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Paris:- Sunday, 24. October 1999:- There's nothing like starting a vacation at 05:00 - 5 am! - to get to the airport for your 10 o'clock flight and then to be asked if you'd like to volunteer for the afternoon flight on another carrier because Air France has overbooked!

Declines Beard Trim In Jordon

LindaThalm
2005-12-02 17:14:18

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home without your visas - unless you, like me, enjoy a good adventure.

A three-hour bus ride later landed us in the suburbs of Amman. The 80 kilometres from Jerusalem as the crow flies took us all day, but getting there was the real fun and we saw some beautiful countryside on the way.

Amman by night is pretty darn quiet except for the Internet cafes. Amman city center by day is colorful, noisy and bubbling with energy.

We scrapped our original plan to rent a car from the airport. The clerk at the Carlton Hotel had a friend who had a car rental company and it was all so easy. The car we got had gone about 300,000 kilometres already, but the tires looked fine. The brakes squealed, the radio didn't work and there wasn't any air conditioning.

With minus one litre of fuel in the tank, we got lost in central Amman looking for a gas station, but finally found one. After paying cash for the gas it only took half an hour more to find the King's Highway, going south towards Petra.

Mercifully, most of the road signs are in English as well as Arabic. While I can decipher most of the Arabic alphabet, Pierre had to drive quickly to stay out of the way of cars, buses, taxis, pick-ups, pedestrians and trucks - challenging my speed-reading and navigational skills at the same time.

Our next stop was Madaba, known for its sixth century mosaic map of Palestine in St. George's Church - where all the tourist buses stop for an in-and-out glimpse. We took the time to visit the rather grandly termed Archeological Park as well and saw some beautiful mosaics and well-preserved remains of a Roman road - with just three other tourists.

Running short on Jordanian cash on a Saturday is not a problem even though banks are closed and ATM's are not on many corners. Just ask the local gift shop owner and he checks the Web for the day's conversion rate from Francs to ...