By: An Jimenez
Our weekend started Thursday at 7 PM when we ate a delicious goodbye dinner with the Amman Academy coordinators and directors at Yoshi: a contemporary, upscale Japanese restaurant in downtown. Good company plus good sushi, what more could we ask for? Pictures below of the incredible Asian cuisine in the heart of Jordan:
Around 11 PM, the electricity in our apartment went out because of a thunderous storm and strong winds (eek, we really thought our apartment walls were going to collapse), and we woke up the next day to even stronger winds and gloomy weather. This was around 5:30 AM. We were planning to catch a bus to Aqaba (a 4 hour drive down South) at 7 AM.
Despite the horrendous weather, we packed our backpacks and Careem-ed to the JETT bus station, hopped on the bus, and slept pretty much the whole ride to Aqaba.
Aqaba was beautiful, and I wish we could spend more time there. We did, however, eat in a nice seafood restaurant recommended to us by one of the Amman Academy coordinators, Abla, called Ali Baba. More food pictures below:
Next stop: Wadi Rum, a desert in the south of Jordan. Our driver, Salem, picked us up in front of the restaurant and drove us an hour into the desert in his Toyota truck. On the way, we listened to some traditional Bedouin music and our new favorite song (introduced to us by Firas, our friend from Jerash): 3 Daqat by Abu ft. Yousra - give it a listen (https://youtu.be/ejvpVhvKesM).
Turns out, we decided to go to Wadi Rum on the day of sandstorm (yikes), but we still had a very enjoyable experience. Although we weren’t able to see the stars in the night, we went on a two hour jeep tour across the desert, ate a traditional dinner with the Bedouins, played some card games and Signal, played the drums, sang some songs, and learned how to Dabke which is an Arab folk dance. The language barrier made it difficult to communicate, but through lots of broken English and Arabic and hand signals, we were able to teach our new friends how to play games like Hierarchy and Spoons and Signal and even how to Salsa. Pictures below from the jeep tour:
We woke up at 5:30 AM to watch the sun rise. One thing to know about the desert is that when the wind is silent, the desert is absolutely silent. I could only hear my own breathing and my jacket sleeves rubbing on my pants and nothing more. It was peaceful to watch the sun creep above the horizon minute by minute in complete silence. I’ve seen quite a few amazing sunsets in my life but not nearly as many sunrises. This one was definitely a memorable one, pictured below:
After a light breakfast, we hopped in the back of Salem’s truck and drove about 10 minutes until we hit the edge of Wadi Rum. We said goodbye for Salem and thanked him for his hospitality and transferred ourselves and our bags into another car that took us to our next destination: Petra.
Petra was incredible. A city literally carved out of stone. Only discovered 300-something years ago but built around 4th century BC. It was interesting because we started our journey into Petra through 20-something minutes of curved, narrow passageways between huge rocks, not really expecting much, and then all of a sudden the treasury (pictured below) comes into view. Beautiful, elaborate, tall, and truly a work of art.
We ended up spending our five hours in Petra climbing all the way up to the Monastery and caught this beautiful view of Jordan at the top. It took us nearly 3.5 hours to ascend all the stairs up and 1.5 hours to speed walk back down to our bus stop. And trust me, we SPED WALKED. Large strides and quick paces for 1.5 hours straight and we arrived at the JETT bus stop at 3:58 PM for our 4 PM bus. Probably the most intensive walking I have done in a while.
In one weekend, we were able to visit a beach (Aqaba), a desert (Wadi Rum), and one of the 7 Wonders of the World (Petra) all in the same country in less than 36 hours. Amazing.