After a fitful nights sleep for some with mozzies and the cold and the noisy heater (I managed to sleep ok somehow) we assembled for breakfast of humous and warm pita bread which is standard in this part of the world and delicious. Sarah got quite addicted to morning dukkha as well. We got the punctured tyre fixed for about $8 while we waited then headed to the only tourist attraction we could see in town, which luckily is a beaut, the Azraq fort built by the Ayyubids in the 13th century. This impressive black stone structure was used as a base by T.E. Lawrence and we saw his room above the south gate, roof blackened from centuries of fires. The roof was built differently in this fort with large rock beams across the top forming a base for other rocks to be placed. You can see why everything was built with rock around here. They lie scattered across the landscape, it’s just a matter of cutting and stacking them (I say it like it would have been easy).
We clambered over the fort for 30 minutes or so then we had to hit the road again back towards Amman, stopping briefly at the Qasr Amra era bath-house on the way. The restoration team was working away when we got there with scaffolding up in front of the wall mosaics depicting, scandalously, bare-breasted women among other scenes of nature. Cleaning and restorative painting was underway which was interesting to see. The bath-house was relatively small in size but had a sophisticated well with room for a beast of burden to pull up buckets, a storage tank and underfloor heating. It would have been just the thing on a cold winters day.
Our main destination that day was the Dead Sea so we skirted around Amman and stopped briefly in Madaba for more incredible mosaics. The town has built a tourist industry for itself out of mosaics so there are a plethora of shops selling mosaics. For some reason a spotted camel was a popular design. Coincidentally the guy who sold us tickets for the mosaic museum also gave us a free tour which ended at his shop. Jackie bought a very distinctive ‘tree of life’ mosaic which is a famous symbol of the area.
The museum was very cool. There were reproductions of mosaics from the area but the museum was centred around an old church which has an incredible original mosaic on the floor. This being Jordan the layers of history have impacted on this mosaic with a later wall being built right through the middle of it but you can still get a sense of the original Byzantinian design. Each corner has a representation of one of the four seasons and the middle of the mosaic contains a plethora of fauna. The guide kindly wiped part of the mosaic with a wet cloth which really brings out the colours by getting rid of all the dust. This being Jordan, no tourist site is complete without some kind of Roman ruin. The church is sitting on top of a Roman road, part of which has been excavated. The rest of the road disappears off under the nearby houses making us wonder how much other stuff is buried under here. The layers of history in Jordan in general is amazing. The country has been on a trade route for centuries, so where the goods and money are travelling through, so come the empires to try and control it. Wave after wave of conquerors have left layer upon layer of buildings. To top it off the nearby Greek Orthodox Basilica of Saint George has the oldest mosaic map in the world, which is a very specific claim to fame. The maps shows the holy lands with Jerusalem at the centre but is unusual for showing land to the east of the Jordan river as well as the west..
One u-turn later and we were heading out of town towards the Dead Sea, but wait, the sights aren’t over yet. On the way we passed by Mt Nebo where of course we had to get out and take a look. It is here that Moses is said to have died. The story goes (I believe) that when he was 120 he came out of the cave he had been living in and walked to the top of this mountain to take in the view before he died. I apologise if this rendition of the story causes offence but I didn’t go to Sunday school and am somewhere between agnostic and atheist in religious persuasion so this kind of stuff only holds a passing interest for me. It sure pulls the crowds though. Bus-loads of Asian tourists were taking the short walk to the top with tour guides yelling at them all the way. The view was a bit of a let down to be honest. The Dead Sea generates a mist which makes the horizon hazy, so while it had potential the site didn’t really wow us. If we had been there in the start of the day the room with a mosaic floor the size of a basketball court would have been amazing but by this stage we had become mosaic snobs so it mustered a polite “very impressive” before we moved on.
The drive from the top of Mt Nebo to the lowest point on earth (that is not underwater) is fantastic. A twisting road through the rocky desert studded with floppy-eared goats and their minders. We stopped to take a photo of the goats, but left quickly lest baksheesh be demanded. At another stop to take a photo of the view I choked on some potato chips so had to hand the driving over to Sarah while my watering eyes recovered. At the bottom of the mountain road the Dead Sea was before us. A the t-intersection it seemed that we should turn left, but the sign to the Dead Sea clearly pointed to the right. The Jordanian road system had got us a beauty – we were now heading in the wrong direction back to Petra and of course could not do a u-turn for another five minutes. Thankfully this was one of the better roads so we cruised on down to the lowest resorts on the planet. There is no budget accommodation in the Dead Sea which I think everyone was looking forward to, Jackie especially. We still went to the cheapest resort which was massive, four pools and beach access to the Dead Sea, which is strictly speaking a lake. I overheard some Australians getting excited about the four bars in the resort, as if a pub crawl was just the ticket the night before swimming in incredibly salty water.
The rooms were great and after two tough nights in sub-standard accommodation we all sank gratefully into the soft beds, although Sarah and I still had earplugs in as it sounded like there was some wrestling going on upstairs, and that is not a euphemism. I suspect drunk Australian were larking about.
Hi all, Sarah here. As a new year begins, I thought I might ‘guest spot’ on Dave’s blog and share some reflections five months into our year-long world trip. While I’m present in his stories and some photos, I realise my voice has been quiet since we’ve been travelling (and the iPhone prised from my fingers, handed back into work from whence it came). After initial Facebook withdrawals, I have come to enjoy its absence and haven’t much put my reactions or meandering thoughts into words outside my own head (except for lists of potential PhD research topics…). So this is as much for me to think about what I’m experiencing as to share it with you.
