, not only can you see Eilat, but you can see into Egypt on that side of the finger (marked by the big Hotel Taba); and the border into Saudi Arabia is only 25km south of the city. This proximity to many nations has a great bearing on Jordan’s culture, as I’ve mentioned before.

Having had only Lipton’s Ice Tea as refreshment with lunch, we found the siren call of the lobby bar irresistible, and treated ourselves to a couple of drinks before heading back to our room. There was one final point of interest en route – the Mövenpick Chocolate Hour, which was an opportunity to grab a couple of treats to have with the cup of tea that I am drinking as I type this. But because they were free, we could be reassured that they contained no calories at all. No, really.

And that’s about it for Aqaba, and the blog is up to date. We have another relaxed start tomorrow (yay!) as we depart at 10 for our next adventure which will take place in the Dana Nature Reserve, about three hours northish of here. It’s supposed to be really great for hiking in, which is good news, since our itinerary specifies that we will undertake a hike there. We know that, like Wadi Rum, there will be no booze served with our meals over the next couple of days. What I’m not sure of is the amount of internet there is, so you may well find yourself having another short respite from my deathless prose. It’s Sunday now and I will definitely be back online on Wednesday; I hope you’ll join me then.

Day 6 – Wadi, but no Rum (no internet, either)

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Friday 20 May 2022 – Woo hoo! Another lie in! We merely had to get ourselves up, breakfasted and checked out for 9am, when Saeed came to take us on the next destination. En route, he took us to a couple of viewpoints. The first gave us a good sight of Umm Sayhoun, the village near Wadi Musa, where the bedouin who had been living in tents and caves on the Petra site had been forcibly relocated by the Jordanian government.

Apparently, they were not in favour, but there they are. By the way, don’t think of bedouin as poor nomads scraping a living by herding goats; some of them are indecently rich, it appears, often from the sale of huge areas of land previously owned by the family.

Our next stop was the viewpoint I mentioned in my last entry that gives a view over Wadi Musa and bits of the Petra site; I was hoping to be able to make out some details to give context, but I’m afraid I can’t. Instead, here is a good view of the very substantial town of Wadi Musa itself, which actually curls around the hill to include the area behind where we stood to take the photo.

Before we departed the area, we also visited Little Petra. The original idea had been to hike from here back to the Monastery on the main site, but The Powers That Be put the kybosh on that by closing the trail (we never found out why, but suspect someone was having a bad day at the office). Little Petra is in many ways like Petra, only smaller, and cheaper to get into. For example, they have a mini Treasury,

(with the obligatory retail opportunity in front of it)

and some creative display ideas facilitated by the geology of the site,

a mini Siq

and some fancy tombs which are, though, on a smaller scale than the main site.

The stone is mainly sandstone which is much softer and prone to erosion, so many things have vaguer outlines, but you can also see that sediment has built up to cover much of the lower floors

(the aperture on the right would be something that someone stood in front of in order to wash their hands, for example).

What Little Petra has that is unique, though, is some surviving painted frescos from Nabatean times, i.e. around 2,000 years ago.

on the ceiling

of a biclinium (those who studied Greek will know that this has one fewer sides with seating than a triclinium).

Retail opportunities were rife, but there was much less importunism on the part of the operatives; this chap, for example, only made occasional entreaties to pay him for his musicianship on the rababa.

Although there isn’t the striking stone colour you find in the main site, there is no shortage of impressive rock formations.

We carried on via an unusually honest piece of marketing by the roadside

which gave us the last major viewpoint before we headed for Wadi Rum and its dire prospect of access to neither internet nor gin.

There were a couple of photo-worthy pauses en route: the roadside was dotted with bedouin camps, for example;

we got an overview of Wadi Rum;

there’s a railway that goes through the desert;

and, amazingly in the middle of a desert, a railway station. With trains.

The railway used to support trains that carried potash across Wadi Rum, but is now just a museum (and occasional film set).

At this point, Saeed stopped, doffed his baseball cap and donned a keffiyah, a traditional Arab headdress. To get help with this, he called in at a place that, would you believe it, was also a retail opportunity. Which managed to sell us one each by the charming Jordanian sales skills that accompany such a welcoming nation.

(Yes, I bought one as well and I use it to bolster my assertion that selfies are a bad idea.) We never quite got to the bottom of why Saeed made this change – but it was noticeable that at many of the stops we made in Wadi Rum (see later) many of the westerners were wearing something similar. Funny, that.

(I guess it’s good to support the local entrepreneurs; the chap who sold us ours told us that the current nastiness in Ukraine was pushing the price inflation of essential stuff like wheat and bread beyond 100%, and reading the papers, which I did just before the internet went dark on me, bears his story out – the whole region is suffering badly.)

