Aqaba – Birthday town

Complete set of Aqaba photos

Aqaba feels like the Gold Coast of Jordan. There are resorts, malls and humongous luxury housing estates in various stages of completion everywhere. The GFC might have hit some of the financing for these places as they have not been worked on for some time. Aqaba is being groomed to become Jordan’s second city after Amman. Currently that honour goes to Irbid which does not have a lot (or anything that I can think of) to recommend it. Aqaba has some distinct natural advantages. It is on Jordan’s only coastline at the Red Sea and as a bonus some of the best dive sites in the world with tropical fish and coral. It is also very close to Petra and Wadi Rum (a beautiful desert area I’ll talk about in the next post), so as a tourist hub it has a lot of potential. At the moment it seems more focussed on its role as a port. It has massive infrastructure stretching south along the coast to the Saudi border.

We drove along the southern coast road looking to get to the beaches beyond the port and the long stretch of billboards advertising the upcoming (any day now) shopping and luxury home precinct. Aqaba is a special economic zone’ just like Dubai which means that they welcome everyone and there’s not a lot of tax. It remains to be seen whether they can match Dubai for over-the-top building.

Despite the overwhelming amount of sand in Jordan there aren’t many beaches, just this tiny stretch of the Red Sea which all the beachoholics have to cram into. We were there on a busy Friday with a lot of families cooking kebabs on portable BBQs at the public beach even though it was strictly speaking winter (it was much warmer this far south). It was a scene that bore striking similarity to an Australian beach, the exception being the quality of the actual beach. Course rocky sand and a rocky shoreline with no waves was not an inviting site. Add to that some clothing uncertainty for the ladies in our party and we didn’t end up having a dip there. Sarah was getting some looks for having bare legs and while pre-pubescent girls seemed to be able to get away with normal beach attire, all the older women were well wrapped up. We drove south briefly to a resort but they charged something like $50 per person just to get in so we headed back to our hotel after a fruitless search for a cheaper resort beach near town (it had been knocked down in the time since our guide book was written).

Back at the hotel I was reminded that it was my birthday with a surprise. As we headed up in the lift with the hotel manager Sarah asked him where he was from (Irbid) and what he had been doing before this job. He replied with a sad smile that he had been an interpreter for the US army in Iraq which was sobering. There wasn’t time to delve any deeper into this as when he asked “Mr David” to open the door it was birthday surprise time! The staff, after some prompting and a check of my passport to confirm it really was my birthday, had decorated the room with wonderfully over-the-top decorations and a big, fat creamy cake. It went down a treat and was followed by a short nap before more birthday goodness at the yacht club for dinner where we had some excellent local seafood. Thanks Sarah, Jackie and Rick for a memorable birthday day.

The following day we were booked in for a tour of Wadi Rum, a desert area about an hour to the north-east with amazing looking rock formations.

Complete set of Aqaba photos