The Road To Perdition

Seven of the 24 of us Egyptian Odyssey’ers signed up for the four day supplemental tour of Jordan, with Petra being the primary objective.  So we flew from Cairo to Jordan, not knowing what to expect.  Turns out we got winter, wild weather, passionate about Petra, advocates for Amman, and jubilant about Jerash.  We turned into seven big fans of Jordan. 

Our guide, Osama Alsmadi, was there to greet us at the airport.  Even before that, we were impressed by Odyssey in Jordan.  An Odyssey airport guide met us, led us to passport control, where he collected our passports.  Bypassing the line, he handed the passports to a Jordanian passport control person who came out to meet us.  We went downstairs to wait for our luggage, while the passport control person dealt with our passports.  He brought them downstairs to us.  I’ve never seen that before.  We were all impressed.

Anyhow, it was raining when we got out of the airport and headed to lunch in the town of Madaba.  Our first visit was to a church most famous for the earliest known large map of the Holy Land.  It is on the church floor as a mosaic from the 6th Century.  The mosaic covers the Nile Delta through Jordan, with Jerusalem at the center.  The Dead Sea, Bethlehem, and other important Biblical areas are shown. Surviving parts of the mosaic also show Lebanon and as far away as Cyprus.

The St. George's Orthodox Church is only from the the 18th Century (only!), but the mosaic wasn't rediscovered until 1884 in the remains of a Byzantine Church.  I'll let LonelyPlanet.com tell it:

Crafted in AD 560, the map has 157 captions (in Greek) depicting all the major biblical sites of the Middle East, from Egypt to Palestine. It was originally around 15m to 25m long and 6m wide, and once contained more than two million pieces.

It’s not perfect, as the Nile Delta is out of place, and Jerusalem is super-sized, albeit primarily because it is the center of the Holy Land.  The rain wasn’t as heavy as we got back on the bus, but we unanimously voted to skip Mount Nebo and drive straight to Petra.  Mount Nebo would have been relatively pointless, with, because of the rain, none of the views of the Holy Land that Moses and the Wandering Jews (another great name for a rock band – groupies could be called The Tribe) got for their first look at the land of Israel.

Most of the mosaic.

The mosaic: Jerusalem 

Carol with the official scarf of Jordan,

long popularized by King Hussein.

After that, we had a late lunch in Madaba at a woman-owned and run restaurant, the food was fabulous.  The restaurant is in her grandmother's house.  It was nice to land in Jordan and immediately get an authentic meal of Jordanian food.  And, obviously, all seven of us knew each other very well after nearly two weeks together in Egypt – we were Tom, Flo, Mo (short for Maureen), Neil, Mary, Carol and I.  Humorously we had a full sized bus to take us around.

The deluge started while we were in the restaurant.  The bus couldn’t traverse the narrow roads to pick us up, so we had to walk through the rain and mud to get to the bus.  It came to pick us up on a hill, and with no sewer systems, the rain became a river down the middle of the road.  All of us had soaking wet sneakers, socks, and feet after, like chickens in the pouring rain, crossing the road to get to get to the other side.

Carol and Mary, going into the restaurant,

and showing off their scarves.

So eventually we crossed from the rainy, green part of Jordan to the desert.  We all thrilled to our first sandstorm, although the hour wait in traffic dimmed our enthusiasm a bit.  The sandstorm was so strong not only was traffic allowed through Noah-like by the police, but we could taste and smell the sand as it poured through the porous cracks in the bus.

Then we drove through a second amazing sandstorm.  By the time we saw our third sandstorm, we smugly considered ourselves sandstorm experts, based on our one afternoon and three storms.  “Since this is the third sandstorm I’ve seen in my life, I can tell already it’s not a very strong one,” one of the group arrogantly noted.

Editor: Something tells me that you were the arrogant one.  Writer, Ah, you might be right.

Later, as we wound our way closer to Petra, we got sleet and then snow.  The snow stuck to the fields, but wasn’t enough to measure any accumulation, nor, more importantly did it stick to the roads.

That night, Carol, Mary, Neil, and I walked just down the street from the hotel to the well-regarded My Mom’s Recipes restaurant where we again feasted on specialities of Jordan.  I had Beef Galaya, a tomato and beef dish that tastes terrific.