Jordan

My odyssey through the Middle East continues apace with Jordan the latest country on our itinerary. We've arrived here at an interesting and tragic juncture, with a series of terrorist bomb attacks taking place in Amman the night before we passed through the capital city. Such atrocities are a new and unwelcome experience for Jordan. Wherever we have talked to Jordanian people in the past couple of days the conversation has quickly turned to these events in Amman. A general sense of outrage and bewilderment that terrorists should target fellow muslims seems to be the recurrent theme.

As in Syria, so in Jordan we are encountering many examples of the famed hospitality of the Middle East. Invitations to take tea abound and today I hung out for a while with a group of Bedouin women in Petra who insisted I stopped to sample their Bedouin billy boiled tea. Not bad but for the intensity of the sugar hit. In Damascus a wrong turning en route to a restaurant led to an amazing encounter. Finding ourselves confronted with a front door at the end of a winding back alley, our small group of five was bundled into the house by the amiable pater familias before we had time to register what was going on. We emerged again an hour later replete with coffee, home-made cakes and the memory of faltering conversation in English conducted in translation via two young daughters amongst the veritable tribe of kids that greeted us excitedly inside as exotic commodities from far off lands.

In between all the bouts of tea drinking we've been visiting some spectacular sites, the most impressive of which has undoubtedly been Petra. This ancient city was home to the rather obscure Nabatean people. It is concealed in the depths of a canyoned river bed and must be approached along a 900m cliff bound passage called the Siq, which in places is no more than a metre wide. You emerge as if bursting out of a cocoon into a spacious plaza with the sublime carved facade of the Treasury Building looming down at you in a rich panolopy of red and brown hues. It is undoubtedly one of the finest vistas on earth. What I hadn't anticipated was the vast scale of Petra and the sheer number of rock cut facades that fill the twisting arms of the valley. Although this is Jordan's premier tourist attraction, it is surprisingly relaxed in feel and easy to escape the hustle and bustle of the main drag with an exploratory side trip. Quaint touches from less touristy times are still to be seen, such as shepherds herding their goats across the site and running the gauntlet of the tourist mules (touted as 'taxis') which ply a trade along the main routes. What also marks out Petra is the incredible contortions of its craggy landscape and the richness of the ever changing colours in the stone.

Jordan is also among the lands of the Bible. Though not of a religious turn of mind, it's nevertheless hard not to be moved in some way by the experience of standing atop the mountain on which Moses gazed down on the Promised Land knowing he could never enter this land of milk and honey. I felt some sympathy for old Moses. Our view from the summit of Mt. Nebo across the Dead Sea and the Jordan River enabled us to see faintly some buildings on the Mount of Olives above Jerusalem - the sacred city which was so near and yet so far away due to international borders and the currents of Middle Eastern politics. Still, we could at least take a dip in the Dead Sea, a fabulously peculiar experience as you bob around like a cork in a barrel trying to comprehend why you don't seem to be sinking.