Bodrum, Turkey

When in Turkey are you in Europe or Asia?  The answer is yes, you are in both.  Turkey is the only country that sits on two continents; the Bosphorus Sea separates the continents.  Istanbul, the largest city with 20 million people, as well as 95% of the country, sits on the Asian side.  Turkey has a population of 72 million, and the majority of them are Muslim.  Turkey currently is a democracy with a secular government, but that could change.  Just saying.

Bodrum is an ancient city.  We viewed a 2,300 year old amphitheater that is still in use today.  We saw a castle that dated back to the crusades, some 600 years ago, that was built for protection from pirates.  I guess some things haven’t changed!  Many ancient sites have been destroyed by earthquakes.  At one time, this was a walled city and only a portion of the old wall remains at the Myndos Gate, where Alexander the Great entered the ancient city of Halicarnassus (one of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World) in 334BC.  At one time, the hills above this port city were covered with olive and pine trees, some purported to be over 2,000 years old; today, there are homes on these hills.  Yes, they are still in the olive oil making business, running in third place behind Spain and Italy; and today, it is illegal to cut down olive and pine trees. 

Amphitheater 

The last remaining piece of the original city wall

The Castle of St. Peter

Modern Bodrum, is a playground for Turkish and European snowbirds.  One could say that this is the Florida of Turkey.  This beach resort city on the Aegean Sea claims an amazing 320 days of sunshine.  It is clean and there is a lot of new building going on.  Off season, the population is 200,000 but swells in season to over 2 million.  Summer temperatures here can top out at around 110°. 

This is a confusing city as it looks Greek and Turkish all at the same time.  In fact, Greek islands are just around the corner.  You will see this reflected in the architecture of the buildings and homes: small windows and white paint are utilized to keep the sun out.  Homes are two stories tall with a terrace on the top.  Solar panels on rooftops heat water.  Homes precariously hang from the hillsides.

Michael and I were both escorts on the same tour today.  We hit the jackpot with brand new buses that had the new bus smell.  They each held 24 passengers and it had great leg room.  They even had a little step stool to use to get up on the first step of the bus.  It was like a little vacation for my knees!  On our tour, we saw cisterns, now abandoned, that were used to collect rainwater.  Today, a dam takes care of the water needs of this very thirsty city.  We also saw windmills, long abandoned, that were used to grind wheat to make grain.  So we saw the usual sites such as the Myndos Gate, the castle --  it was pleasant, the weather was wonderful.  Who could ask for a nicer day?

View from the hill where the windmills are

This is a beach resort city today

Homes cling to hillsides

Abandoned windmills

We headed out into the countryside, which was beautiful.  We passed through very old villages on narrow, windy and sometimes dusty roads.  I wanted to stop and take pictures as everywhere I looked, there was a photo opportunity.  Our two caravan bus continued on to a small seaside fishing village called Gumusluk.  We had been transported back in time!  This was such a charming little village, with open air restaurants nestled right along the edge of the water.  Small fishing boats sat at anchor bobbing away just feet from your chair.  As part of the tour, we were treated to a soft drink and a Borek pastry, filo dough filled with cheese and vegetables and fried.  Yum.  Then we were off to explore the village and came across some unique souvenirs shops selling handmade items.  Soon, my money and me parted, and some lucky girls in my life are going to be the recipients of these riches.  Michael even found his strapping tape here!  All too soon, we had to leave for the ride back to the ship.  Boo hoo, this was a real treasure of a place.

Haifa, Israel

Sometimes you just have to say NO; No tours, no to routine, no to anything you don’t want to do.  So today we said NO.  It was just going to be an easy day to do whatever we felt like.  We didn’t have an incentive to do anything special because we had already been here before and there wasn’t anything to see that we hadn’t already seen.  And that was very OK with me as my knees were really killing me (and my finger still is a problem, but that’s for another day).  I’m sorry to whine about hurting, but when you hurt, it colors how you perceive things. 

We didn’t want to just sit on the ship, so Michael went to the Square to talk to the local representative about what to do.  In the meantime, I went for my second massage to try and loosen the tendons and muscles around my knees and hips.  Massage for some is relaxing and a pleasant experience; for me, it is pain!  How the hell did things get so bad so fast?  Was it the antibiotics that exacerbated the already wincing tendons?  Too many stairs, too many high steps to get into a bus?  Too many ruins I’d walked over?  Whatever, the reason, my knees HURT.  I am loathe to take pain pills and I have run out of muscle relaxants.  But you know me – I am afraid I might miss something, so I just keep going and going.  I will have plenty of time to rest when I get home.

