We had a great time diving the Red Sea in both Jordan and Egypt. The coral is in pretty good shape and there is a variety of life that we haven’t seen before. Check out the pictures of Aqaba, Jordan and Dahab, Egypt on the website for some of the really cool stuff we saw. By the fourth dive, we had seen so much that when Mary pointed out a group of rare (to us) lionfish, I just waved my hand and swam on. Picture here is a Red Sea Walkman. The wings open when it’s real angry. Ooops.

Saudi Arabia is considered the holiest of the holy lands in Islam and non-Muslims are not terribly welcome. We wanted to check it out, though, so we did a dive called the “Saudi Border”. It’s a wall dive that starts almost directly off the border checkpoint between Jordan and Saudi. Now we can’t say for sure that we made it across the line, but it was close enough. Lots of lionfish on this dive.

We did a couple wrecks, one of them a WWII British cargo ship that was full of tanks, trucks and motorcycles when it was sunk by a German bomb south of the Suez Canal.

We did a dive at the southernmost tip of the Sinai penninsula where warm and cold currents from the deep come together and draw some of the bigger fish out of hiding. After we passed a regular old blue spotted stingray, we came across a handful of gigantic eels. The biggest was at least 7′ long and had a neck that seemed about 1′ across at the widest. It was an absolute monster with a big gash along its body from some battle that we were lucky enough to miss. These are so big that they are just not afraid of anything – three of them actually came out of their rocks and free swam for us.

Our final dive was at night in Dahab. There’s a lot of plankton in the water that glow when you disturb them. We must have spent 15 minutes on that dive just dancing and moving around to watch the phosphorescent trail of plankton that looked like fairy dust. In between, we saw some interesting night action. It turns out that parrotfish spend half an hour every night to build a protective cocoon with their saliva before they sleep. How cool is that?
OK, so I forgot to rotate and zoom this picture, but look close and you’ll see a thin white membrane around the fish. kinda gross, actually.

Wadi Rum in Jordan is inaccurately known as the land of Lawrence of Arabia, a famous English officer turned author who traveled thru and wrote about southern Jordan. It is, however, where the movie was filmed. The land is rose and golden sand interrupted by hills of sandstone that stick out of the sandy sea like marshmallows in rocky road ice cream. Here we finally rolled down a sand dune, only to realize there were no showers at the Bedouin tent we were sleeping at for the next two nights. The first day was spent bumping about in a 4×4 through the various terrain, taking in the sites, napping after lunch, and climbing on top of rock bridges. It was a full moon so the valleys were lit with gray shadows which made it a little easier to sleep in the great wide open given the animals echoing all around us. The second day was spent on camel back. These dromedaries were a taller than the ones in Morocco but their humps were a tad smaller. Through a series of unfortunate incidences Steve ended up being unbalanced on the saddle and therefore wore himself out by the end of the first hour on a five hour trek. By the sounds he made and the agonizing expressions on his face I don’t know how he managed to stay on the hump. The guide tried padding his saddle more but Steve’s built-in cushioning was getting a good beating. Nothing could be done to improve his situation, it was only getting exponentially worse. In the end Steve caught a ride back to camp in a 4×4 and the guide decided “maybe he is very soft.” I nodded in agreement and urged my camel back to running pace.

–Mary

There’s nothing to be said about Petra that isn’t already done better someplace else on the web. I’ll leave it at this: there’s a lot more to Petra than what we see in the usual tourist pictures. And it’s all good.
We spent three days in Petra seeing the famous stuff and hiking out in the middle of nowhere to see the less traveled ruins. There’s very little in Petra that you can’t walk on or climb up.
Only twice did we violate signs saying “no climbing”, and one of those was with permission of an ‘official guide’ I had met. Mary gets to tell the story of the more egregious violation.
We succumbed to our touristy inner selves and even went on a candlit stroll to the treasury at night. It takes something like 1500 candles to lite the 2km path to the Treasury and then another 500 light the treasury itself up. It’s corny, but actually really cool.