Reflecting back on 2011, the first half was a blur of work deadlines, medical appointments and exhaustion. There was a hiatus when we spent Easter down the NSW South Coast and between rolling green hills spotted with dairy cows, the rough amber sand and turquoise waves, we decided to take a year off to travel. The rest of our time in Australia before we left was another blur of work deadlines to handover projects, trip planning and visa applications, and packing to cover multiple countries and climates. Our farewell drinks photos show two tired but happy faces. The comments I’ve heard most on our travel photos is that we look relaxed – a state we evidently hadn’t been in for a while (I can’t recall – refer ‘exhaustion blur’ above).
We are currently in Ghana, West Africa. We paused for Christmas in a small, French-African beachside bungalow with delicious cooking, 3 pet dogs, fireflies, crashing waves and palm trees. Locals walked by on the beach dressed elegantly in brightly patterned swathes of fabric and tubs of freshly caught fish on their heads. For New Years Eve we are in the former capital of Kumasi, the seat of the traditional Ashanti kingdom. Since we left Australia in August we’ve visited Canada, California, Mexico City, Cuba, New York, Iceland, London, Jordan, Israel and now Ghana. We’ve caught up with family and friends, some who we hadn’t seen in over a decade. We have thousands of photos. I’ve read 25 books (a PB against my usual 4-books-a-year rate). We’ve caught 16 planes and I’m getting a little better at not holding Dave’s hand in a death grip each time there’s turbulence. We’ve met many warm, interesting people and got to know a mixture of locals and other travellers such as: a Cuban baseball coach, a Jordanian cake-maker, an Israeli atheist, a Russian professional gambling financier, a Ghanaian-German peace-builder, a Spanish banker seeking to convert to Judaism, a Lithuanian spiritual tour guide). We’ve met Elvis once (a coconut-seller on a beach in Cuba) and Jesus twice (one a perpetually-smiling employee of a Cuban bed and breakfast, the other a Palestinian tour guide in Bethlehem). We can report that taxi drivers are the same in every country (honking to get your attention, offering to drive you again tomorrow); as is human kindness and hospitality.
It’s been both as exotic as it sounds, and much more normal. I know from my anthropology studies that humans are incredibly adaptable, and it has proved to be the case with us too. Within a month it felt utterly natural to be living out of a backpack, changing locations every couple of days, and most of all, not working! The sum total of our responsibilties at the moment are: visiting people, seeing remarkable historic and natural sights each day, travelling to the next place, planning and booking future flights and accommodation, sorting through photos, blogging and deciding where to eat today. These obligations, such as they are, replaced those of the rat race quickly and effortlessly. I had thought I’d be pinching myself each morning with incredulity but in fact, it has become the (very pleasant!) norm. There was also amazingly little adjustment for Dave and I to be spending 24-7 together all of a sudden. In the beginning we would get irritable with one another every 2-3 weeks and schedule a day apart. Now it’s been a while since we’ve had one, and we’re probably due for another, but until we get too snippy with each other it doesn’t occur to us to suggest it. Not spending all this time together seems more odd. I’ve been trying to start daily meditation but often struggle to find the time (seriously…). When I do, and focus on gratefulness, the opportunity to take this time and step outside our life at home, hits me again. I am incredibly appreciative and cherish it.
Travelling always broadens the mind and exposes you to different ways of seeing and living in the world. It is good to be reminded that there are many ways to do things apart from the ones you’re used to. That can be discombobulating but also illuminating, and mostly I’m finding it to be freeing. Dave and I are lucky to have travelled quite a bit before, together and separately before we met, but I’m glad that travel doesn’t seem to lose it’s impact the more you do it. Some favourite experiences to date include being kissed on the cheek by a camel in Jordan; walking on a glacier in Iceland; learning African drumming with a Rastafarian on the beach; watching families in the local cemeteries celebrating Day of the Dead in Mexico with flowers, skeleton candy, songs and dancing; talking about religion after preparing a Shabat dinner in Israel; dancing salsa in Cuba; and learning about the shameful slave trade on the Ghanaian coast. Those are some that immediately leap to mind; there are many many more, described by Dave in earlier blog posts.
My sense of time has also changed with our trip. Taking away the mobile phone and emails, which imply an instant response, as well as removing work deadlines and travelling in rural areas where people around us count time in different ways, has both slowed and expanded each day. Reading up on the history of each place we come to has shifted out the scale of time I’m thinking in as well.
It’s strangely empowering to have everything we need right now, with us in our two bags. Ok, Dave will make me own up to the fact that he has a smaller backpack (65L) than me (70L) but still carried some of my stuff until recently. And he often has to talk me out of a small purchase by reminding me of this fact (but – a gift for home! It’s helping the local economy!). And of course, we’re not Bear Grylls here – we have money to buy food and shelter. But still, I feel pretty self-sufficient, having fit enough clothes and shoes for tropical, temperate, freezing, hiking, dancing, city touring situations, plus medical kit, sleeping sheet, travel pillow, towels, toiletries, kindle, notebook, head torch, mobile in my luggage – not to mention my female penis which enables one to pee standing up (not tried yet). Alright, I admit Dave’s point; I don’t need even half the stuff I accumulate at home.