So we decided to ride the local #23 bus around town and see the sights.  Cheap at only $1.50 per person to see much of what a ship tour would see and at a highly reduced rate!  It was a long hike through the port and out to the main street.  After exchanging dollars for shekels, we caught the bus right by the port.  Haifa is built on steep hills, lots and lots of hills.  This is Israel’s third largest city.  The bus wound its way up the hills by going horizontal and then vertical to get up to the top of Mt. Carmel.  We saw the famous Baha’i gardens, but chose not to get off, and from the picture, I think you can see why.  Michael wanted to go to “Mother’s Park” because he was told by the local representative that there was a dynamite view from there.  We got off the bus with no idea where we were going.  We found the park, but no view.  Now Michael likes to walk just to walk and he figures he will eventually run into whatever it was he was looking for.  The day was perfect, sunny and warm, but I was in no mood to walk about aimlessly.  I told him I didn’t mind walking around if I knew where we were going.  So after a few sarcastic comments back and forth, we went back to the bus stop. 

Haifa is built on hills

Stairs in the Baha'i Gardens

 

Baha'i Gardens and Temple

We sat on a bench and watched the Haifa world go by.  This was a very busy spot and I tried to blend in with the locals.  It is very hard to blend in when the person you are with is wearing a Hawaiian shirt and carrying a big-ass camera around his neck.  I found the locals not to be a friendly bunch, but seemed rather cautious.  Very few people talked to each other.  I can usually strike up a conversation with a person while sitting on a bus bench, but here I didn’t feel welcome to do so.  I can’t say as I blame these folks as there are those that wish to blow them up.  About a half hour went by and the #23 bus finally came and we hopped on and headed to the big mall. 

The first thing we did was get something to eat.  Thankfully, the sandwich place we chose had a menu in English.  Away from the touristy areas, we did not find a lot of English language signage, although most people we interacted with spoke good English.  We shared a roast beef sandwich and a diet coke and it only cost $12! (rolling my eyes) Wow!  The prices were very high.  We were looking for strapping tape to seal the cartons we are sending home (never found any) and a pair of shoes to replace the ones I wore out.  I found several shoes I liked, but the prices were double and triple what I would pay at home.  I eventually found a pair for $75.  The ladies in the shop were thrilled to have a cruise ship passenger from America buy one of their shoes.

We marched around (more like dragged our tired butts) the entire four floors of the mall (it wasn’t that big) and I was really ready to go back to the ship and rest.  Even Michael started to complain about his knees.  We caught the #23 bus again, and this time, I really focused on the neighborhoods and people we saw.  I did not see any individual houses, just apartment buildings of various sizes.  Many of the windows were covered with ornamental wrought iron bars and others had outside mounted automatic-type window shade coverings that roll down over the window to keep the sun out.  Just like in Jerusalem, buildings had solar water heater systems and satellite dishes.  There were many cafes, many of which had outdoor seating. 

As we descended the hills, the neighborhoods changed.  Buildings were much older and more crowded and a bit dingier, and the little store fronts were smaller.  And still lower down the hill, I think we were in a predominately Muslim area.  It would have been fun to poke around the shops here and stroll around, but it was time to return to the ship.  We were both tired.  We made it back to the ship in time for some rest before the next scheduled activity.

Morry, who is the ship’s rabbi, was born and raised in Haifa, and as a welcome to his hometown, he and Hanita invited 15 people to dinner at a local Arab run Mediterranean restaurant.  Arranging taxis for all these people turned out to be a bit of a problem.  There was a misunderstanding about where to pick us up, but the drivers just shrugged it off.  It seems as though this attitude is somewhat typical of Israelis, but Morry’s sister said it was getting better. 

I don’t know what kind of appetite people normally have who eat at a Mediterranean restaurant, but the “appetizers” never stopped coming.  There were at least 15 plates such as hummus, tdaziki sauce, tomatoes, babaganoush, taboolie, eggplant, olives and other stuff I could not identify, all with pita bread.  We all sat at four tables, and each table had the entire round of appetizers served at their table.  OMG, there was soooo much food.  Who had room for a dinner entrée?  Some folks ordered dinner, such as Michael, who ordered lamb chops.  I was told that presenting so much food is the norm in a Mediterranean restaurant; if you had finished everything, then they would worry that you didn’t get enough to eat.  So like other cultures, Jewish and Italian come to mind, you eat until you are ready to burst. 

