The Ladybug living the Jordanian dream: Amman

The last stop of my Jordanian journey was also the most painful: I left the Wadi Rum desert with my heart broken because I didn’t want to let go all the emotions, feelings and gifts for my soul that I received there but we had a long trip up north to reach Amman and a last day to enjoy this amazing country that I didn’t want to leave.

I cannot explain how I felt during this four-hour trip along the country from down South, I was sad but happy at the same time, I couldn’t believe that all those moments happened for real and I didn’t know how to make them last in my mind and soul. I must confess that I also cried (which I did a lot when I came back home) but I cried of joy and gratitude for the unexpected and new emotions.

When we arrived in town we were still dirty and full of sand everywhere, then we decided that the best thing to do was heading to the Al-Pasha Turkish Bath (very famous in Amman) to enjoy a full sauna, Turkish bath, peeling and massage in this wonderful place, where we also enjoyed free tea and sweets before leaving for dinner. I took it like a sort of renaissance: they could remove the sand from my skin and hair but couldn’t remove the best memories that I keep in my heart.

The day after we had 12 hours to enjoy Amman and I must say that this town did its best not to make me feel too sad: Amman is colored, noisy, crowded, full of life and sparkling although quite hot!

We started the day with a few hours visit at the Amman Citadel, to visit the Roman ruins on top of the hill and we gradually walked down to reach the famous Roman Theater and the colorful suq of Amman near the crowded King Hussein mosque. We found there the best Syrian fabrics and Jordanian embroideries for incredibly good prices (this was my Amman bargain!), discovered the gold suq (where I bought a beautiful ring) and the very surprising women suq.

It was lunchtime when we decided to go find the famous Hashem restaurant where we ate the best hummus and falafel of our lives and it was so cheap that when we received our bill we thought it was for one person but it was for the six of us! The tea also was delicious and the huge variety of hummus made us fighting for which one was the best! After this delicious lunch we walked a few minutes to Habibah, one of the most famous bakeries in Amman where we ate the delicious (but full of calories!) kunafa, a typical Jordanian syrup soaked cheese pastry, and other delicious things that we cannot even name!

With our tummies full and happy we stopped at the Diwan Duke, the oldest building in town, where we had a clear vision of what was life in Amman during the last century and where we had a long chat with its welcoming owner, Mamdouh Bisharat.

We left then the old town to head to Jebel Amman to visit the King Abdullah mosque with a beautiful blue dome although we missed the Abu Darwish mosque because of the crowd of the rush hour. We got lost then in the colored steets of Amman, with its beautiful murals and painted stairs all over the city (don’t ask for them, you will find them almost everywhere!)  before eating our last mensaf at the Al-Quds restaurant and running to the airport to catch our night flight to Milan.

This happened almost two months ago now but I will never forget this wonderful trip, possibly one of my best three life travels. It changed me, for real. I was definitely ready for such an emotional journey and it found me when I needed it most. I think of Jordan every single day of my life since then and I know I will be back one day.

The Ladybug living the Jordanian dream: the Wadi Rum desert

I traveled to Jordan for one reason: visiting Petra. But I didn’t know that Petra was not going to be the best memory from this trip. What happened the day after our visit to the City of Mysteries was so incredible and breathtaking that I can hardly express it with words: I discovered the Wadi Rum desert. And I fell in love. Not only with the desert, with the amazing views and sunsets, with the Bedouin culture and lifestyle. I literally fell in love with life. The unexpected experience that I can consider the best of my life just left me head over feet as I finally found what I was looking for: the joy of enjoying the present moment as the moment itself was so good that it was impossible even to imagine it.

I found my happiness, my true self in the Wadi Rum.

The Wadi Rum desert, also called the Valley of the Moon, looks more like Mars and it became very famous in the West because of Lawrence of Arabia description of this area with its sculpted rocks, sand dunes and Bedouin camps in the book Seven Pillars of Wisdom at the beginning of the XX century.  

If  you want to enjoy the Wadi Rum at least for one day and one night (I would have loved to do it for more if I had the time!) the best thing that you can do is book a jeep tour (also a camel ride if you like to…I loved it!) and a night in a Bedouin tent in a desert camp.

There are many agencies that offer every type of tours, including luxury and bubble tents in the middle of the desert but if you want to try the real un-commercial Bedouin experience I strongly recommend Bedouin Directions. Mehedi and its team of fantastic Bedouin guides offer  jeep tours, hiking tours, scrambling tours, and camel treks. Also you will have the chance to sleep in a beautiful real Bedouin Camp (or under the stars!) while tasting the amazing Bedouin food and sage tea (you will drink it all the time in the desert and you will miss it a lot when you will be back! I bought some there and every now and then I just smell it to feel like in the desert for a moment!).