The things which I am enjoying most are: daily reading and time for regular exercise (my back’s never felt so great!), learning the history of a place, trying new cuisines (cactus salad, anyone?), blending in and standing out, and most of all talking with locals and learning about their life and place. In this globalised world, I was a little surprised – but still delighted – to find that just as we’re interested in and curious about other people, so they are in us. Many are wondrous at the fact we’re not married and, at such an advanced age, don’t have kids. Our ‘five finger’ running shoes have been a source of mirth everywhere. Some can’t believe the softness of Dave’s hands (no physical labour). We’ve also had people from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Ghana and other African countries ask to take a photo of us – or take one surreptitiously. For once, freckles are an asset!
I find the very physicality and solidity of each place we visit comforting, from being just a name in our planning spreadsheet, then an outline from reading the travel guide, then a destination for a plane trip speeding across the earth. When we land and start travelling overland, seeing how immovable the place is brings home the immensity of the world. That a place existed before we arrived, welcomes us graciously while we’re there, and continues once we leave, makes me happy; in the same way I appreciate our smallness and trivialities when looking out at the stars.
I don’t miss using a computer and mostly sitting still for 8-12 hours a day; nor instantaneous internet access. But paradoxically, I am glad for Facebook when we check in, because it brings loved ones and home close – both quotidian and big news are there, it lets me immerse myself in life at home and say hi and not feel far away. Funnily enough, I have missed doing (some) chores! On the occasions when we’ve been able to cook our own meal, do our own washing, or clean up in a friend’s place or a rented apartment, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it. Nice to have as a change I guess – I loathe cleaning the bathroom at home!
Most challenging has been witnessing poverty and the lack of economic and political freedoms in some places, the significant inequalities in the world that make it possible for Dave and I to travel and safeguard our health, and impossible for others by dint of their place of birth or colour of their skin. It’s frustrating, disheartening, and catalysing all at once. I’m reading and talking with people to figure out how we are best placed to help address this, both while we’re travelling (e.g. staying in accommodation that is run as a social enterprise and ploughs profits back into the community) and when we get home (through working, volunteering, donating, political engagement).
The only other thing I haven’t enjoyed is being sick and homesick. These coincided when I was downed with altitude sickness in Mexico and then recently, we felt homesick on Christmas Day. Both made me yearn for my family, Vegemite on buttery toast and the particular light of Australia. But once recovered, and after meeting up with Mum and Dad in Jordan and Israel, I have been illness-free. And, as corny as this sounds, I feel like I’m home when I’m with Dave so it’s never disorientating wherever we are – although some mornings I’d love a bowl of Weet-Bix.
In 2012 I will turn 35. We will visit French-speaking Togo and Benin for the annual Voodoo Festival, then Rwanda, Tanzania, Turkey, maybe a -stan like Uzbekistan, India, maybe Bhutan, maybe China, maybe Indonesia. We will come home to Sydney in winter and have to adjust to no longer being DINKy nomads and completely in charge of our days. We need to figure out where to live, and pick up where we left off – but drawing on this year away. I’ve got replenished energy and a renewed appreciation of the fortune of Australia – potable water running out of taps, a broadly peaceful and trusting society, democratic (if not participatory) government, social safety net, functioning healthcare. These are things to be argued for, extended and made accessible. I want to make time to do some of the things that I enjoy and have been able to while away (African drumming?), fitting it around work. I worry I won’t be able to; but this time away is reminding us of other ways of doing things, that we don’t need a heap of material things, that we are part of the luckiest and most privileged people in the world, and so have the greatest advantage to realise ideas and dreams. I have to hope that the same adaptability that has emerged while we are travelling will help us settle back in.
Enough earnestness for now, I hope that this finds you well and looking forward to 2012. Dave and I send you best wishes for a very happy and healthy New Year!
What seemed on paper like a perfectly reasonable day of travel turned into one of the most incident packed I’ve had. Thinking back it seems hard to believe that this all happened in the one day but such is the nature of travel in a small country, you can pack a lot of sights into very little driving.
We began in the maze of Irbid and followed the brown tourist signs to Umm Qais, a Roman ruin in the far north-east of the country, a simple hour long drive in the morning to warm us up. The signs kept coming, which is lucky because there is no way you could have just figured out the path we took out of the city through the ever chaotic Jordanian traffic. The scenery once out of the city was lovely with deep rock studded valleys and rock quarries. Very soon we found ourselves at the gates to the ruins being given an unasked for introduction to the sights by a tout in traditional dress with a huge urn of juice strapped to his back, a bit like Adam Sandler’s waterboy. This was an unusual site. Touts in Jordan in general were much more casually dressed and pretty relaxed once you said no thanks. This guy told us where everything was then insisted we all have a small cup of juice.
We said: no, no, don’t worry.
But he insisted: yes, yes, you have juice.
It wasn’t bad juice, dark purple, possibly grape or pomegranate.
We said: here have a tip for your time. How much for the juice?
He said: oh, whatever you think is fair.
We said: here’s two dinar (roughly AUS$3)
He said: no, no, you must pay at least $5!
We paid and refused his kind offer of a guided tour. The ruins at Umm Qais are famed for not only the Roman ruins but for having a much later ruin of an Ottoman-era village perched above it. We headed straight for the Roman ruins which really capture the eye. These ruins have not been restored as fully as Jerash and are in some ways the more interesting for it. They are made up of a small theatre, forum and colonnade flanked by shops but the full extent is still buried underground. The road is incredible, stretching off into the distance and a good ten metres wide. You can still see where the footpath would have been and wheel ruts in the stone from heavy carts pulling their wares into the city. The road is in pretty good nick considering it’s over 2000 years old. The large stones are a bit wonky but presumably that is down to a few earthquakes since then rather than faulty Roman engineering. The road slopes off the each side to allow water to run off the surface. In general the Romans were masterful with water bringing it into towns allow aqueducts, creating huge bathing complexes, sewers and drains. Pity about the lead piping but that’s hardly their fault.