And then they brought desert!  It was a baked sweet cheese pie with coconut and cinnamon.  It was the size of a large pizza and we were served humongous portions.  Most of us just tasted it as we were ready to roll out of there needing a wheelbarrow to hold up our stomachs.  Thank you Morry and Hanita for a wonderful dining experience.

Jerusalem

It was a dark and stormy night ….. somewhere.  But not here in this part of the world.  We have had calm seas, in fact, so calm that we have to look out the window to see if we are actually moving.  I cannot ever remember taking a cruise and having flat seas for such a long time.  I can count on one hand the number of bumpy days we have had in the almost four months we have been at sea.  It is unbelievable!  In addition, we have had incredible weather, with only a few rain days.  I do not think this will ever happen again.

We entered the Suez Canal on Monday, April 22 at about 6am.  The transit was totally uneventful.  The Suez Canal is nothing more than a big ditch, about 45 feet deep and only one vessel at a time can pass through in each direction.  On the east side is the Sinai Desert and on the west is the Arabian Desert.  There were some villages on the west, and sand on the east. It was a big yawner.  In fact, it was a normal sea day and we played bridge.  There was not much to see.

After entering the Mediterranean Sea, we headed to Ashdod, Israel’s largest seaport.  Ashdod dates back to the Canaanite culture of the 17^th century BC, making the city one of the oldest in the world.  Today, it is a modern city with a bustling port.   That’s about it for Ashdod.  Our reason for being here was to go to Jerusalem.  Our last visit to Jerusalem was 20 years ago, and boy have things changed. 

I am not sure how to proceed with my narrative because I can throw out all kinds of facts and information about Israel and Jerusalem, but most of it will have little meaning without actually FEELING the sacred places.  Once again, I leave Israel with a lump in my throat.  This is a magical place for those that seek a connection to ones historical roots. 

So for the folks that have never been here, I am going to write a bit about Israel in general.  This is a country that is 2/3 desert, but you would never know it to see it today.  Over 260 million trees have been planted since 1930 and a great deal of the area we saw was forested, and a vast majority of the land is agricultural including olive oil, fruit, and a developing wine industry.  The Judea Mountains separates the coastal plains from the rest of the country.  The Dead Sea is almost 1,400 feet below sea level, the lowest point on earth.  Being a desert, lack of water is a big issue.  The main source of water is the Sea of Galilee; when there is no water they purify wastewater for agriculture, and also now have a desalination plant.  The country is clean and green, and I saw flowers everywhere.

New immigrants to Israel go to a government run center where they learn Hebrew and then get help in securing a job and housing.  Languages spoken here are Hebrew (the national language), followed by Arabic, English, and Russian.  There are 8 million Israelis, and 80% are Jewish; the rest are mostly Arab Muslims and Christians.  Army service is compulsory; men serve three years, while women serve two years.  The culture of the country is constantly developing due to the blending of immigrants. 

Female Soldiers

In 1948, Israel became an independent state.  She was attacked the same day she gained independence by a coalition of Arab nations.  As a result of its victory, Israel expanded the territory given to the state by the United Nations, and in the 1967 War, the old city of Jerusalem was recaptured.  Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

So now back to our story.  We toured and drove and drove and drove.  I put my notebook away and just took in all that the guide had to say about the incredible history of this place.  We got 5,000 years of history in one day!  Whew, that is a lot to take in! 

Starting from Ashdod, we drove into the Judea Mountains climbing up a narrow pass to Jerusalem.  We saw iron shields that were used to protect the supply convoy vehicles during the 1967 War.  There is much evidence of war in this country. 