So then we headed for the Inner Darkness that is Wadi Rum, a place that has neither internet access nor gin. You can bring the latter with you if it’s that important, although you are charged a tenner corkage to drink it in the camp we went to; and I tried to bring the former, in the shape of a Skyroam Solis Lite, but the mobile signal was so rubbish that I had to make do with being offline for almost 24 whole hours. The sacrifices I make, eh?

Wadi Rum is a protected area in the Jordanian desert, so as well as no alcohol sales and no internet there is no normal road traffic on account of there being no normal roads. There’s a village where punters are dropped off and taken to their various camps within the area on 4x4s driven typically by local bedouin drivers. We stopped off and had lunch at the village, which gives a view over Lawrence of Arabia’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, apparently.

I can see six, if I look at it carefully.

So we climbed on board a 4×4 and were taken to the Aicha Memories Luxury Camp. Our specification for luxury level accommodation was an important part of our itinerary, because, you’ll remember, I hate camping.

We had a couple of hours to relax before our afternoon/evening entertainment, so took a stroll around the site

(our accommodation was inside one of those fancy-looking geodesic jobbies, and I have to say it lived up to their website claims that it’s just like a luxury hotel room only in the desert. And with no internet.)

And then it was time to go off on a jaunt around the area, driven by Salim, a young bedouin who (praise be to Allah) had not only good English but a sense of humour as well. Wadi Rum is 280 square miles and we covered a total of 17 of them bouncing around on the back of Salim’s aged Toyota Landcruiser (not comfy, but very much suitable for the terrain). This was our route, in a sort of anti-clockwise direction – the slightly darker area is the extent of Wadi Rum as a whole.

What we hadn’t realised was how much hard graft we would have to put into the whole thing. Today was (according to Garmin) the second-hardest-working day of the holiday, after clambering up to the Petra Monastery – in other words, more work than the High Place of Sacrifice walk. And it could have been much harder if we hadn’t wimped out of one bit – please read on.

I, ex-pro photographer that I sort of am, had taken a gimbal with me to try to give some smooth footage taken from the back of the 4×4 as we bucked and jolted across the desert. Given the results, I also tried some footage handheld with my smartphone. The comparison is quite striking, if you’re interested in this kind of thing. If not, move on, nothing to see here.

(You can see that even though there are no paved roads, there’s no shortage of traffic; there’s a lot of toing and froing across Wadi Rum and we passed a lot of camps (none as posh as ours, of course) but quite a lot of them seemed unoccupied, presumably in the aftermath of the pandemic. One wonders what the Wadi was like in full flow.)

The first inkling we had that we were not just there for the ride came at the first stop, when it became apparent that we would have to scramble up this fucker.

It’s imaginatively called the “Red Sand Dune”. Note the soft sand that makes walking hard work even when it’s flat and level. Note also, please, the gradient.

But also, please, note the view from the top, which was quite something.

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It became clear that the route was not so much well-trodden as well-driven; there were many groups of gasping, red-faced tourists struggling up this monster and being told by the smug bastards who were going down that it was “worth it”.

The next stop was less dramatic but still had its moments – the Al Khazali canyon.

There are places where it’s a bit of a scramble, but it’s not too hard and its main interest is in carvings and inscriptions on the rocks in it – some pictures and some writing. Yes, I have loads of photos, but I’ll only inflict these on you.

Shortly after this we came to a stop here.

It’s called the Little Bridge. You’ll see why later. Of course we had to scramble up it and of course I had to take a photo of a triumphant Jane atop the arch.

As she headed off towards the arch I shouted to her that she should let me have the water bottle she was carrying, because it was important not to lose it in case she fell. This seemed to amuse some of the other punters who were around at the time.

The reason it is called the Little Bridge became apparent at the next stop. For reasons which may become apparent, we decided to remain as spectators.

The next stop (we kept bumping into people from the previous one, which is why it was clear that there was a definite route being followed by many drivers) was another canyon, the Aby Khashaba canyon. “Phew”, we thought, a bit of a rest from all this dangerous up and down stuff. Wrongly, as it turned out.

The rock formation on the left looks a bit like the helmet of Agamemnon, I’m sure you’ll agree – we wondered if it is carved by natural erosion or by people..

Having gone up some more bloody soft sand, we then had to descend this.

Tricky, but we made it with no bones broken. The final stop was to watch the sunset, which is incredibly hackneyed, but still has its magic if you’re there. One chap was lying down on the job

but the colours were pretty wonderful.

If you can spare 90 seconds or so, here’s a hyperlapse (15x normal speed – I’m amused by the trails of the jeeps whizzing around in the foreground, just like the trails in a Wilson Cloud Chamber).