The ruins here are under partial restoration so some columns have been righted and had new stone added but you can see the excavations underway where huge trenches have been dug into the ground and carefully brushed and scraped to reveal what lies below, which is a lot. Standing at ground level in one part of the ruin you are standing on the soil debris above the ruins of a two-storey Roman house. The excavations have exposed the roof structure, walls and floor as you voyeuristically peer into the earth. I imagine it’s post-grad students spending their summers working here and they have a lifetime of work to go before being done with this site.
The Ottoman village was built much later in time at the end of the 19th century but they had no shortage of rocks to use, many of them no doubt pinched from the crumbling Roman site. The village is abandoned now but illustrates a much simpler building style, or maybe just that they had a lot less money to spend.
We had a quick morning tea drink at the amazing cafe, which is really only amazing for the views. Umm Qais is perched high above the Sea of Galilee which is also called Lake Tiberias. This area borders with Syria and Israel and forms part of the renowned Golan Heights. Syria invaded Israel in 1948 but Israel pushed back and now its borders include the Sea of Galilee and areas to the north. This is historically of critical importance to the Israeli water supply. In a fairly dry country the Golan Heights provides most of Israel’s water. In fact the 1967 six-day war was in part triggered by tensions over this water supply.
So sitting as this cafe you can see the place where Jesus performed a bunch of miracles (although walking on water seems more likely to have taken place in the Dead Sea), you can see into Israel and the border with Syria, look over an amazing Roman ruin and Byzantine town, all while sitting in the sun with a drink.
So far the day was going swimmingly and on schedule. Our next destination was the Eastern Desert which is a flat expanse of sand and rock heading out to the Iraq and Saudi border. This doesn’t sound a likely tourist destination but along the way you can see the ruins of stone forts, hunting lodges and bath houses built in the 7th-8th century by the Umayyads.
The elite used to nip off into the desert for a spot of hunting and bathing away from the prying eyes of the religious authorities. So with this in mind we headed back down through Irbid, there being no other road around. This is where the trouble started. We were going fine following signs towards Amman with Sarah behind the wheel until the signage stopped coming. We had either turned to early or not in the correct place. We now found ourselves trapped in the Irbid lunch-time peak hour traffic crawling along in quite possibly the wrong direction entirely. Being midday the sun was no guide so we just took a few likely looking streets until we had to admit defeat. At one roundabout we took a left turn and ended up in a quiet residential street with kids playing. As we slowly drove along taking in the fact that we were more lost than ever a small child ran out in front of the car. There are many tourist faux pas that you can commit but killing a small child has to be pretty high on the list, right up there with running over a pig in Papua New Guinea. As manslaughter charges flashed through all our minds Sarah slammed on the brakes and came to a juddering stop just as the kid ran into our bumper. His brother, whose chasing had been responsible for his little brother running on to the road without looking, plucked his startled brother off the car back by the scruff of the neck and handed him off to another kid to march home while he gave us a piece of his mind in classic Arab style. We got the impression that he was asking whether we had eyes. We pleaded innocence with upraised palms and slowly drove off the other end of the street where we found even smaller streets leading who knows where.
Rick, bless him, jumped out and got directions from a guy who said, “Just follow me” and got us back on the right path. We lost him in the traffic but Rick, bless him, jumped out with a map and got further directions from two guys hosing down some white goods. We found the missing signs once again and were on our way to the desert. The road was still far from clear, even on a highway with just two choices. Ahead of us there was a road in half ruin, one side of the highway completely ripped up with traffic detours (not signposted) leading us to the other side. In the other direction a better looking road. All the signs were in Arabic. We were pretty sure the beat up road was the right road to take but given that this was also the road to the Iraqi border we though it wise to double-check. Rick once again jumped out and talked to a couple of guys who had pulled over to help us out. The crumbling road before us once indeed the correct choice so we meandered our way through the concrete barriers on the highway every time the good road ran out and we needed to drive on the other side. It was a fitting highway to lead into Iraq.
As we arrived at the one small town between us and our destination the call of nature hit almost everyone in the car at the same time. I have an inhuman capacity to delay going to the toilet so I was ok but pressure was mounting while no obvious toilet spots appeared. Eventually Rick just pulled the car over into a dirt patch near some houses with a look of intent in his eyes. Sitting next to a wall nearby were a group of women and children with no barrier between us and them. Rick was undeterred and pulled the car to a stop. We had images of the scene from the women’s perspective. A car pulls up in a cloud a dust and a white man steps out to urinate in full view. “You can’t do it here,” Jackie pleaded. We drove a little further up the road and found a similar rubbish strewn field with an uninhabited wall for Rick to relieve himself. This time the only company were two small boys who came up to try their luck begging but we didn’t tip on that occasion.
A big part of the problem driving in Jordan were the maps. They were infuriatingly unspecific. What looked like a simple route through the city in reality became an overwhelming choice of roads with not much help in which to choose other than the tourist road signs. This came back to bite us once again as we looked for the first desert castle, a hunting lodge built on one of the few hills out here. What on the map was portrayed as a simple road off the highway became an informal tour of the light industrial zone in the area. Far from being a remote desert escape the hunting lodge was now swallowed up by the encroaching urbanisation of Amman.
