Traveling to Jordan

January 8th (Thursday) - Part Two
And so our long day continued as we got on the bus and rode north up through the Sinai Peninsula.

After a couple of hours, during which we got a little chance to doze, we stopped off in the resort town of Nuweiba for lunch. Nuweiba is considered to be part of Egypt's "Red Sea Riviera" and it certainly was beautiful. It was warmer there and there were people taking advantage of the beautiful beach outside our restaurant. Notice the camel on the beach!

After lunch we continued our journey in the bus north to the Port of Taba. Here we had to get out and go through a very tight and long security procedure in the port building with all of our luggage before boarding the boat for our ride to Jordan. We actually got to take a hydrofoil boat across the Red Sea's Gulf of Aqaba over to the Royal Yacht Club resort area in Aqaba, Jordan. To give you some perspective, this town is so far south in Jordan that we were only about 10 minutes north of their shared border with Saudi Arabia. And in this northern part of the Gulf of Aqaba, you can actually see the southernmost part of Israel next door as well (town of Eilat).

Customs met us and we received our visas and they spot checked several pieces of our luggage including one of ours before sending us on our way. We picked up a new bus and driver, along with a new guide, Mischel. We had about two hours drive through Jordan, going through downtown Aqaba which was very clean and very cosmopolitan. One thing we noticed right away is that Jordan is very proud of their royal family - King Abdullah, his wife and four children - formal portraits of the king in uniform and the family together are hung up in every lobby and on the outside of some buildings. There are even pictures up of Abdullah's father, King Hussein (who died a few years ago, and his last wife, Queen Noor (an American). Eventually we came to Petra where we went to the Petra Panorama Hotel for a meeting, dinner and bed. Considering that we'd been up since 2am that morning with no more than a short nap on the bus, we were definitely ready for bed!