After that, Salim

took us back to the camp. By this time, I hope you’ve been following, it was dark, and the camp was attractively lit up

and we went for a light bite in the main catering bubble

and a lemon and mint in the cafe, where some (reasonably) locals were having a good ol’ chinwag.

and then it was time for bed. Not having any internet relieved me from the immediate need to write the day up (I’m in Aqaba as you read this) so we got a decently early and sober night, not characteristics that have particularly marked out the holiday thus far. To be honest we were both really quite tired – the days have been long and intense and so it was good to have the prospect of a decent night’s sleep. The morrow brings the possibility of even more relaxation as we head to Aqaba and have nothing organised in our itinerary! I dare say there’ll be something to write about it and I will do this in due course. In the meantime, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about our day in the desert and will come back to read more as I write it.

Day 5 – We See The Light in Petra

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Thursday May 19 2022 – We got a lie in – yay! – well, compared to yesterday we did. Alarm call at 0530, hasty breakfast and off we went to Petra with Ali, starting at 0700. There were even fewer people today than yesterday, which meant even less chance of business for the hustlers near the visitor centre to find any marks to offer horse rides to; so their attendance was sparse, too.

Although the weather was similar today to yesterday’s (i.e sunny and eventually hot) the light was surprisingly different, as you’ll see from the myriad photos in today’s entry. Many of them are similar scenes to yesterday, but the light was different; and in Petra, the light can be remarkable. Ali was encouraging us along at a brisk pace, as he wanted us to get to a particular point before the sun got too high. As we walked along the main drag from the Treasury, the stone was positively glowing, presumably because of reflected light from the surroundings; whatever the reason, the effect was striking.

Our objective today was to get to (sigh!) the highest point of the site, the High Place of Sacrifice. The conventional way to do this is (sort of) clockwise, with a steep ascent from just before the Theatre, and a longer but less steep descent bringing you back opposite the Royal Tombs (go and look at the map from yesterday if you haven’t memorised it, and take a black mark). Instead, Ali took us the other way round in order to get the light he wanted us to see. It turns out that he is a professional photographer, which is why he took the light as a priority and why he kept suggesting shots to me yesterday. His instincts were right, and so I continued to let him school me in fruitful angles, as you’ll see as you read on.

We passed some goats.

Nothing unusual in that, you’d (rightly) say. But how the hell did they get up there?

Stay tuned for more goat action, by the way. The track led us past a series of caves – living spaces and tombs – and the colours that today’s light had brought out were marvellous (that’s Ali in the first picture).

One particular space, still in use by someone that Ali knew (actually, he knows everyone) had a particularly vibrant ceiling (he uses it to pen his goats – a sort of 5-star goat-el. Thank you. Thank you for listening to my joke.)

The tombs in the photo above are for middle-class Nabateans; looking across the valley, we could also see more tombs, also for the middle classes.

Between us and the tombs on the far side, you can see a couple of holes in the ground. These mark the area where there were tombs for lower-class Nabateans. Much of them have been covered in sediment that has built up over the centuries; generally speaking, somewhere between one and two metres of sediment has accumulated, which means that the lower or ground-level storeys of many places appear to have low ceilings. Actually, the floor has risen.

Reinforcing the “necropolis” description of Petra from Suhir, our Jerash guide, we passed a further series of living space/tombs, many with names that have nothing to do with their original occupants, but either derive from local legend, or were simply coined more recently to identify them: the “Broken Pediment” tomb;

The “Renaissance” tomb (possibly the dwelling of the High Priest);

and the “Roman Soldiers” Tomb.

The name is a complete misnomer, because not only are the three figures on the face Nabatean rather than Roman, but also it’s not a tomb. It was used as a meeting place for visiting dignitaries and religious high muck-a-mucks before adjourning to eat to the triclinium opposite (from which the above photo is framed); originally the space between the two was a colonnaded garden.

The triclinium itself is remarkably coloured

and shows the eponymous three sides. After this the religious dignitaries would form a procession, eventually to the High Place of Sacrifice but first to a small temple.

I hope the steps they had to climb were wider and better-formed than the ones there today, otherwise a dignified procession, particularly in priest’s robes and assorted paraphernalia, would be very challenging.

Forgive a plenitude of photos, here, but the temple had several features worth remarking on. For example, outside it was a cistern

which was filled by rainwater let out from a 75 cubic metre reservoir above by unplugging a hole (just above centre left) which allowed water into a collector and down a channel which led to the cistern.