When we finally arrived it was at a beautiful time of day with the sun slowly setting over the desert landscape. We were the only tourists once again and the caretaker opened the metal door for us. Inside there were glimpses of the former splendour inside with mosaics on the floor requiring just a little imagination to picture how it would have looked in its glory days. We whizzed through the nearby bath house, which although interesting for showing how the water was heated under the floor, we toured as the sun dipped below the horizon leaching the last heat from the air. The nights got cold very quickly and really all we wanted to do now was get to our accommodation for the night.
Sometimes it’s a good idea to wing it a hotel room for the night. This worked fine for us a couple of times in the US. Sometimes it’s not such a good idea and this proved to be one of those. Even though it was low season so there was no danger of missing out on a room, we would be entering a town in complete darkness in the border areas of Jordan. As we sped through the darkening desert we looked up our destination once again, Azraq, and found that we had somehow missed earlier that the guide described it as a “glorified truck stop”. This didn’t bode well for a good nights sleep. The town is located next to a misleadingly titled oasis. Once upon a time this might have been a beautiful spot in the dusty desert but the oasis has long since been sucked, not quite dry, but certainly until it’s just a swampy puddle. There are efforts underway to restore water but it’s a slow effort given all the wells in the area that draw on the groundwater.
There were three hotel options for us to choose from. We ruled out the budget choice as it had been a pretty long day. Of the two remaining there wasn’t much to split them and we only saw signs for one, so off we went through the semi-trailers in the pitch black. After a few missed turns thanks to more ambiguous signs we at last pulled up outside the Al-Azraq Hotel & Resthouse which did not look all that promising, another dud Lonely Planet recommendation described as semi-luxurious (perhaps the emphasis was on “semi” but this is a bit of a subtle way to get the point across). The manager seemed surprised to see us, which was reasonable given that we were the only hope of guests and he had no idea we were coming. The hotel was located well off the main road and was in a very quiet location. This was its sole attractive feature. The reception was as cold as a fridge but we took the tour to the equally cold guest rooms which had seen better days. It felt like the hotel had not had any maintenance done in the last ten years, apart maybe from the stack of grey bricks holding up the sink in our bathroom. To get hot water we were instructed to leave the tap running for ten minutes. The heating when turned on, after the diesel generator had started, sounded like industrial machinery. After the wet sheets the night before this was the first thing Jackie checked in her room. The sheets were dry but had a brown stain running down the middle. “That’s an old stain,” Rick assured her. The only saving grace was a pool which it was too cold to use and it turned out was a perfect spot for mosquitoes to breed and pray on guests during the night, even in winter, as we found out during sleep.
But the day had not finished with us just yet. As we drove off to try and find what passed for a restaurant in this town we got a flat tyre. Somehow I have never been in a car that got a flat tyre before but I would have traded a flat on many of those blissfully uneventful car journeys rather than get one now. We pulled off onto a dirt road. There was a house in the distance but few streetlights. Youths appeared from the darkness as we got the spare tyre out of the boot. Rick got the car jack cranking but he was politely eased aside eventually by a teenager who helped get the wheel nuts back on. If you must know I was holding the light.
A quick wheel change later and we were heading into the very dim lights of North Azraq. We found one place that looked like it might serve food and they indeed could cook up some chicken for us. It was well beyond the point for being fussy so we sat in their unheated and freezing fluorescent-lit dining room featuring white plastic outdoor furniture and waited with bated breath for our meal along with one other customer, presumably a trucker. Happily we ended on a high point and despite eating in beanies and coats the food was great, a quarter piece of chicken with a huge mound of spiced rice and some salad. After the meal we dragged our weary bodies off to bed where Sarah honestly feared that she would never get warm again. We cracked the chemical hand warmers Sarah had stashed in her bag and blissfully entered the darkness of sleep with heater on full and ear plugs inserted.
The most well-trodden path from Amman is to go south towards Petra or maybe a day trip to the eastern desert. We decided to go north to Jerash and Umm Qais with their impressive Roman ruins. If the road signs are anything to go by the spelling of most places in Jordan is up for grabs in English. A little imagination is required at times to interpret different spellings of the place you’re heading towards. Rick took the first session of driving heading out of Amman which is not for the faint hearted. While there aren’t as many cars as Mexico City the Jordanian drivers use many of the same tactics. Lane markings are used as a guide more than a strict policy. It’s pretty common to see a car straddle a lane marking as though having it directly under the car means it’s lined up just about perfectly. Lane changes are done with a relaxed lean rather than any planning. The most difficult aspect of driving and navigating in Jordan is that many of the roads in the city are divided by concrete barriers, much like a freeway. This can lead to many frustrating moments when your destination is just off to the left, but you can’t turn until the road lets you. There are many official u-turn spots for this purpose but these can pop up swiftly and when least expected your perfectly functional lane turns into a left turn only.
Road signage is usually in Arabic and English, which is great, but often the signs pointing out tourist attractions or major destinations stop telling you where to go before you have arrived, leaving you with gut instinct to fall back on which isn’t always enough in labyrinthine cities. But all that is to come. We guessed right heading out of Amman and found ourselves on the highway to Jerash about an hour north. In fact, driving up to Jerash it rarely feels like Amman has actually ended. There are road-side stalls selling fruit everywhere and the housing becomes less dense, but you are never left in the wilderness. The landscape is dry, rocky, hilly desert dotted with some trees and bushes.
