Jordan

I can't even begin to explain how impressed I was with that little country. Amman is a very modern, very clean city. Truthfully, it might as well be San Francisco. And the royal family, the Hashemite dynasty, are such progressive monarchs.

But before all that, Petra.

We arrived at our hotel at 9pm, without sleep since the 1:30am wake up for climbing Mount Sinai. Suffice it to say, waking up the following morning was difficult. Our Jordanian guide, Fadi, is a fantastic guy. The engine on the bus was absolutely roaring, so it was hard to hear him that first night, but he turned out to be extraordinarily helpful, informative, and compassionate. You couldn't ask for a better guide. It's really hard to weigh him against Osama, but in any case there's no need. Just two amazing guides. Well, the following morning we drove a mere ten minutes to Petra.

If you've seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or Transformers 2, you've seen the great treasury building at Petra. As it so happens, it wasn't a treasury at all; local Bedouins believed that there was treasure hidden in the carvings, and so called it (they even fired rifles at it, the holes of which can still be seen).

But if you think that the Treasury is the highlight of Petra, there's so much more. The amazing thing about the Treasury is that the observer walks toward it through a very deep, narrow crack in the earth to emerge in a large open area. However, the walkway through Petra continues several miles farther into a series of temples, palaces, and storehouses. It's enormous, and one could spend days just hiking it's alleyways.

Petra was the capital of the Nabataean civilization, a major commercial and trading power at the edge of the Roman Empire in the first centuries BC and AD. They basically controlled the supply routes between Damascus and Yemen, the major Indian Ocean port. Petra rose to prominence because it was a secure position at the crux of the trade route. To really understand this amazing city in the rock, one must imagine the walls of its already narrow alleys lined with vendors, money changers, and hordes of animals.

After a night in the wonderful city of Amman- where I met a Saudi in the hotel internet cafe who invited me to his country, oddly enough- we headed for Mount Nebo, or Jabal Nibo. This was the site where Moses died, looking across the Jordan River at a massive panorama of biblical Israel. On a clear day, you can see all the way from Beersheba to the Sea of Galilee. It was breathtaking and spectacular. It was a Sunday morning, so there was an Italian group holding Mass in the Franciscan chapel at the summit. I slipped in between services while the rest of the group was on a bathroom break.

After leaving Mount Nebo we drove to the Allenby-King Hussein bridge. This is the only place where Palestinians are allowed to leave the West Bank for another country now that the Gaza airport and seaport have been closed thanks to the Hamas takeover. The bridge is named after General Edmund Allenby, the British commander who took the Levant from the Ottomans during World War I; on the Jordanian side, it is called the King Hussein bridge, after the long-reigning monarch Hussein of Jordan.

So saying goodbye to Fadi, we crossed into Israel.