Azraq Lodge

I leave in a couple hours for a three day FoEME conference in Lotan, Israel. The conference is being held in Kibbutz Lotan by the Center for Creative Ecology and is going to be focused on environmental issues including eco-tourism and sustainable development. I am pretty excited. We are passing through the border crossing in Aqaba and, inshallah, the crossing will be smooth and stampless.

... cash to buy an 8000 dollar hearing aid for his child, his story runs. He sells crafted blankets, the profit of which would go directly to the women weaving them. I tell him that sounds like a good cause, and can I take some pictures of those women? No, they are very shy, comes the anser. Just give what your heart tells you. The money is not important. I understand, but I can't justify a larger donation to my sponsors, I counter. I can give 100 shekels (about 25 dollar). He ...

... will work out just fine. Now that I'm writing this on a waiting seat in Frankfurt/Hahn airport, the lowcost-carrier airport 100 kilometers away from the city somewhere on a high plain, I feel I miss the level of sensitivity to write down just what I want. But there are greater concerns. It's not my mother tongue and more importantly, it has not been my mother's tongue. Consider me a guest en anglais and I promise to take off my shoes. Bash me and you might ...

... the Old City walls, it is composed of communities perched on number of steep hills separated by the deep valleys. You do not get a real feel for the city boundary except for the well-defined small ancient walled area.

We took in the panorama of the Old City from our first stop at the Mount of Olives. Immediately below us, up the side of the Mount, are thousands of graves of people wanting to be buried as close as could to the place where ...

... over the last summer break... We stayed there for only approximately three days following our previous pilgrimage trip to Saudi Arabia.. We commenced our trip by arriving in Amman's International Airport after a flight from Jeddah's International Airport in the morning of 24th August 2009.

We were all exhausted after the pilgrimage trip, yet exuberant as we waited upon the excitement that Jordan had prepared for us for the next three days of our stay there....

Amman, Jordan hadtravel

... before nightfall, and checked out a few of the accommodation
options before settling for best of the bunch. We walked down the street to
find some dinner as semi-trailers zoomed past noisily. We ended up in a place
with a couple of carcasses hanging out the front and a pen of sheep next to it.
Talk about fresh meat. We ordered some kebabs, and we watched the cook butcher
our portions on the spot before serving up three huge ...

... chronologically to make it easy... First off, my weekend was really exciting even before I left because my host "sister/aunt", Yasmin, had a baby on Friday! She's a little girl named Jood (it sounds just like "Hey Jude" by the Beatles), and I forget what it means in Arabic but I'll find out, because all the names have meanings. We went to see her in the hospital on Friday night and she's sooo tiny! In Jordan, when you go to visit the mother in the hospital after a baby is born ...

... Wizard in the Holy Grail "THERE ARE SOME WHO CALL ME,,,,, TIM". I've been waiting for weeks for somebody to utter the next line and today it happened! "What is your favorite colour?!" Ha! I was so happy, totally un-prompted and all. Having said that by the law of averages, I think it was odds on for me to be asked, I think ...

... of Jordanian 'outback'. This (above left) is pretty much it for miles as you take the eastern highway, which fallows a very shallow wadi bounded by low lying hills on each horizon (when looking left or right from the bike). Occasionally a kink in the road, a higher hill or a semi trailer blasting by slows progress but on the whole it's eerily reminiscent of ...

... for Saddam Hussein, they could look no further than Jordan. Every man here seems to look like him , right down to the moustache !!!!! Off we drove, and you begin to feel slightly sane as the Jordanians do not use the horn, but their driving was still slightly scary. We made our way to a hotel above the site and settled down for the night. Classy hotel, it actually had a sit down toilet, but the door wouldn't shut properly, because of the toilet !!!!! Next morning, up ...