We landed in Dubai at 7.20am, using instruments because there was no visibility until we hit the runway.

I had watched "Pay it Forward"with Kevin spacey, Helen Hunt and the cute kids from "Sixth Sense"on the way to Singapore, but there wasn't anything good to watch on the next leg. Dubai airport was not as good as they claim - there were none of the Clarins products that I needed to buy.

Emirates gave us a voucher for free refreshments and a free lunch - we didn't want Arabic Maccas and it was hard to choose so we had French Pastries for morning tea and salmon on a long roll (cut in half like Subways), called a sandwich, for lunch.

From Dubai we caught another plane, an Airbus 330 which flew to Abu Dhabi (30 mins) and then waited while it refueled (1 hour) and finally flew on to Amman.

And boy!! What an experience in Amman! Because we were travelling on, we thought we should go through to the transit lounge. They they told us we had to go back and have our passports stamped, so we went all the way back to Terminal 1 and had the passports stamped. As we came back to terminal 2 we stopped to buy Shannon's Toffiffi. As I was paying for it, one of the men came along and told Tom we had to go back and collect our luggage. We said "No, it was booked through to Aqaba" and he said "No, the customs people want you to come and claim the baggage so they can check it. So we went back to Terminal 1 where our baggage sat beside an empty carousel. The customs men looked at us and said "No, that''s fine", so the other man put it on the carousel to go out to our plane, and we made our way back to our departure gate in Terminal 2! Finally!!! Amman airport - filthy toilets (1/2 of which were the hole in the ground variety), no paper, construction zone for new duty free shops, and daylight savings was starting the next night so we were losing an hour of sleep.

Our little plane to Aqaba was a Dash 8 - very similar to the little one we caught to Hervey Bay. Apart from us and 4 others, the plane was filled with some European tourist group we couldn't understand. It was an incredibly noisy plane - could barely talk to each other.

We arrived at Aqaba and found our luggage but no bus for the Alcazar. After all had left but 5 others who were for the Alcazar, a lady pulled up in a Peugoet asking for us - their bus was busy so she came and collected us. We were exhausted. Our hotel room had twin beds so we had to wait while our porter/bell boy made it into a king bed. We were total zombies.