Damn’ clever, these Nabateans. The pillars of the temple make a frame in one of my favourite images from today – the open space was once a garden, and at the far side is the tomb of the gardener…

from the temple they continued up to the Lion Fountain

which was itself fed from the same reservoir running water down a channel and out through the lion’s mouth, into a pool where the religious visitors could wash before making their sacrifice (the marks from a stream down the right-hand side is caused by escaping rainwater because the original channels and dams have eroded away). The lion is in Assyrian style. Ascending further gives another view of the Roman Soldiers tomb and a glimpse of the reservoir which fed these ingenious water distribution channels.

Further up, we came across evidence of where stone was quarried,

in this case for a Crusader fortress which was built little higher, but which was destroyed in an earthquake.

The steps in the photo above lead past a pair of obelisks representing the two principal Nabatean gods.

Whilst we were ascending them we heard the music of the rababa, the Arab flute (though distinctly not played by a professional musician). The player turned out to be a Bedouin lady

to whom we donated a couple of Dinars for her musical contribution to our ascent, and who it turned out had quite a substantial retail opportunity up there.

And then having ascended those steps and overall some 185 metres (really? It felt like more) we reached the High Place of Sacrifice.

at the top of the picture is the altar whence the blood would flow through a channel into a reservoir below

(the Nabateans were clearly experts in fluid mechanics). In the middle of the area is the platform on which the giver of the sacrificial animal would stand before the sacrifice was carried out by the high priest

and the blood would flow through a channel across the area to be stored so it could be sprayed around as evidence of a good, old-fashioned and satisfactory slaughter.

No self-respecting High Place of Sacrifice would pass muster without offering the dignitaries a decent view

and we could also see some more goats (see, I told you there would be more goat action)

and we wondered, as before, how the hell they got there.

Shortly after and slightly below the High Place is an excellent tea stop-cum-retail-opportunity and Ali recommended we take advantage of it. Apart from anything else, it offered some precipitous and spectacular views over the main Petra centre.

Some very good, sweet and energising mint tea was served by a young lad who was one of two people who ran the place

As well as a unique viewpoint over the main Petra site, which still showed signs of the glowing light that illuminated it earlier

we could also clearly see the Bedouin village where the government had moved people when they removed them from living on the Petra site itself.

Then it was time to start the descent to Petra, past several notable scenes.

until we got back down to Petra’s main drag. We said farewell to Ali, and thanked him for doing a splendid job of showing us some out-of-the-way places and interesting photo scenes, and headed back (once again under hot sunshine) on the long pull up towards our hotel. I took the opportunity to take a couple of final shots; for example, the light on the Façades was wonderful,

and there was still a glow to the rocks as they reflected light from the paths.

In front of the Treasury was busy and buzzy,

we were passed by a couple of mounted Police, in distinctive pointed hats

and there were by now plenty of hustlers at the top of the path down waiting for marks to come by to try to get them to do a horse ride down to the site.

We’d done about 7.5 miles by this stage and were glad to get back to the hotel. Garmin reckoned we’d ascended a total of some 500 metres as we went down into Petra, up to the High Place, back down into Petra and back to the hotel.

so we felt we’d earned the short sleep we awarded ourselves back at the hotel, along with, of course, a cup of Twining’s finest Earl Grey. After a few hours’ rest, Saeed came and picked us up to take us to a lunch consisting of a traditional Jordanian dish – Maglouba, or “upside down meal”. There’s a particular serving trick of turning the meal over from the pan onto the plate so that the rice is on top of chicken and vegetables; served with salad and yoghurt. En route, he took us to a high viewpoint over Wadi Musa and Petra.

I think you can make out some details of the site, but I’m not sure.

The fissure in the middle is the Siq, and you can make out some other details of tombs, but I can’t be certain of what I’m looking at. Perhaps we’ll revisit the spot tomorrow, when the sun is more favourable, and be able to make out more.

Lunch was in a café/restaurant called TimeOut, in Tourism Street, Wadi Musa. It looks like a rather ordinary café from outside

But behind the café front there’s a rather fine dining room

where we had a rather fine meal. Yes, I have a photo. No you can’t see it.

And that was pretty much it for the day. Tomorrow we leave Petra for one of the other tourist tick boxes in Jordan, Wadi Rum. We’ll be staying in the nearest I will allow myself to approach camping, a geodesic-shaped luxury tent. According to the website, this will let me “wake up in the wild outdoors without compromising an ounce of luxury. Expect the same amenities and facilities as you would have in a top-class hotel.” I shall whinge ceaselessly if this has over-egged my expectations.

However, the luxury doesn’t extend to any form of online access, so I’ll be going radio silent for the next couple of days. However, please keep the faith and come back over the weekend to catch up with whatever adventures have ~~befallen us~~ come our way in our absence from the whirl of the world-wide web.