We got to our hotel without delay and checked in to a huge place in an olive grove high on the hills 15 minutes drive from Jerash. We appeared to be the only guests knocking around in the place. This is not usually a good sign but apart from being slightly shabby this was a great place to stay (the staff were fantastic). We put the lack of tourists in general down the unrest in the middle east and that we were heading into winter which is not everyone’s idea of a good time to travel. It was bitterly cold in the wind when the sun was not around but on a nice sunny day (which is mostly what we had) the temperature was great.
Jerash is deservedly famous for its Roman ruins. While not as well known as Petra the ruins in Jerash are incredible. They stretch for the length of the modern town, half of which people still live in and half of which is given to the ruins which are slowly being restored. This is no jumble of rocks though, the ruins include Hadrian’s Arch, not one but two theatres, a nymphaeum, temple and numerous churches. The scale of the work undertaken is incredible, especially when you think how far they are from Rome. By all accounts this was a much less grandiose town until Emperor Hadrian decided to pay a visit. He must have given plenty of notice because most of these huge buildings were constructed specifically to celebrate his visit. Hopefully he was impressed and didn’t just say “Not another bloody arch!”.
Historic sites in Jordan have a very odd ticketing system. You buy your ticket from one place then walk a short distance and hand your ticket over to another person who rips it in half for you. This would be fine if the ticket offices weren’t so bloody hard to find. In Jerash the ticket office is about a kilometre from the visitors entrance and ticket checker. We turned up at the ticket checker on our first afternoon to be told that he couldn’t sell us a ticket and we would have to go all the way back past the hippodrome to buy them. We decided to just get our tickets early the next morning instead. We got to the ticket office and bought four tickets. Unbeknownst to us they only sold us two tickets so when we walked all the way to the ticket checker he broke the bad news to us, someone would have to buy some more tickets. Luckily for wealthy and lazy westerners like us there was a young boy standing around waiting for just such an eventuality and he promised to take our money and run back down to buy us some more tickets. Trusting souls that we are we parted with our cash and watched him run off down the dirt road at a fast clip. You will remember that I said Jordanians are an honest bunch and true to form the young boy came walking back up the road a few minutes later, breaking into a run when he saw that we were watching him. We tipped him a couple of dinar and got on with our exploration.
We spent all day walking around, mainly open-mouthed in wonder at what we were seeing. One of the best parts of ruins in Jordan is that once you buy the ticket you are left free to clamber all over the ruins and at this time of year there weren’t many other people around. As an engineer Rick went weak-kneed over the way they put the arches together. The theatres are especially cool. Open-aired with a stage at one side and walls all around they are just as effective today. The Romans used an acoustic technique of carving circular notches in the wall below the first row of seats. When you stand in the middle of the theatre and speak you can hear these notches bounce the sound around like an amplifier.
We also saw a gladiator show and chariot race in Jerash at the Hippodrome, an open-air stadium of antiquity not dissimilar to a modern racetrack. The gladiator show sounds corny but it was good fun. The actors are meant to be ex-military and they do bring some sort of order to the representation of Roman soldiers and gladiators. The commentary is tongue-in-cheek and didn’t take itself too seriously. Jackie’s favourite part was when one of the well-muscled bare-chested gladiators made his pecs beat like a heart in her direction. The highlight for me was the chariot race where two guys being pulled by two horses each burned around the dirt track on machines that barely looked like they could stay upright.
As if that wasn’t enough for one day we scheduled in Ajlun castle which is on the way to the town of Irbid further north. Ajlun castle is Islamic and was built to defend against the crusaders. I’m fairly hazy on this period of history but from what I’ve pieced together from the information boards there were eight crusades from around 1100-1400. Their aim was to win back Jerusalem from the Muslims. Armies from various western European countries were assembled with the blessing of the Pope and went off to do what armies are designed to do. They were defeated eventually but not before they built a lot of castles and had a fair few built to fight them.
So Ajlun castle is one of those built by the Islamic forces to fight marauding Christians. It has been carefully placed on a steep hill with a view of all the other steep hills in the area. The further north you travel in Jordan the more forests appear. The country is 80% desert but up here the land has olive and cypress trees everywhere. The castle is very well maintained and has stupendous views from the top.
The roads had been well-signposted and we were on our way to Irbid through stunning scenery, big rocky hills and gullies that make you appreciate the epic nature of the bible. Christianity might have turned out differently if it fermented in somewhere like Ohio.
Irbid has nothing to recommend it. Even the guide admits as much. We were really only staying there as a stopping of point to the ruins at Umm Qais further north. Luckily the hotel we were staying in wasn’t far off the main highway into town because we had no detailed map and Irbid is a complete maze. Despite having a rough map in the guide which showed that we needed to drive past the Uni then turn left it was still incredibly difficult to zero in on the hotel. Numerous circling and u-turns later we ended up seeing a sign for the hotel, and after one last loop actually managed to stop outside it. Lonely Planet describes this hotel as deservedly four-star but I don’t know any four-star places that would make a bed using wet sheets. This is what Rick and Jackie discovered in their room along with a dank musty smell. The manager ungraciously agreed to change the sheets and we headed out to the bright lights of Irbid.
I’m not being sarcastic about the bright lights. Irbid really is the strip mall of Jordan. It is the second biggest city and has replaced charm with billboards and fast food chains unsurprisingly located in a strip opposite the University. We had a brief wander and then silently willed Rick to choose the pizza place as that’s really what we felt like. It was Rick’s choice because it was his birthday. Sarah organised a cake with a birthday greeting for Rick written on it (and for some reason gave the baker her email address. He later wrote professing a life changing experience from Sarah’s touch, which I can sympathise with, but she has let him down gently). For a present Rick got a keffiyeh which I haven’t seen him wear yet yet, maybe waiting until we arrive in Israel. The pizza was tasty and delayed the moment we went back to our shabby rooms and inserted ear plugs in preparation for sleep.