We started with an 30-minute camel trek: it was my first time on a camel and I enjoyed the ride so much! Camels are adorable animals and they have the cutest face and softest hair, it was definitely a great experience before taking the desert with our jeep. We wandered around from the sand dunes of Al-Hasany to the seven pillars of Wisdom, from the Lawrence House to the ancient petroglyphs on the canyons, to the breathtaking rock bridges with a nice stop for a delicious Bedouin lunch and many stops for local tea and dances with the local Bedouin guides who are incredibly hospital and fun! We ended our jeep tour with the most amazing sunset that I have ever lived in my life, sipping tea prepared by our amazing guide on a small fire that warmed our hearts and souls. It was a moment that I will never forget, I still remember that we all cheered to “Here and Now”, to the beauty of that moment that we were all sharing and that we fully enjoyed.

But this was just half of the Wadi Rum experience as the night at the camp was as good as the day in the desert!

We enjoyed a delicious  traditional Bedouin dinner cooked in the ‘zarb’, an underground oven covered with sand and we danced for hours traditional Bedouin songs with our hosts. It was so fun that I couldn’t stop dancing and laughing before going out the main tent to watch the most incredible starred sky. No words can describe how beautiful it was, I stayed there for hours staring at the most wonderful sky I have ever seen.

I cannot say how sad I was the day after when we had to leave my beloved desert to go back north for the last stop in Amman before leaving this amazing country. What I can say is that the desert changed me: from that moment I realized that I was a different person, at this point this adventure touched my soul. The Wadi Rum is definitely my new favorite place on earth and I regret that we spent only one night there, but I am ready to go back and spend more time there with my new Bedouin friends: here again the Jordanian saying is true, “you arrive as a tourist, you leave as a friend”.

Thank you Wadi Rum and thank you Bedouin Direction for the best memories of my life.

The Ladybug living the Jordanian dream: Petra

The first reason why we decided to travel to Jordan was to visit Petra, one of the seven World Wonders, personally my second one and my first abroad (as the other one is the Colosseum in Rome!). We have been feeding our eyes with pictures from this wonderful archeological site for years so we decided that it was time to take the road to the country, take our own pictures and collect new memories in Petra.

The site itself has a very mysterious story: it is not known precisely when Petra was built, but the city began to prosper as the capital of the Nabataean Empire from the 1st century bC. Petra was later annexed to the Roman Empire and continued to thrive until a large earthquake in 363 AD destroyed much of the city in the 4th century AD. The earthquake combined with changes in trade routes, eventually led to the downfall of the city which was ultimately abandoned. By the middle of the 7th century Petra appears to have been largely deserted and it was then lost to all except local Bedouins from the area.

In 1812 a Swiss explorer named Johannes Burckhardt set out to ‘rediscover’ Petra; he dressed up as an Arab and convinced his Bedouin guide to take him to the lost city: since then Petra attracted tourists from all over the world and the site is constantly under development. New monuments are discovered and made accessible to visitors every year and many of them are only “visible” at the moment from some corners of the site.

It is for sure a real city and it was very hard to see it all in one day that’s why we decided a tailored tour with our fantastic guide the night before while eating a Jordanian dinner in Wadi Musa. We met very early the next day to enjoy as much as possible of the city until the sunset when it closes to tourists. We decided to follow the famous siq (around 1,5 km) along the breathtaking canyons where so much of the Nabatean culture and lifestyle was already visible and explained to us by our incredible guide. The reason why we decided to enter Petra from the siq was the emotion of seeing the Treasury, one of Petra most known monuments, from the canyons. I was completely speechless and my heart was beating so fast for the incredible emotion.

Seeing it for real for the first time is a moment and a feeling that I will probably never forget.

Once we managed to control our feelings we started our way through the Street of Facades and the Roman Theatre before starting a pleasant hike to the High Place of Sacrifice. There are a lot of hikes in Petra if you want to see the best places and views: you can do them slowly if you are not super sporty but in case you feel really tired you can do it with the many donkeys that you can find around the site. But please, do it! The best of Petra is from its heights! From the High Place of Sacrifice you can easily see so many monuments that are still hidden from the tourist view that the 45 minutes hike will look like 10 minutes!

We were lucky enough to have a sunny day with a good temperature so it was not so bad to walk a lot but remember to bring water and to stop every now and then in the many Bedouin shops to have some typical sage tea to recover and regain your energies!

There are also good hikes to admire The Treasury from the top of the front rock but we decided to leave it for the end if we had time and in the end we didn’t have time at all for a last hike!

We also visited the wonderful Royal Tombs (Urn Tomb, Silk Tomb, Corinthian Tomb and Palace Tomb) with the greatest walls and ceilings where the erosion created amazing motifs, before returning to Colonnaded Street to stop for a frugal lunch (there is a little self-service restaurant before the route to The Monastery or you can bring your own food) and then make the most important hike: around 45 minutes to the famous Al-Deir, The Monastery. I can’t say if I preferred the Monastery or The Treasury (maybe the first one!) but they are both a huge surprise and very emotional when you see them after a long walk (The Treasury) or a long hike (The Monastery). Still we decided to sit there in the bar just in front of it and to admire it in all its beauty while sipping mint tea and just enjoying the once-in-a-lifetime view! As it was already almost the sunset we waited there to watch it from that spectacular position before heading down to the exit before the site closing (around 6.30/7 pm).

