good talk

The 5 Gulf States that I was in I had never been to before and I'm always glad to add extra countries to my collection but Jordan I had been to just 4 years before. I didn't cat around Amman this time but got on a van going to Wadi Musa, the town next to Petra. Lots of hotels just pick the one you want. In the morning I hopped a van for the 2 miles to Petra, the "Lost City," the city of Sele in the Bible. Settled by the Nabataeans in ancient times and rediscovered by the Swiss adventurer, Johannes Burkhardt in 1822, Petra was kept secret to the West for a thousand years (ha, ha, actually I don't know why), a city largely carved from Red Stone. And the redness of Petra had largely faded in the 4 years since I had last been there, I have no idea why, I asked and didn't get any good answers. The most famous building is "the Treasury" which is the first you come to and it's about a mile and a half to the furthest point, "the Monastery," which I reached this time. There's a lot of climbing involved and 4 years before a silly Arab was acting up and kept me awake at the hotel I stayed at, I didn't have the energy to get to "the Monastery." There's lots of other tourists and they're riding camels, horses, donkeys but I made it a point to just walk, to me that's part of it. The area around Petra is strange, I've seen cumulus clouds that were barely above the ground. The Moabites were originally here and denied the Jews passage through their land, the Jews eventually returned and threw the Moabites from the cliffs. I ate at the huge buffet in the middle of Petra, $12, it was just basic grub but you could have all you wanted, calories you need to explore the place. I didn't miss anything this time, I was exhausted by the end of the day but I enjoyed it. The next morning I got on a van going to Aqaba, on the Red Sea. Little to see there, this was my 3rd time to Jordan, I had been in Aqaba 15 years before. Took a taxi to Wadi Rum, it's like a national park, it's just a lot of desert and mountains. I stayed at this friendly place which has a restaurant and a bunch of tents out back which cost $4 a night. I walked out into the desert and read for a few hours, it was pretty nice. I ate at the restaurant, wrote postcards and eventually retired to my tent for the night. No light, just darkness after the sun went down and it was cold as heck but plenty of blankets in the tent. And the wind howled that night like you wouldn't believe and swayed that tent back and forth like somebody waving their hand. All in all it was a pretty good experience and I slept well. The next morning I took a taxi back to Aqaba and then took another taxi to the border and crossed over into Eilat, Israel.