JORDAN
We were particularly excited about making a trip to Jordan because it marked the first Arab country we visited outside of Morocco. At the risk of boring the audience with long, drawn-out stories and a crap-ton of photos (which we do have), we will summarize (to an extent) our trip. We elected to do an organized tour for Jordan since it was the first time spending an extended period of time in a new location. We weren't sure what we "needed" to see or how to pull it all together, so we took the guesswork out of it and picked a pre-planned itinerary with almost everything included. We used the travel company, Encounters Travel, and booked a 6-day tour.
We started and ended the tour in the capital city, Amman. After visiting many of Amman's historical sites, we started the drive south to visit Mt. Nebo, Kerak Castle, Petra, and Wadi Rum. After three days, we drove back to Amman, making a stop at the Dead Sea before returning to our hotel.
Trip Highlights:
Floating in the Dead Sea
Stargazing in Wadi Rum
4x4 tour of Wadi Rum
Petra
Hummus and Manakeesh
A few thoughts regarding some of the highlights:
Petra - It's no wonder at all that Petra is one of the New7Wonders of the World and a UNESCO World Heritage site...holy cow. It's incredible, and MASSIVE. We only had one day to discover the hidden city, but you could easily spend three days wandering through every part of this majestic wonder. Honestly, the best word to describe the site is mindboggling. You cannot describe the scale of the buildings to someone without seeing them in person. They are vast, vacant, eerie, and just plain puzzling. The main route into the city is a 45-minute walk through winding canyons before reaching the iconic "Treasury" building. From there, you make a left and exit the canyons to find numerous other sites strewn across the area. Crossing a valley, we opted to climb 900+ rock-carved stairs (about 45 minutes one-way) to visit the Monastery, before making the trek back to the main entrance of the park. Altogether, this was an 8-hour day in the sweltering sun, but totally worth it!
Floating in the Dead Sea - Another mindboggling experience we were excited to try! The only downside was that it was 104 degrees outside and we arrived at the Dead Sea during the heat of the afternoon. So we only stayed for 30 minutes before heading back to Amman. We will also warn you that while floating in the Dead Sea is surreal, there are some things to be careful of! Do not put your face in the water (which we did not do). Do not try to float on your stomach (we did do this, and it is quite funny to try and get yourself back upright - because of the buoyancy you cannot physically pull your legs underneath you, you have to roll over). And although your skin feels super smooth after swimming in the Sea, we could not spend much time in the water because it stings! After spending the previous 5 days applying and reapplying sun screen and walking around in the sun, our skin was a little bit sensitive. Well, throw some salt on that...and yeah, the tiniest of tiny cuts or irritations will burn. Regardless, it was a very "cleansing" experience and we would have loved to explore more of the Dead Sea and some of the salt fields.
The hardest part of putting together this post was deciding how to include our photos...this was the first time we had nearly 100 "post-worthy" photos - how do we put them all here?? So, we've tried to select our top 20 photos from various places during our trip. The remaining photos will be posted to K's Facebook account and to our Instagram account (@veganwithasociallife). We've got some downtime over the next couple of weeks while J gets back into the swing of things at the university. We look forward to traveling more starting in November. Enjoy!
