Up early we explore the hotel and decide we need a week here to make use of the facilities, also we need a big bank account as most of them involves extra charges, eg salt spa, mud wrap, massage, indoor salt pool etc BUT a swim in the dead sea is free. You need to take a packed lunch to navigate through the maze of outdoor pools and bars to finally descend to the "beach". I use this term loosely as it is just a rock platform from which you carefully tread your wa...

From what we have seen of Jordan so far, we are not impressed......the people, the service, the tourist industry or the landscape. It appears that the the main objective is to screw the tourist for as much as possible with the least amount of service. One of our group Peter, decided yesterday that he would like a steam bath and inquired from our guide about the cost. About $20 he was told. She would take him there and his 5 minute transport back to the hotel ...

While the temps in the daytime here in the desert are in the mid 20s, the night time temp falls to around 10 so we rug up this morning for our visit to the Petra archaeological site. We even lend out some of our winter gear to others in our group who didn't bring warm clothes - we could do a roaring trade here as there seems to be quite a few people staying here who didn't know the desert is cold in the winter. As we walk into the site of ancient Petra, which ...

It is with great sadness we say goodbye to Tarek who has been our guide in Egypt and we all wish he could come to Jordan with us. Our new guide certainly has a hard act to follow. The flight to Amman from Cairo takes 1hr 20minutes and once there we proceed to buy our visas which only cost $27 each but would have cost about $140 each if we had purchased them from Canberra before we left. No forms to fill out, no photos required - just hand over the money and all...