Our second day in Petra we hiked up the 752 steps to the Monastery which is another huge fascade in the rock. It’s well worth the effort and of the tourists that decide to make the trip almost all take pictures then head back without much pause. But Steve isn’t just any other tourist; he wants his picture at the top next to the urn. He casually walked around the No Climbing sign when others are distracted. I stayed on the bottom to drink my soda and because someone has to take the pictures. A short time later I see him sneak out on the top ledge then hide. Minutes later I see him scamper from behind one ledge to the next like a duck in a duck hunt. He repeats this dance a few times before I release he’s trying to take pictures at the top using the timer on the camera while trying to avoid being caught. Unfortunately one of the locals caught site of him during his last pass and warns me that he should come down before the police finds him and takes him away. There’s nothing I can do so I just nod and return the look of stern agreement. Bad Steve, but good picture.

-Mary

Editor’s Note: I actually was never close enough to read the words on the sign. I cut a path far from the sign and up a slightly more dangerous hill so I could truthfully say “sign, what sign?” It worked out in the end. Mary took all the heat and nobody said a word to me. Heh. Of course, all I get for my efforts is this silly picture of the urn on top.

The only thing better than breaking the rules and getting away with it is when it is facilitated by the rule maker. In Petra there is the remains of a Byzantine church with ancient mosaics dating back to 600 AD, very well preserved and kept behind a simple barrier. We are the only ones there and the guy watching this place asks if we would be interested to walk on the antiquities provided we took our shoes off. The offer caught us by surprise so we had to clarify that we heard him correctly. Seriously, we can walk on these thousand year old works of art by peoples long since gone if we go barefoot? We said this of course while we were taking our sandals off. It’s kind of nerve racking to trod on artifacts because you just don’t know if the next step is going to pull up a tile or crack a motif. Then he brings the wet sponge out and starts rubbing some of them to show the brilliant natural colors under the layers of dust. While he’s doing this I thought I noticed a tile actually roll off and he quickly picked it up into his palm. We tiptoe about feeling the tiles beneath our feet taking pictures and video. Talk about trying to take gentle steps. I really wanted to bust out a cartwheel but thought that might be over the top. In the course of our half hour conversation he made a quick comment about losing his job if anyone saw us doing this but we didn’t push him on the details. Apparently this guy had been working with the excavation team for a decade and knew all kinds of interesting facts about the work being done in Petra. He gave us the sales pitch just as we were about to leave so we bought a jar of sand art and a set of postcards from him. We figured the price for walking on the priceless mosaics was well worth the $2.50.

Oceans are 3% salt, the Dead Sea is 30% plus a bunch of other minerals. With such a high salt content nothing lives in it except highly specialized bacteria. The tourist draw is the incredible buoyancy the salt content affords and the health benefits from the highly enriched water and mud. Being in Jordan we were so close to it that we couldn’t resist the detour. We were tentative to dip in because the water was murky and slimy to the touch. It was the exact temperature of the air which was in the mid-80s. Once in the heavy water kept us effortlessly afloat. Between the warm temp and thick water I wondered if that’s what it was like to being in a womb. Yes, a weird thought. It was just that soothing and relaxing…until we started testing the buoyancy with various attempts at acrobatics. It started out with trying to sit upright then spinning and balancing on our stomaches, all the while keeping our heads out of the water for fear of effects of the salt. And like the old idiom goes, it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. Steve gets a little too comfortable with his balance and loses it, tumbling backwards into the water with his feet reaching for the sky and his head submerged in the soup. This whole time we were only in two feet of water so I lead him blind onto the beach and douse water over his eyes which are bloodshot. If you’re curious what it feels like to have the Dead Sea in your eyes you’ll have to ask Steve, but the water tastes like dirty salt, what I would imagine licking the bottom of a hiking sandal would be.

-Mary

Click on the ‘Jordan’ link to the right or go back to the website for photo albums for the Dead Sea, Petra, Wadi Rum desert and scuba diving in Aqaba

On the 10th day of Ramadan, my true love gave me heartburn.

We learned a big lesson a couple days ago. We were spoiled with the good life in Turkey. Our arrival in Jordan marked a turning point in our travels. In one 2 hour flight, we went from “vacation” to “trip”. Istanbul is Europe. Jordan is the Middle East. We saw little evidence of Ramazan (as it is called in Turkey) in Istanbul. There was no interruption in services, people were eating, drinking and smoking all day long. We ate McDonalds in public.

