I went away over Christmas. Marion and I took a two-week adventure travel tour, and we got back yesterday evening. Unfortunately, my checked luggage didn’t make it back with me. I’m hoping to get some word about what happened to it beyond what I was able to find out before I left the airport (which was, “It was loaded onto the airplane in Amman.”) I’ve had no luck so far, though – the tracking website just has the information I gave them about the missing luggage, and the phone number they gave me doesn’t appear to be answered by anything other than a recording machine. It may be a long time before I can say that I’ve unpacked after my trip.
Overall, I liked Jordan better than Egypt, even though there was more to see in Egypt. They were both pretty dry and dusty, but Jordan was cleaner, and traffic wasn’t insane. And by insane, I mean that in Egypt, particularly Cairo, traffic laws appeared to be an unknown concept. Getting to the hotel the first night, our van was in one of five lanes of traffic (on a road with three lanes marked), with motorcycles moving in whatever spaces they could find between vehicles. Traffic lights appeared to be ignored unless a policeman was present, and pedestrians had to be pretty bold.
Traffic and general cleanliness aside, it was a good trip, but there were problems. I think everybody on the trip came down with traveler’s trots, and we had one full-blown case of dysentery that required hospitalization. My own digestive problems weren’t all that serious, but they came late in the trip, and I just got more-or-less over them right as the tour ended. I also came down with something flu-like right at the end, which gave me problems on the flight home and is still affecting me.
The monuments and ruins we saw were impressive, and I’m glad I got to see them. Abu Simbel particularly impressed me, not so much because of the size of the monument itself, which is pretty damned amazing, but because of the magnitude of the effort required to save it from the rising waters of Lake Nasser.
Petra was also impressive. The whole site is about 265 square kilometers in size, and it’s only about 30% catalogued. Our guide told us that we walked about 18 kilometers (and went up and down about 800 meters vertically) the day we spent there.
Anyway, more to come later.
