Our very first stop was at a factory famous for its Dead Sea Products and other Jordan souvenirs. We were told by our friends that it is cheaper to buy these in Jordan compared to Israel. So we ended up buying a mix of hand/body creams, mud, sea salts, soaps and a kuffiya for Rohit. The shopkeeper had great marketing skills I must say since the damage was 90 JD for us in the end. Extremely satisfied with our trip, we went to see the memorial of Moses@ Mt. Nebo.
Mt. Nebo boasts a (somewhat) shackled church with mosaic flooring, Moses’ serpentine bronze cross and is supposedly the burial site of Moses. Under ideal weather conditions, you get to see the dead sea, Jerusalem on one side and the Jordan river eastward from top of the mountain. Again we were not so lucky and instead met with a lot of haze making it hard to see anything beyond a few hundred meters. The mosaics were done very intricately and dated back to 500AD. The story is: Moses with a lot of pilgrims started walking together to show them the promised land: the new day Jerusalem. At Mt. Nebo, God showed him the direction to look, which today is a straight line from Mt. Nebo -> Dead Sea -> Jerusalem. Even today lots of pilgrims follow the line of this holy pilgrimage between Mt. Nebo -> Jordan River -> Jericho -> Jerusalem.
Our next stop was at Madaba: an old city famous for trading. It boasts a Greek Orthodox Church displaying oldest map of the holy land in a mosaic on the church’s floor.
There were many shops with mosaic art using colors and stones resembling that from church’s floor. Somehow for me, the mosaics of the Vatican city and St. Peter’s basilica are the most ornate and most beautiful, so I did not feel like spending too much time in Madaba shops + handycraft centers.
Then after about 1.5 hours came Shobuk: famous for its castle(Montreal) for crusaders. The castle is overlooking Wadi Musa and is located at rather strategic place. There were some great views of the wadi(valley), the semi-desert outside which we captured through the camera. But really speaking, the site can be skipped completely. Finally in 30 more minutes we reached “Amra-Palace Hotel” in Petra. Seems a pretty plush place - excellent staff in the kitchen and dining area. They gave me hot boiling water to cook my Maggie noodles :). We slept yet again for 4 hours until 10 PM due to heavy jetlag and got up to have dinner. When will our bodies adjust to the timezone? It is 3:45 AM on 12/27 and I am wide awake writing this.
Everywhere today on our way (highway through the desert) we saw lot of houses built with limestone, gardens and private collections of olive trees ( their harvesting got over in November, so we could not find any trees bearing fruit). One great thing to notice is the wide spread electricity to all places, even in the middle of the semi-desert. We had long chats with Afram about healthcare, politics, city mainline business, average cost of living, taxes, oil, tourism industry, etc. It was quite entertaining to compare and contrast with similar situations in India. Jordan is very much like India, except India is much better to its people in lots of aspects above.
We have a long day in Petra today. We decided not to take any help of professional guide; but rather go and explore ourselves. Should be a lot of fun and I am really looking for to “One of the eight wonders of the modern world”!
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