It is probably some people’s worst nightmare to travel for three weeks with their (de facto) parents-in-law, especially travelling around in a rental car intensively. I’m lucky that Sarah’s parents are such great travellers and actually made the trip easier than it would have been otherwise. Rick takes after Sarah (or most likely the other way around) in organisational skills and proactive navigation which definitely came in useful on this trip. Jackie provides in depth analysis of the stories and scenarios surrounding the people we meet which keeps intrigue high. We got into a few scrapes on the trip, stayed in a couple of less than stellar accommodation and walked our feet off but Rick and Jackie were nothing but pleasant company through it all.
On arriving in Amman I made a beginners travelling error. When the random guy carrying our bags two metres to the taxi boot asked for baksheesh I got my conversion wrong and gave him a $7 tip. He probably does pretty well out of weary travellers. The taxi ride sure woke us up. The driver seemed to take whatever the speed limit was and double it. He was driving a mercedes with super soft suspension so even the speed bumps didn’t slow him down that much. We arrived at our suite in super fast time to be greeted by Rick and Jackie in a nice two bedroom suite in the fifth circle of Amman (not related to the circles of hell in any way).
Amman doesn’t get a great write up in the guides and I can kind of see why. There is nothing spectacular about the architecture. The buildings are new but not particularly interesting. It’s a lively and friendly city though. The next day we got into town and just wandered around until we locked in on the citadel, the most impressive part of the city for a tourist. Despite these ruins being a baby in size compared to what was coming up, we were duly impressed at the time by the massive Roman columns perched on one of the many hills that make up the city. As in many places in Jordan, restoration work is underway, so what you see is a mixture of crumbling ruin and partially restored stonework. For citizens of the new world it is a physical reminder of the empires that roamed the earth long before us. The effort that went into these buildings seems ridiculously exaggerated. Who were the Romans trying to impress in this far flung (but important for trade) part of the empire?
The museum on site had further examples of the many civilisations that called this part of the world home. The highlight are some ~6500 year old statues that look more like aliens that humans but are just mind boggling when you put them on the scale of the modern world. The point at which humans had enough time to be making art and jewellery rather than just surviving is the point where we became something different from our ancestors. The middle east is really where this all started (according to Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel at any rate, a book well worth a read on this topic).
The Romans knocked up a 3000 seat theatre while they were at it. To aid acoustics the walls would have encircled the highest seat making unamplified performances easy for even the cheap seats to hear.
With the sun going down early we headed back to the apartments but not before a detour through the fruit market behind the mosque. Evening prayer was underway which the speakers attached to minarets lit with neon green lights made loudly clear. There was great produce in the market: dried apricots, figs and dates, fresh apples, oranges and bananas. Rick negotiated a few orders (in retrospect paying a bit over the odds, but as we’ve seen from the baksheesh issue mentioned earlier, it takes a little while to get your money bearings in a new place where prices are nowhere marked.)
Back on the main street we jumped in a taxi only to be pulled over by the police. We’re not entirely sure whether the taxi driver was pulled over because he let people out in the middle of a busy street or because we jumped in while he was holding up traffic. Either way he had to produce some ID and go off for a little chat while we waited in the warm taxi. The nights in Jordan in November are chilly and we were quite content warming up while the taxi driver waited his fate. Luckily for all of us he came back in good humour and we headed back to our suite. For dinner we walked to a nearby restaurant. We were staying in the fifth circle which is outside the hectic downtown. Amman is divided in seven circles based on how far you are from the centre. The fifth circle has some large hotels and roads but not so many pedestrians. The restaurant was fantastic and we got started on our love affair with hummus, tabouleh and lemon mint drinks. We got in a habit of over-ordering at first, the portions were so generous of kebabs and grilled meat, hummus with pomegranate seeds, fresh warm turkish bread, babaganoush. The restaurant labelled itself as Lebanese and we never really did get to the bottom of what the difference is between Lebansese and Jordanian food. The best I can tell it just varies in a few specific dishes but I couldn’t tell you what those dishes are.
Well fed we wandered back to the hotel and lay in wait for the 4.30am morning call to prayer which disturbs less and less and you become accustomed to the public wake up call blasted out everywhere. In the morning we collected a fairly beat up Mazda 6 rental car which was delivered to the hotel featuring a wet boot (we didn’t probe that issue too closely). We gave a credit card imprint and drivers details, then the delivery guy insisted that we give him some money so that he could go and fill the car up for us. I guess this was a kind service but call us cynical, we had some doubts as we watched him drive off. The guide maintains that Jordanians are scrupulously honest, and despite some small baksheesh incidents we did find everyone extremely helpful and friendly. We got the car back and headed into the maelstrom of the Jordanian highway system.
London was a stopping off point on the way to Jordan and Israel. London manages to attract Australians to it like a magnet so we had a few people to catch up with who were great hosts: Zoe, Penny and Olga, many thanks for the hospitality. Special mention has to go to Rinke who flew in from Frankfurt especially to see us and is paying our blog close attention – thanks for your interest.
I think one of the best things about London were the museums and galleries. They are all free to go in (although we did make donations) and are open at incredibly convenient hours. Either Sarah or I (or both) went into the Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Modern, Tate Gallery, the Portrait Gallery and the British Museum. London is such a lively place that it was easy to remember how I got sucked into its vortex while living here for three years. It was also easy to remember all the bad points, being crammed on the underground during peak hour, the constant assault of the mass of humanity London attracts, the cloudy foggy days. As a five day stopover it’s a lot of fun but I had no desire to live there again.