Iron shields to cover convoy vehicles

There is so much that I cannot begin to write about it.  So many wars have taken place over the millennia, and the three major religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam claim Jerusalem as their holy of holiest place.  I was always cognizant of the turmoil this tiny country has and continues to suffer.  Her neighbors have vowed to destroy this incredible country.  A green and productive country rose out of the Sinai Desert, and yet Israel’s neighbors still threaten to annihilate her.  After touring the neighboring Arab countries, you would think that they could learn a thing or two from Israel.  What a shame.  I will put politics aside for now……

Jerusalem in located 3,000 feet above sea level in the hilly mountains of Judea.  It has a population of 800,000.  My impression of this city is stone/trees/flowers/hills/history.  All buildings and houses in Jerusalem are covered with stone, giving the city a uniform look.  There are solar panels and hot water tanks on rooftops, taking advantage of the sunny days.  The city is extremely clean.  There is a high speed train between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, cutting the travel time between the cities to just 20 minutes.  Since our last visit here, I was amazed to see how much the city had grown.  One needs at least a few weeks to take in all the sites this city has to offer, but today we only had a few hours and drove by many of these sites but did not stop. 

There is so much history here and it is impossible to write about it here in this blog.  I am in awe of how ancient this city is.  There have been wars, so many wars; the city was conquered so many times and much of the original sites had been destroyed and then the new folks built over the top of what they destroyed.  The archeological digs continue and new objects are uncovered all the time.    

The traffic around the old city is BAD, real BAD.  My tour took us to the garden of Gethsemane, the garden of olive trees in which Jesus spent the last moments before his arrest. 

Church of Gethsemane

Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus was arrested

We then drove up to Mount of Olives, which is the burial grounds for Jews who believe that when the messiah returns, they will be resurrected. 

Mt of Olives cemetery

Rabbis on Mt of Olives

We then had lunch at a kabutz, where I meet up with Michael.  We dined together and then took our picture at an overlook of the West Bank. 

West Bank is in the background

Then we drove back to the old city by the Knesset, Supreme Court, and a few museums; and what seemed like forever stuck in traffic, we finally went through the Dung Gate and made a trip to the Western or Wailing Wall.  Boring narrative, huh?  Michael’s tour took a three hour walking tour though the old city, where he went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.  I will tell the rest of the story with the pictures.  But……..

Front of Church of the Holy Sepulcher

Dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher

Normally, I like to spice up my blog, but today was not the day.  I had prepared a note to place in one of the cracks in the Wailing Wall, and as I did, I was so overcome with emotion that I could not stop the tears from falling.  I cannot describe what happened.  I FEEL a strong connection here.  Why?  I cannot say.  Our guide, who was a robot spitting out history, showed her first emotion when she saw me return to our meeting place.  With a knowing smile, she hugged me and understood, all without words.  She said it is not an uncommon experience.  As I write this, tears are in my eyes, and yet I have no words to describe why or what I am feeling.  This is Jerusalem for me.  It is not the stone, it is not the physical world; it is the emotional tug that I cannot explain.  I am the most unreligious Jew I know, I am not sure about the existence of God; I am a cultural Jew.  Yet, this strange mystical feeling overcomes me, and I cannot understand it.  Perhaps it is just something to know that I FEEL it. 

The Wailing Wall

Room underground from the Wailing Wall

Here are additional photos of the Old City:

Cairo

Looky who is taking a turn to blog!  It is Michael.  I stayed put so I could rest my weary body, especially my knees.  It seems as though one of the side effects of the antibiotic I was taking for my infected thumb can cause tendinitis   I don't know if that is why my knees hurt so bad, but the timing is suspicious.  So here it goes:

***

Well, it’s my (Michael) turn to shine as I escorted an all day excursion to Cairo while Beverly remained aboard the Quest to get a massage, play bridge (huh?) and tend to her aching knees.

Cairo hasn’t changed much since we were here three years ago, except maybe the Muslim Brotherhood is now in charge, Hosni Mubarak’s party’s building has been burned down, unemployment is up, illiteracy is up, and over one million Egyptians live in graveyards.  Such progress!!!

So, a little background first.  Cairo is s city of some 20 million people out the total Egyptian population of 85 million.  It is crowded, dirty and heavily polluted.  It is estimated to be the third most (after Mexico City and Beijing) polluted city in the world.  It is old, old, old.  In fact, Cairo is 1,000 years old, while Giza, right next door, is some 4,500 years old.  Politically, the place is a mess.  While Mohammed Morsi garnered a majority of the vote some eleven months ago, it is estimated today that if he ran now he would get about ten percent.  Believe it or not, most Egyptians wish for Hosni Mubarak to return.  Our tour guide put it most eloquently when he said the Egyptians traded in a corrupt (Mubarak) regime for a corrupt and inept (Morsi) Regime.  There were over 1,300 strikes in March of this year alone, and so hopefully the end of the Brotherhood is close.

