Posts Tagged ‘machine gun’

Jordanian Exploits

January 28th, 2009

Hi everyone,

Talia and I write to you alive and well, although we’ve been on one hell of a ride.

Petra was awesome. Can’t wait to show off the photos. I’ll start the story once we got back from Petra.

There’s not much else to do in Petra town than see Petra itself, so passing time once we were back at the hotel was difficult, suffice to say we were in bed by 7.

We were woken up (as usual) by the muslim prayer siren which plays right next to our room. It was 11pm.

12pm comes. This time we were woken up by machine gun fire which sounded a little too close to our hotel than we would have preferred. A little afraid, we had a hard time getting back to sleep. We heard it again at 12:30.

Prayer siren again at 5 made our night that much more comfortable.

Did I mention that our mattress was about as soft as the floor, and our pillows felt like bags of powdered cement?

It wasn’t all bad though. That afternoon the petrol man had come to the hotel, which meant I got to have the first warm shower since we got to Jordan, and we got heat in our room that night. The desert gets really cold after sunset.

Okay, so morning comes, and we pack our things and get in a taxi. The next two hours were the scariest two hours we’ve ever lived. The driver spent more time on the wrong side of the road than on the right side, and more time 20 k’s above the speed limit than below. We also got pulled over for a security check 4 times.

The boat.

We weren’t exactly sure what port we were meant to be at – but the drivers lack of English didn’t give us much of a choice anyway. We got there and went back and forth between booths getting stamps and visas and more stamps. The whole process cost an arm and a leg. No English here either, which made things difficult and a little frustrating. We weren’t even sure whether or not our tickets were going to take us to Egypt, let alone the port our driver was going to pick us up from.

In the end we got on the right boat, and went to the right location, in the wrong class. We accidentally purchased first class tickets (we think). We were always pushed to the front of the line, and our bags were put separately – we got pretty special attention.

They took our passport from us once we got on the boat so they could process our Egyptian Visa. Getting them back was no mean feat – once we arrived in Egypt we had to find the place to buy our visa’s and the immigration office to get our passports back, amongst a crowd of screaming Arabs.

We rushed through the security check and onto a bus with a guy that spoke no English but had a sign that said the name of our hotel.

We’re now in Dahab, and it’s absolutely beautiful. Our internet time is running short, so we’ll leave it there – but know that the red sea is beautiful, everything is cheap, and we’re going to stay here longer and spend less time in Cairo.

We’ll write again soon.

Luke & Talia