Day 6 – Tuesday 19 December

I was wide awake at 5.30am as dawn started to light the sky & by 6am I was writing our blog until breakfast.  Our destination this morning is Jerash, a bit over an hour north of Amman.  The drivers are just as erratic on the highway as the city & the small towns we pass through where the road narrows was even more interesting.  Jordan is very mountainous and we are forever climbing then descending rapidly.  The countryside is very desolate with rocks and barren land everywhere, however, there are lots of sand coloured houses built all over the place, some substantial, some not so.  There is also a fair bit of hovels made from sheets of tin, plastic sheets & anything else they get their hands on.  The poverty outside Amman is a lot more evident, there is also rubbish everywhere strewn along the sides of roads, down hillsides & in ravines.  Now & again there is a scattering of olive trees & the occasional olive grove near houses.

The signposting in Jordan is not all that easy to follow, with most of the signs in Arabic & most of the major ones in English, there is usually not that much warning that you need to turn off anywhere.  We find the Roman ruins in Jerash by stopping at a set of traffic lights & seeing the ruins directly ahead of us, that made it a little easier to find the turnoff & a place to park.  Jerash was also known through the ages as Gerasa & also Antioch.  Jerash was originally occupied by the Greek Alexander the Great during the 4^th century BC with the Romans taking over in 63 B.C. for another 400+ years.  The Romans built the ancient city that is seen today after being discovered & painstakingly excavated from centuries of decay & earthquakes.  Hadrian’s Arch is the main entrance to the site & is an imposing sight, built around 130 A.D.  Inside the Arch the ground is littered with large pieces of ornately carved stone, remains of pillars & capping stones.  The next major structure is the Hippodrome, built for chariot races it is 265 metres long by 50 metres wide & could accommodate 17,000 spectators, another imposing structure that was repurposed many times over the ensuing centuries.  Everywhere we turn there are imposing ruins, arches, columns, stairs & we wander around impressed by the amazing amount of work that has gone into building this huge city.  The Temple of Zeus holds a commanding view over Jerash, looking down onto the large circular main open plaza of the city.  The Roman theatre behind the Temple of Zeus is another very imposing structure & very complete, still able to seat thousands of people.  Today there were 3 locals performing with drums & a bagpipe for some Chinese tourists, one of the band took a real shine to Tereza.  Ron has been put on notice.

We reach the Temple of Artemis, within sight of the other city gate & turn back to follow the main Roman road through the city & come across the site of a stone saw machine, powered by water, built around 550 A.D. & is the earliest machine found in the world to date.  We continue walking back to Hadrian’s Arch & are continually amazed by the size, number & beauty of the ruins of this ancient city, there are small details visible everywhere, the Romans certainly were great builders & engineers.  Lot of the destruction happened because of the frequent earthquakes.

We took the scenic route to the Dead Sea, following old twisty roads down steep mountains & through very old small towns that are desperately poor.  At one stage we wondered what had happened, we turned a corner & all of a sudden all of the houses were large, majestic & well-cared for.  This did not last that long before returning to the hovels & shacks that housed most people.  The road seemed to be following an old goat track down the mountains into the valley of the Dead Sea, there were herds of goats scattered around everywhere, mostly with an attendant close by, we had to stop as one herd of goats crossed the road in front of us.  How them & the man tending them didn’t get killed by an impatient car driver speeding down the hill I will never know, overtaking us at speed when we were stopped.  As we got lower down the valley we started following a small stream & there were small farms scattered around.  We saw a man & woman with a donkey ploughing a small rocky field with a wooden plough.  Finally we were out of the hills & on the flat valley floor of the Dead Sea & farms stretched out on either side of the road, a lot of them with what seemed to us very poor temporary shelters as housing.  We eventually spotted the vastness of the Dead Sea & not long after reached our destination, The Crowne Plaza Hotel, an anachronism of overstated wealth considering all the poverty we had seen along the way.  The hotel is very large & grand & after we check in behind a very large group of Chinese tourists we quickly change into our swimmers.

The motel has a number of swimming pools, some very large, scattered around the complex & also forming a major feature in the middle of the hotel complex.  We make our way down to the private beach on the waters of the Dead Sea, there are around 100 Chinese tourists smearing themselves with the health mud &/or swimming/paddling.  Tereza smears herself with the healing mud whilst the rest of us take to the water.  It is a bit rocky walking in, the swimming sensation is weird.  The very high concentration of salt makes us very buoyant in the water & it is difficult to swim like we know it. It is extremely easy to float, in fact you can float standing upright with the top part of the chest out of the water, there is that much buoyancy.  Tereza & Monica find it difficult to put their legs down because they are naturally very buoyant. There is the upside of not being able to put your head under the water, a few of the Chinese women got salt water in their eyes & the pain must have been bad, lifeguards rushed out with bottles of fresh water to flush the salt from their eyes.  Any small cuts we had became painful & stung like crazy.  Tereza & Austin suffered real bad because they had some open cuts.

That experience out of the way we had a quick rinse with fresh water on the beach before heading back to our rooms for a shower, we went to the lounge for some drinks & a few games of Uno then dinner.  More xmas trees & decorations around the hotel.  Another great day.