Wadi Rum
Set off at 7:30. Visited Little Petra ( Siq Al-Barid) including boulder-blocked view.
Then down to Al-Bayda ([aka Beidha] – circa 7000 BC village).
Then straight off to Wadi Rum in open top jeep to see Lawrence’s Well plus rock formations with Nabatean and Thamudic inscriptions.
Another hugely photogenic place – Wadi Rum – we took loads more pictures than shown in this piece and it is well worth a click through to see the full highlights set (link at bottom of this piece).
Then onto Aqaba – shawarma and calamari lunch
Then on for weird border crossing alone but it all came right in the end.
This border crossing was quite a thing.
There had been a terrible shooting, subsequently known as The Island of Peace Massacre, at one of the few other Jordan/Israel road border crossings, just a few days before our crossing. As a result, the Aqaba crossing site was more or less completely deserted.
Unconnected with the extra security, there was a strict “passengers only” rule at the crossing, so our Jordanian driver/guide had to say goodbye to us at the Jordanian barbed wire and we had to do our own thing walking across several hundred meters of no-mans-land between the Jordanian side and the Israel side. The site was surrounded by hills from which you couldn’t help feeling an Island of Peace-type lunatic could shoot having secreted themselves there with ease, despite the enormous security presence at each side, but not in no-mans-land.
We each had a trolley for our baggage. The trolleys had traditional “minds of their own” making it extremely difficult for us to walk in anything vaguely approximating a straight line, which rendered the several hundred meters of no-mans-land even longer.
Worst of all, our trolleys were squeaky, which meant that the only sound we heard in the eerily vacant no-mans-land was the “eek…eek..eek” of our own progress wheeling the trolleys.
It felt a bit like a scene in a Sam Peckinpah or Sergio Leone movie. This scene might give you some idea of it:
Once we got to the Israeli side, we learnt that border control and all the additional security was the entirety of the waiting party…our Israeli driver/guide had not turned up.
A bright spark at border control asked to see our travel documents and quickly worked out which agency to call, placed the call and told us that our driver would be with us within 10 minutes…which he was. I don’t think anyone imagined that we would press ahead with the road/foot border crossing in the circumstances…no-one else had done so that day!
Spent a tired evening relaxing in [Princess] hotel.
A placeholder & links covering the whole journey can be found through the link here and below:
All the photos from the Jordan leg of our journey can be found here or below:
