Amman to Zanzibar (A to Z): 24 and 25 March

Thursday 24 March: Booked out of this beautiful Hotel and headed for Petra. On the way we visited Kerak the site of a massive fort built by the Crusaders in about the 11 Century. It is a spectacular fort built high on the hill and is a dark maze of stone vaulted halls and endless passage ways, it would be easy to get lost and it must have been a very cold place for the soldiers in the winter. Again it is hard to imagine how they built these structures so long ago. After lunch outside the port we drove through wild rocky country to Petra arriving late in the evening. Another interesting day.

Friday 25 March: Finally our chance to see the main reason for visiting Jordan, the wonderful site of Petra, it is currently considered as the second greatest wonder of the world after the Great wall of China. We started by visiting Little Petra which is basically at the back door of the Petra valley. This would have been spectacular enough as it was obviously a great site in itself. Most of the Bedouins in this area have left their tents and are living in a small village near little Petra and they walk in each day from this point to work in Petra. Next the main Petra. It is a vast, unique city, carved in sheer rock face by the Nabateans, an industrious lot who settled here and built this 2000 year ago. It was built as an important junction for the silk, spice and other trade routes that linked China India and southern Arabia with Egypt, Syria, Greece and Rome. Lots of walking as it takes a kilometre through 80 metres high cliffs to reach the stunning building known as the Treasury, which it wasn’t. This place became famous and drew tourists after it was used in one of the Indiana Jones movies. The facade is 30m wide and 43m high and carved out of the sheer pink rock face, it is awesome. It was carved in the 1^st century AD as tomb for an important Nabatean King. They must have been very smart and ingenious to have built all the tombs in this area as although this is the most spectacular there are 500 more in the area that are even bigger but less impressive.

We meet here the son of the NZ woman who as a backpacker at the age of 26 met a Bedouins man and married him and had three children living in a cave. The son we met did his schooling in NZ and engineering at Sydney Uni. He now runs a stall selling jewellery designed by his mother and made by the Bedouin women. He told me that the drop off in tourism was having a big effect on Jordan and Petra in particular. He said before the troubles started they had 132,000 visitors a year to Petra, now 32,000. It is sad as Jordan is very safe, the people are wonderful, the country is well managed but they are suffering from loss of income due to the drop off in visitors. They have much bigger problems with water shortage than Australia and this has been exacerbated by the large number of refugees they are looking after as best they can. The population of Jordan is 6M plus 3M refuges. The 3M refuges started here back as far as 1948 when over 1M Palestinians arrived and then a second big influx at the time of the first Gulf war. Now they have 250,000 refugees from the current Syrian crisis. We think we have a problem in Aust. Jordan is wonderful but we feel sad for this country and its people as they are suffering at the moment but with a smile. We will never forget Petra or Jordan.