Wadi Rum

So I spent the my last weekend in Jordan at Wadi Rum which has been a recommended spot to visit while in Jordan. I had been told by multiple people in Jordan that it was a must do while I was here....so I figured I would save the best for last. I will admit that it was pretty nice even for the short period of time we got spend there. I went down with my co-worker and Hilary's friend Stacy.We took off early Friday morning from Amman and managed to get to Wadi rum in 3.0 hours (usually a 4 hour drive) and one speeding ticket later (that was after being pulled over 3 previous times and let off since we weren't from Jordan). So we went around Wadi Rum in a SUV and checked out all the famous spots in the dessert, pulled over a couple of times to hike up some mountains, they apparently don't care if you fall and kill yourself here, they let you do pretty much anything without any equipment. After all that we went to this Bedouin camp site where we had a fire and they cooked us a really good dinner. It was just the three of us staying at the camp site so we had the run of the little tent area which was super cool. We drank about 10 glass of Jordanian tea which is a black tea with LOTS of sugar in it. They actually boil the sugar with the water first and then add the tea leaves. After all that we crashed out under the stars which was pretty amazing.

The next morning we found a horse ranch and went horse backriding around the area, it was really beautiful and I am happy to say that my many years of lessons came in handy. It all came back to me and i was able to ride around the place, it was pretty amazing. Sooo sad to say but that was my last weekend in Jordan and now i'm off to Bangkok and Indonesia...more later

Beirut in Beirut

Ok well not really but that city does have a strange energy or feel to it. I had to head up to Lebanon for 3 days for work but don't worry I did manage to squeeze in some time to check out the city. The city felt a bit depressing to me, I'm not exactly sure thats the word but its the closest thing I can come to this late at night. There are 5 star hotels next to some hotels which are war torn with bullet holes in them. It is crazy to think that a 15 year war went on in this country. The entire downtown was completely rebuilt after the war ended, so its beautiful and new looking but it doesn't exactly fit into the cities identity. I went to dinner one night with some friends of friends who live in Lebanon and got an understanding a bit more of the history and what it was like during those 15 years. It seems the perspective is that things are still a bit uneasy between two religious groups in the country. I guess that was part of what you could kind of feel when you are there...however Beirut does have one of the hottest night lives in all of the middle east just so everyone knows.

Wadi Dana

Jordan has some really beautiful landscape which I never realized until I got here. There are a number of Wadi's (or valley in Arabic) and last weekend I went to Wadi Dana which is about 2.5 hours south of Amman. However we left on late friday afternoon and we didn't account for getting a flat tire along the way which I guess is pretty common in Jordan. So we spent about 45 minutes in this little tire station waiting to see if they could get a tube to fix our flat, unfortunately they were not able to fix it since all the shops were closed on Friday. So we drove the rest of the way to Wadi Dana on the spare which was an actual full tire thankfully...We did get lost on the way there since it was dark and you are in the middle of the desert. When we did find out way, we got to this little family run hotel/campground and they had dinner waiting for us. It was delicious.

We pretty much crashed out and then got up early on sat for a hike. The place was beautiful, kind of like the grand canyon only about 100 times smaller. The weather was perfect and it was really cool to be some of the only people along the path or even out there hiking.

On the way we ran into some Bedouin kids who were out with their goats, it was pretty cool, they chatting with us a for a while and then we continued along on our way. All and All an awesome weekend and it was great to get out some and see more of Jordan.