At our biggest surprise, the same city changed completely its color at the sunset going from dark yellow/rust to rose-red (they call it the Pink city after all!). Can you see how different the Treasury was in this pinky color?

When we arrived at our hotel we felt super sore and tired but also very happy! We had one of the most incredible days in our lives so we decided to have a pleasant Turkish Bath and relaxing massage at our hotel (the Petra Palace Hotel was very nice and clean and its position was fantastic, less than 400 meters from the entrance of the archeological site!) before having dinner at the Cave Bar, possibly the oldest bar location in the world as it is entombed in a rock carved by Nabateans nearly 2,000 years ago!

Three nights a week you can also enjoy the Petra by night tour: it starts at 8.30 pm and it brings you through the Siq to the Treasury, both enlightened by candles in the night. It must be super nice but we couldn’t do it because it didn’t take place that night.

One last important tip: one of the best investments that you can do when you are in Petra is having a guide. There is so much to see and know that you will never manage to do that yourself and when you do you will probably miss so much. We were lucky enough to have one of the historical tour guides in Petra (he is an official tour guide since 1979) and definitely the best we could ever had! Mahomed Al-Hasanat (explorerone69@yahoo.com) is the best person to guide you in Petra or around Jordan (Little Petra, Wadi Rum, Aqaba) and he is now also a great friend.

As it often happens in Jordan you arrive as a tourist and you leave as a friend.

The Ladybug living the Jordanian dream: Madaba and the Dead Sea

There is no other way to call my journey through Jordan than a DREAM. First of all a dream coming true, because I have been dreaming of visiting Petra for such a longtime that I can’t even count the years; but it was also a dream itself, a place where I completely disconnected from the world and finally deeply connected with myself. I am not the same person who arrived in Jordan more than a month ago as this trip has changed me in a way that I didn’t expect: everything was suddenly finding its place in my life while new chaos emerged but it was a good chaos, a creative one, lifeblood for my thoughts and dreams.

It will be hard for me to give you tips and telling you the story of this trip without connecting it to the emotions that I felt.

For this reason I decided to split the journey in four posts, the main stops of this trip: Madaba and the Dead Sea, Petra, Wadi Rum desert and Amman.

Let’s start from day one: Madaba and the Dead Sea.

Once landed in Amman, we rented a car at the airport and started our trip towards the Southern Jordan starting from a quick stop in Madaba to visit the famous mosaic map of Saint Georges church and to buy kilims, the typical Jordanian rugs handmade here, another reason why this city is very famous. Situated at just 30 minutes by car from Amman I really suggest a visit to this lovely town as it gives you a delicate first approach to Jordan with its beautiful churches and mosques before getting to the “real” Jordanian adventure. We stopped here only a few hours in the morning (just the time to visit the oldest Palestine mosaic map in the world and buy a red keffiyeh and a kilim!). Madaba is hospital, peaceful and full of history, it was great to hang around visiting churches (they are all very close to each other) and to meet locals, who are very proud of their city and willing to give you all type of information! Artisan Street is perfect for your first shopping in Jordan and definitely cheaper compared to Petra.

But it was when we left Madaba and started the Kings Road heading to the Dead Sea that we started understanding what to expect from Jordan. The most beautiful views were in front of us and they didn’t leave us until we arrived in Wadi Musa that night. I cannot describe the beauty of this road with canyons and valleys on one side and the beautiful view of the Dead Sea with its turquoise water and white salt on the other side. We stopped hundreds of times to take pictures or make videos or just stay there and admire the incredible work of the nature in silence. The first day in Jordan was already leaving us speechless.

We joined the Dead Sea, the lowest point on Earth, around 400m under the sea level around two o’clock: as it is difficult to find a place to access directly to the sea we stopped at one of the many resorts along the sea, the Amman beach. We went for this one because it was less crowded with tourists and many Jordanians use to go there to enjoy a couple of hours at the beach. Floating on this sea was one of my dreams since I was a kid and studied it at school: the experience is incredible because the high concentration of salt in the sea not only doesn’t allow life in the sea but also won’t let you swim because you are constantly floating! Right on the other side you can admire Israel and if you are lucky enough (we were!) you can try for few JODs the famous Dead Sea muds on your skin. I suggest you try this because between the salt and the mud you will have the softest skin ever (I also had Turkish Baths, scrub and massages in Amman and Wadi Musa…I had the best skin I ever had in my life in just 5 days!).

After a quick late lunch and a last “bath” in the sea we took back the Kings Road to Wadi Musa: hours of silence and meditation along the most amazing road I have ever gone down. Jordan was already revealing its secrets and was starting to change my molecules…

We arrived in Wadi Musa just in time for dinner at the Red Cave: we ate mensaf, the typical Jordanian dish made with lamb, rice, yoghurt and pine nuts, Jordanian sweets and had a lot of Bedouin tea (I didn’t know yet that I was going to drink liters of Bedouin tea for the next three days!). Petra was waiting for us on the next day!