Sorry for taking so long to post this. I'm safely home and busy with friends and my internship at Americans for Informed Democracy. Let's backtrack, shall we?
Jordan and Syria were amazing. AMAzing. I met some of the friendliest people I've met anywhere. It was honestly a bit of a relief to realize I'm not incapable of enjoying myself in the Arab World. Jordan and Syria are not like Egypt. The countryside is much more diverse, the cities are cleaner and less crowded, and the people don't hassle you to the point of cheating you or harass women constantly. It was nice. Heather and I both look forward to going back.
We skipped the stop in Siwa Oasis to give ourselves more time on the rest of the trip. After an 8 hour bus ride from Cairo, a 10 hour wait at the Nuweiba Port Authority (Egypt), a two hour ferry ride to Aqaba (Jordan), and an hour and a half in a taxi to Petra, I was over 48 hours without sleep and rather unhappy. Our hotel hosts welcomed us with fresh slices of outrageously delicious cantaloupe and sent us to bed. I snuck out to look at the stars in the cool, quiet valley air of Wadi Musa, and all the stress of the last few days and weeks and months melted away.
The next day was Petra, a Greco-Roman era city built into a red sandstone canyon, and Jordan's biggest tourist attraction. It was one of the most beautiful places I've been in my life, so brace yourself for lots of photos. Walking toward the canyon, you start seeing things like this and taking lots of pictures... not realizing that they're the tip of the iceberg.
Then you get into the canyon...
And feel increasingly insignificant...
Then you turn a corner and you're looking at the Treasury towering above you in bands of red and pink and orange.
Then you pass through some amazing streets of tomb facades...
Then you hike up a mountain for about an hour in the blistering sun and 110 degree heat to reach the Monastery. Anybody seen Transformers 2? This is the place.
Then you hike out to the viewpoints near the Monastery to look at the beautiful, rugged desert landscape. We could see the Dead Sea and Negev Desert.
Then you sit down for a while, drink some juice, chat with some flirty but kind Bedouin boys, wind your way back through the canyon at sunset, and feel wholly insignificant.
Then you return to your hotel, get some delicious dinner at a local cafe, and sit on the roof in the cool night breeze, chatting with the manager of the hostel (who is high as a kite on hashish) about politics, differences between Egypt and Jordan, and the treatment of women in the Middle East.
The next day we headed to Amman, which is not a very exciting city, so I didn't take pictures of it. Instead of exploring Amman, we went to swim in the Dead Sea for a few hours. It was amazing. The water felt oily because of all the minerals, and it burned your tongue if it got in your mouth. It was nearly impossible to float vertically because your legs refuse to be pushed beneath the surface. It was quite an ab workout. Anyhoo, we enjoyed the swim and covered ourselves in mud, as it's very good for your skin and extreeeeemely expensive to buy at spas and salons. There were huge chunks of salt crystals in the mud. Salt deposits in the water near the shore:
Stereotypical tourist picture:
Sunset over Israel:
Jordan was proving too expensive for us (1 Jordanian dinar = .7 USD... ouch), so we decided to head straight to Syria. This part was complicated. Americans are supposed to apply for visas 6 months in advance, but we didn't do that. The other option is to go to the border and wait for 5-6 hours for them to process your visa and sufficiently annoy you. We brought snacks and books and chatted with the border guards. I gave them an origami dragon when we left.
A Syrian named Basel was passing through the border when we got our visas and offered us a ride to the next town, where we would get our bus to Damascus. After talking with us a while, he offered to take us to his home to meet his family and eat some dinner. I hesitated. At the beginning of the semester, when we met our friend Abdul in Giza, my friends had all been extremely uncomfortable that I had talked with him and accepted his invitation to have lunch at his home. Apparently, however, Heather had learned to trust strangers since then. So we went with Basel. His wife was very kind and his 5 children were adorable. We played with the kids a while, ate dinner, and chatted... it was somewhat difficult because Syrian and Jordanian Arabic dialects are very different from Egyptian. We did alright though. Anyway, Basel dropped us off at the bus station and we arrive in Damascus a couple of hours later.
We fell in love with our hostel in Damascus. It had a beautiful courtyard, a family of kittens living on the roof, and the sweetest staff, including two brothers who taught us some Syrian Arabic.
We liked Damascus quite a lot in general, so we didn't rush to leave. The streets in old town:
A beautiful mosque converted into a market:
The world-famous souq (market) in downtown Damascus. This is one of the main covered streets, but there were also frighteningly crowded alleys everywhere.
This is one of the old inns in the souq. It was cool and quiet... I could have sat by the fountain for hours.
Fresh squeezed orange juice kept us going in the 100+ degree heat.
We did finally tear ourselves away from Damascus and its delicious orange juice to visit Palmyra, which is Syra's biggest tourist attraction, but not QUITE as cool as Petra. Landscape in central Syria:
Palmyra has some spectacular Greco-Roman era tombs and the ruins of a city.
We watched Obama's speech with the employees at our hostel in Palmyra and talked politics a while. One was a university student in Homs, Syria. We ended up hanging out with the guys from the hostel most of the evening... went to a touristy Bedouin dinner and dance performance (though we were on the Syrian side of the crowd - woo!) and went walking through the ruins in the moonlight. It was a great night.
Anyway, we returned to Damascus and flew back to Cairo to avoid the horrors of the Aqaba ferry, carrying the email addresses and phone numbers of a dozen new friends. I really can't believe how welcomed I felt in Syria. It was not only safe, contrary to what our media tells us, but full of the most wonderfully kind people I've ever met. It was a worthwhile trip. :)
So I'm in Washington for the time being. Still dreaming about getting back to Nairobi, but happy for now. I'll let you all know the next time I'm blogging.
