Aqaba

The route through Jordan: From Eliat (Israel) crossing into Aqaba-Diving in the Red Sea-Wadi Rum desert-Petra-Shobak Castle-Floating in the Dead sea-Crossing into Palestine

We had planned to visit Jordan when we went to Palestine at Xmas. We were looking forward to the warmer weather that’s for sure. We entered Jordan coming from a city in Israel called Eliat. Once we had arrived in Eliat, it was a short taxi ride to Aqaba which we shared with a German guy, who ended up staying in the same place as us aswell! Once we arrived at the border we paid our exit fee to leave Israel :-). Entering Jordan was no problem at all and the visa was free! It’s only free if you enter through Aqaba. Once across the border, the only way to get to the centre is by taxi, it’s only about 10 minutes. We had an idea  where to stay from the lonely planet-the cheapest place of course. Perfect location with views of the sea.

View from our room

It was evening when we arrived so we just dropped our bags and checked out the place. It seemed to be pretty busy, everybody sitting on the beach smoking their sheesha. There is also a giant Jordan flag on the beach. Apparently it’s the 5th tallest free standing flag in the world. You can see it from Israel and Saudi Arabia. When we returned to our hostel we met an English guy Tom who was travelling around Jordan with his Mother who lives in Qatar. He had come from Petra, so explained a lot to us. Little did we know we would spend the next 3 days with Tom and his mother!

Aqaba

The next day we went with Tom and his mother to go diving. We were’t sure if we were going to go diving or not but in the end we did. We did our discovery dive with a company called Arab Divers. Tom had checked out the best diving places the day before and had decided on this company. It wasn’t the best experience as we had an instructor who didn’t have a lot of patience. But we enjoyed it anyway. We did our dive in a place called Japanese Gardens in the Red Sea. Unfortunately we don’t have any pics of the cool fish we saw, the instructor was supposed to send them to us! When we drove back to Aqaba, you could see the border for Saudi Arabia in the distance. It’s only 10km from where we did the dive!

Getting ready for the dive

That evening we relaxed hanging out on the beach of Aqaba with the camels. We sat on the beach people watching while smoking a sheesha. We met a man from Aqaba on our way back to our place who insisted we had tea with him so we did. We ended up spending a few hours with Mustafa drinking tea. A really friendly man who has travelled a lot of countries. He want’s us to pick him up next year and go on an adventure. He made sure we got his address and number! We finished the day off with a falafel sandwich. Falafel is pretty much what we ate there all the time.

Smoking sheesha

Edgar and Mustafa

 Where did we stay? Moon beach hotel

Totally recommend visiting Jordan!

To see all the photos of this trip on the link below:

https://picasaweb.google.com/106642992406238602288/JordanJan2013?authkey=Gv1sRgCJXg26mQ2O2bngE