Egypt derives the largest amount of its annual revenue from the Suez Canal (some $55 billion US annually), tourism and cotton, in that order.  However, tourism is off some 80%.  Three years ago there was one vendor at the Pyramids for every eight visitors.  Today it is one to one, and they have become super aggressive.  I had one woman on my bus who was groped by a vendor, to the surprise of absolutely no one.  Our guide, who is a university trained Egyptologist told us that this was his first assignment in over 18 months, and consequently he is having a very hard time surviving.  He voted for Morsi but now can’t wait for him to be removed from power.  Even while I was in Cairo, the Justice Minister resigned in protest and several vehicles were set on fire. Oh, did I mention I visited Tarir Square?  Believe it or not, the single biggest problem right now is the lack of diesel fuel.  Trucks, buses, etc. are lined up literally for days at the pump.

The city of Cairo is expanding in a most unusual way.  Just before Mubarak was overthrown, an enormous number of building projects were begun.  Today, they sit unfinished, while millions cannot find a place to live.  The new housing projects undertaken under Morsi are almost all illegal.  That is, they are built without permits, inspections, and so forth.  I am sure you have read that they also collapse from time to time with little notice or concern from the government.  And now the army is doing some very strange things.  For example, while I was at the pyramids, a big army helicopter landed a soldier on top of one of the pyramids so he could raise their flag.  This is totally illegal, but that means nothing.  Back to the city, the traffic is simply unbelievable.  Nothing moves, horns never stop honking, no laws are obeyed.  It is just a mess.

Nile River

Typical apartment buildings

Have they heard of sanitation?

City street

Your guess about what is going on is as good as mine!

Another interesting thing about new construction is that they virtually never finish anything on the outside.  The inside of a new apartment building may be fine, but the outside is poorly laid bricks, with no effort to finish the work at all.  For example, window frames abound, but there are no windows.  Nothing is painted or plastered over.  Did I mention the garbage?  The infrastructure in Cairo is so bad that they don’t even bother to get rid of the garbage.  They throw it in the canals around town, or just leave it on the street to be blown away by the wind. 

Unfinished construction abounds

Well, now for a little bit about the excursion itself, which I enjoyed very much.  Our first stop, after the two hour drive to Cairo from Sokhna where the ship was moored, was the Egyptian Museum of Antiquates, which is an antiquity itself, at 104 years ago.  It is a mess.  Dirty and totally falling apart, but housing some of the most priceless art in the entire world.  There are some 120,000 pieces on display, and all but one (a replica of the Rosetta Stone) is an original.  The high point of the museum is the King Tutankhamen exhibit which is frankly unbelievable.  It includes his 250 pound solid gold coffin, his 25 pound solid gold breast plate, and so forth.  The only thing more unbelievable than the treasures was the sloppy way in which these priceless pieces were kept.

We next had a very unmemorable lunch at the Hotel Meridian.  Fortunately, this was a brief stop as it was time to move on to the Pyramids, the last standing of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.  Here we saw the Cheops Pyramid which is 480 feet tall.  It is made up of 2,300,000 individual blocks (twelve times the volume of the Empire State Building) and weighs in at 16.5 million tons.  It took 100,000 people over seven years to construct.  We also saw the Chephren and Mycerinus Pyramids which are right next door.  These three pyramids are over 4,500 years old. It truly boggles the imagination.  Finally, we stopped briefly at the Sphinx which is even more decrepit than the last time we were here.  They really need to fix this and soon.  Now it was time for the required stop at the souvenir shop followed by an agonizingly long trip back to Sokhna and home.

 

Cheops Pyramid (center) with brothers Chephren and Mycerinus

The sphinx taken at an angle with the great pyramid behind it

Sharm El Sheikh, or How to Go Nowhere

Here’s a riddle for you:  how far have you travelled if you were driving 60 mph in a bus for three hours?  The answer:  0 miles

It was a bad start to the day and that should have been a tip off about how the rest of the day was going to go.  For starters, the ship was supposed to tie up to a pier.  That didn’t happen.  Instead, we had to anchor out and then tender into the pier.  That took a bunch of time off an already short day.  Our tour to St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai desert was scheduled for 8.5 hours and the ship’s departure time was 5pm.