Fly to Jordan. For two days we held sympathy Ramadan by fasting until sundown with EVERYONE else. This wasn’t because we’re wonderful and considerate people, but because finding an open restaurant or market in our part of Amman just isn’t that easy.

But today was different. After washing the salt out of my eyes and nose at the Dead Sea, we were lucky enough to find a restaurant catering to tourists. We ate so well that I was going to skip dinner, if you can imagine that. After a few hour drive down the King’s Highway through a few Crusade Castles (time to pick up the history book…) we arrived in Petra where the brothers that run our hotel offered us some of their “break-fast” meal (they all think that twist in meal naming during Ramadan is funny). Well, there is only one thing for us to do when a huge family-size portion plus two deserts are brought out for us. Gorge.

But now I don’t feel so well…

I think we’ve also seen an end to good internet for quite some time. There are rumors of DSL here and there, but we’re living the dial up life for now. I want to scream it’s so slow. I don’t know how you live like this, dad!

Rama-what? No really, what are the rules here? I admit my circle of friends and acquaintances at home has never included many muslims, that I’m aware of. Therefore it was surprising to me to learn that one of the pillars of Islam is the observance of Ramadan. The dates change every year, but it’s always 30 days. This year it’s Sept 24 to Oct 23. Lucky us we get to experience it while we’re traveling through Turkey, Jordan, and Egypt. What we’ve heard is that during this time good muslims cannot eat or drink ANYTHING from sunrise to sunset. This year that means from 6am to 7pm no bread, no tea, not even water, nothing means nothing. After sunset there are gorging parties all over town. Also, they must pray 5 times during the day, including at 4am, and all efforts are to be exerted to do so at a mosque. This not only scrambles a lot of public services like transportation and office hours, but also puts people in bad moods since they thirsty and starving all day. And they have to go cold turkey with alcohol because it is strictly forbidden during this month, more so than the rest of the year when some of the rules are more loosely interpreted. There are other particulars like the sacrifice of a goat, etc. that we haven’t been able to get all the particulars on. So we weren’t sure what to expect in Istanbul since it is very much a modern city with enormous western influences but is nonetheless muslim. In the morning my belly was already on empty so we walked around trying to spy if any non-tourist was eating or drinking. As it was a Sunday, their only day off, the streets were quiet. I was getting pretty desperate and ready to buy snacks to scarf in the hotel when we did catch some local looking peeps sipping in cafes. There was nothing that indicated that this was day was any different from the last. So on the first day of Ramadan my true love gave to me, a McDonald’s hamburger.

-Mary

So much time amongst the rock,
Hence we yearned the sea to frock.
Sent off by the flaming Chimera,
To sail pass the land of Lycia.
Here a city given to fish,
And lived jolly saint Nicholas.
Aboard the gulet waves we ride
To nap, idle, and tan our hide.
No cares, worries, nor questions why,
Four days thus sailed by.
-Mary

The Blue Cruise as it’s called sails across the southwestern Turkey coast from Olympos to Fethiye. In 4 days, 3 nights it goes the distance that it takes a bus one and a half hours to cover. And that’s pretty much the pace of life on the 78’ wooden gulet. Your day is your own and although there were 16 other passengers and 3 crew there is ample space to spread out and enjoy the peace. Each day the vessel would stop in a couple of locations to see the sites, stretch the legs, and have a swim. Three warm meals a day, plus a snack, were prepared by the cook who looked like a cheerful surf bum. He made all kinds of good stuff like stuffed peppers, French toast, and fish-head soup from the captain’s morning catch. The soup wasn’t much to look at because it stared right back, but it tasted good. The cabins were spacious doubles each with their own shower and head that flushed. The last night we opted to sleep under the skies on the deck. The gulet is really nicely set up for lounging with cushioned beds for laying out, canopies for the whities, and even a hammock at the bow. To break up our napping, Steve entertained with cliff jumping.
We were very pleased with the quality and experience given the price was half what it would cost in the States. We would highly recommend doing this for anyone going to Turkey and looking to relax under the sun.

-Mary

Editor’s note: we had lunch in Demre, which is the home of one Saint Nicholas they claim as the inspiration for modern day Santa. No presents dropped through our porthole, though.