Secondly, we could not find the bus.  It seems that our bus driver was on the cheap side and did not pay the bribe to get into the port gate to pick us up.  So we had to haul ass out of the port and up the street to find our bus.  That took up more time.

We finally got on our way and about ½ hour in, the bus stops right in the middle of the road, and the driver gets out and comes back with a few bottles of drinking water.  Hum, what do engines and water have in common?  A radiator – in this case, a leaking radiator – and we are going into the Sinai desert, a barren, rocky and deserted place where bad things can happen.  Oh, and did I mention we had a security guy with a gun on board?  Why do we need one, I asked the guide?  That is to protect passengers from the Bedouin bad guys who like to capture and ransom AMERICANS.  Are you getting a warm fuzzy feeling? 

We continued on and the bus made terrible wheezing sounds as it barely made it up a hill.  Uh oh, this is not good.  We arrived at a gas station, the last bit of civilization before St. Catherine’s, and now the driver is bringing buckets of water.  We were wondering if there was enough water to get us to our destination, especially if all our drinking water would be used to keep the radiator full.  We even talked about filling up the empty bottles with our urine as the onboard toilet was full.  Hahaha.  This was not getting funny.  After much discussion, the driver called for another bus.  The bus was to meet us at St. Catherine’s.  Several of us were VERY uncomfortable with this scenario.  What if the bus didn’t make it to St. Catherine’s?  We would be stranded out in the middle of the Sinai desert.  In addition, so much time had elapsed that even if we did make it to St. Catherine’s, there would not be enough time to see anything; we would have to turn right around in order to make it back to the ship in time.

So I very vocally called out that I wanted to go back.  In the meantime, the bus company had sent two vans out to take us to St. Catherine’s.  No way, Jose.  Now six of us wanted to go back and 12 wanted to go on.  The large van only had room for 11.  What to do?  The group leader decided, after much loud discussion and disagreement, that we would all go back, and that we would wait for the replacement bus at the gas station. 

And that is what we did.  The guide felt really bad about the situation.  We returned to Sharm El Sheikh and had a little tour that consisted of taking pictures of a mosque, a church, and a brief stop at a market.  Then we tendered back to the ship where I spent a great deal of time trying to make my achy knees feel better.

The mosque

The church

Don't all parking lots have camel parking spaces?

You won't see this on Rodeo Drive!

Wadi Rum, Jordan

Channeling Lawrence of Arabia!  There were no bushes or trees to look under for signs of Lawrence.  But there were plenty of rocks!  Wadi Rum is the desert that Lawrence of Arabia transversed with his skirmishes during the great Arab revolt of 1917 against Turkey.

I’ll get to the description in a moment.  But first a word from our sponsor, the country of Jordan.  We were in Jordan a couple of years ago and went to see Petra, a most magical and mystic place.  So on this trip to Jordan, we decided to go to Wadi Rum.  Jordan doesn’t have much going for it except for these two spectacular places that time and nature have created.  The country of Jordan was established in 1921 and is ruled by a monarchy.  The landscape is harsh as 75% of this country is desert.  There is no oil or natural gas; but most important, there is no water.  Right now, there are over one million Syrian refugees and that is putting stress on this waterless country.  It is so bad, that they collect rainwater.  The median income is only $1,000 per month.  The majority of the population (92%) lives in the capital city of Amman.  Gas is very expensive at $1.50 per liter.  One final note:  Jordan and Egypt are the only Arab countries with a peace treaty with Israel. 

The native population is the Bedouins.  These are nomadic tribes that live in the desert, moving from place to place.  They are goat herders and camel traders, but today, are making a living from tourism.  Since they are specialists in desert life, they are guides for hikes, tours of Wadi Rum, etc.  This has lead to some stability for the tribes and now they live in villages provided by the government with services such as education and medical clinics, although many forego the education part.  Bedouins get vaccinated against scorpions and snakes with homemade vaccine.  They do this every 12 years in order to maintain immunity from these desert dwellers.

Today, the weather was absolutely perfect.  It was on the cool side but very sunny with an incredible blue sky.  I bet you can’t guess who forgot the sun block and came back with a shiny red nose (and it wasn’t me).  We had a one hour drive out to Wadi Rum.  Our guide was a fellow named Jehad (like in jihad) – that didn’t make me very comfortable – maybe he should use a different name with the Americans.  We drove on a good road through brown, barren and rocky mountains.  We saw an occasional Acacia tree, which camels like to nibble on.  On the way to the visitor center, we stopped to climb all over Lawrence of Arabia’s actual, real-life train. Michael got to play engineer and when he was done doing that, he took over the machine gun and sprayed a hail of bullets all over the bad guys.  The train sits on almost 100 year old tracks and is used to take groups of people on tours through Wadi Rum – and I will add that those that ride the train are wimps.  I will explain.

  

Lawrence of Arabia's train

Michael playing engineer

The Seven Pillars; Lawrence wrote a book with the title taken from this mountain

After a pit stop at the visitor center and a short video, we went out to mount our 4x4 vehicle.  And I bet you thought I was going to say a camel.  Well, I think mounting a camel would have been easier than what we got.  Do you know where old decrepit 4x4 small trucks go?  Right here in Wadi Rum.  Each truck looked worse than the next.  There were benches mounted on each side of the truck bed, with room for three people on each side.   We had to climb OVER the tailgate to get in the truck.  I wish I had a moving picture of us old farts climbing into that truck.  Some needed a push in the butt to get up and over, some needed help getting the leg over the tailgate.  It was not very pretty.  And the trucks were filthy dirty.  Ugh.

Our chariots

We sat and bumped around on these seats; no seat belts!!!

It was too windy to keep my hat on, so I fashioned a turban out of a shawl I brought along.  I thought I looked pretty chic.  I went native!  Maybe I can start a new fashion trend at home.

New fashion statement

The desert landscape is startling for its colors and rock formations that have been carved by erosion from wind and sand.  Moonscape comes to mind, but as we rode deeper into the desert, the colors and rock formations became more dramatic.  One cannot really see the scale of this place in a picture, it is so immense.   We bumped our way along on a sandy road and made our first stop at a steep sand dune, where we climbed up to the top.  The sand was quite deep and if going up a steep hill isn’t hard enough, try adding ankle deep sand.  The sand was a stunning red and was very fine.  But it was worth the struggle to get up to the top. It felt like being on top of the world.  The vistas were so grand, the colorful desert spread out as far as the eye could see.  I wished I had a container to fill with this beautiful sand.  It was time to go back to the truck and get our tushes back in it.  It still was not very graceful. 

Deep sand road

You can get an idea of the scale of the rock formations; that is Michael standing at the base

We continued our tour and whenever we wanted to stop, all we had to do was bang on the top of the cab for our driver to stop.  We saw goats and camels, but no other animal life.  At one point, one fellow’s hat blew off and we banged on the roof.  He saw the hat and backed the truck up to it and I thought he was going to get out to retrieve it.  But no, he kept the truck moving, opened the door, leaned out and scooped it up.  It was a very impressive move!

Goats grazing

Camel train

We came to a Bedouin camp and oohhhed and ahhhed over the camels.  Michael went over and sat on one, but declined the offer to ride it.  They charge $1 to get on, but $20 to get off.  He wasn’t taking any chances of being stranded on top.  

Bedouin camel herder

Michael sitting on the camel

We also saw ancient drawings of camels etched on the side of the mountain.  That was cool.

Camel etchings on side of mountain

So off we go again, and this time I was getting the hang of getting in and out of the truck.  We stopped for tea by a rock formation that was just stunning in color with an incredibly smooth face.  There was nothing here in the desert to make tea with to our inexperienced eye.  The guides collected dried leaves and made a fire pit with rocks they found nearby.  Then they used a piece of flint to start the fire.  Once the fire got going, they pulled out some well used teapots and brewed fresh tea.  We stood around waiting for it to brew and then enjoyed sipping our tea from throwaway cups.  

Making tea

Sheer granite wall

Beautiful colors in the rock

Then it was time to mount up again.  I was starting to get the hang of how to get back in the truck by this time.  It’s all in the arms; once you get the foot up on the bumper, one has to hoist one’s derriere with a nice lunge as you grasp the tailgate and pull yourself up.  I would give my performance a 7.5 at this point in the excursion. 

King of Jordan during Lawrence's time

We stopped awhile later at a Bedouin camp that was really a touristy tea stop and store.  Not cool.  We completed our tour of Wadi Rum rumbling along dusty, rocky and sandy roads, and then made another tea stop.  I was glad to get back to the bus, but I was proud of myself as my final exit off the truck was a good one.  I scored a perfect 10 on that dismount!!