The most exciting thing to happen in London was our attempts to get a Jordanian visa. You don’t normally need a visa to get into Jordan as an Aussie citizen (you get a fortnight on arrival) but as we wanted to go into Israel then back into Jordan we needed to apply for a double entry visa. The most convenient place for us to do this was London but not until a few days before our flight. The first mishap was my forgetting to bring my passport to the embassy, a small oversight. Luckily I have a British passport as well which Sarah carries for just such emergencies. So for the purposes of the middle east I am a British citizen. I don’t plan to join any riots. The clerk said that our visas might be ready on Monday, but definitely on Tuesday. We explained nicely that our flight was on Tuesday morning so it would be super if we could pick up our passports on Monday. He said they would see what they could do. As we were the only people asking for visas we were confident.
On Monday I was due to meet Sarah at 2pm at High Street Kensington tube station after she had been to the doctor and had lunch with a friend. What happened next has two different perspectives but I will try to give a balanced account. The Jordanian embassy shuts down at 3pm. By 2.30 there was still no sign of Sarah so I hoofed it up to the office and tried to get both passports. I didn’t have the visa collection tickets so could only get my passport by showing other ID. At this stage I got a flurry of delayed text messages from Sarah which she had sent hours earliern telling me that she was at the doctors and to collect the passports on my own. I explained that she really needed to be here before 3pm to collect her own passport, urgently. It was 2:47. I asked the embassy clerk to stay open for 10 minutes as Sarah was on her way, at this stage sitting in an unmoving underground train at Edgeware Road. We waited in the waiting room but eventually the clerk said that he had to close. It was possible for us to get the passport the following morning at 10am but this would be truly chaotic. I waited out on the street for Sarah and the staff milled around waiting for the other staff to leave. In the distance on the street I could see Sarah running towards us just as the clerk responsible for the passport exited on to the street. He kindly went back into the office and we had our visas.
Our London accommodation was up to the usual standard, small, tiny bed, cramped breakfast area, expensive. It’s no place for a budget traveller. We left on a ridiculously Easy Jet flight to Amman, Jordan to meet up with Sarah’s parents for a three week trip through the layered history of Jordan and Israel.
All through our guide book we came across references to the mighty Icelandic hotdog which you can’t avoid when driving around the country. Somehow on our second last day we discovered that we had not sampled this much hyped delicacy so we made a point to go to the most famous hotdog stand in Iceland called Bæjarins beztu pylsur, conveniently located in the capital city quite close to our hostel.
Bill Clinton ate a hotdog here but did not have the works, only mustard. This was a huge error. The works is the entire point. The hotdog we tried covered all flavour bases. Crispy fried onion layered the bottom of a warmed roll. Next the hotdog, rumoured to be made from lamb and beef and cooked in beer. Then a brown gravy light tangy sauce, then the yellow slightly sour mustard. We didn’t have time for much else in the city but the hotdog alone was worth the return trip.
Vik is famous for its coastline, not because it’s a great place to lounge around and sunbake, and probably not for the surfing, although for all I know it’s possible to pull on a dry suit and surf until you get frostbite on your nose. The stunning aspect of the Vik coastline is the jet black fine sand on the beaches. Photos of the beach on a grey day look like they’ve been taken in black and white. For Australians raised on blinding white and blazing hot sand it’s an inverse beach experience more attractive for its novelty than comfort.
The previous day we took a stroll on the fourth biggest glacier in Iceland, Mýrdalsjökull, but really when you walk on the glacier it’s just the spillover flowing down the valley. Even a finger of the fourth biggest glacier is massive in scale. You can see the movement of the glacier in this video. (UPDATE: That video has been removed so you’ll have to make do with this one showing an eruption in the same location.) The glacier is in furious retreat, 75 metres per year, and this November in Iceland was unusually warm. Usually roads are closed because of snow and ice, the waterfalls are frozen and our glacier guide would be ice climbing up them, but this year it was 17 degrees in Reykjavik with no sign of anything being frozen.
For our walk we strapped crampons to our trainers and trekked up this massive ice cube. The ice on the glacier was incredibly hard and glassy. It is advised not to place the ice axe directly on the ice because it could slide off into a crevasse very quickly. The ice is clear blue in places, other times it’s filled with air bubbles. This particular glacier is dotted with black volcanic ash from the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull last year (I dare you to pronounce that). There are also piles of black rock which the glacier has pushed up through itself. Where the black rock covers the ice the melt rate of the ice slower so you get these black towers of ice forming. Crevasses could be anywhere. Most of the water in glaciers flows under the surface which we never see but there are still many caves and crevasses to see on the surface. The guide would hack of a big hunk of ice and throw it down the crevasse so that we could gauge with our ears how deep it was. Suffice to say you wouldn’t want to fall in one.
Sarah has inherited an interest in death and destruction from her mother. It might be genetic. She asked our guide whether they had ever lost anyone on the glacier, thinking that perhaps a hundred years ago some people might have gone missing. “Yes, last week actually,” the guide replied. A Swedish man had climbed 6km up this finger of the glacier without proper crampons or telling anyone where he was going. He got lost as the day was ending and made an emergency call but they lost his signal before being able to get useful information. Our guide among others searched the glacier all night and continued the search for four days before the man’s body was found in a crevasse which he had slipped into. This put a slight dampener on our stroll but the guide managed to get people cheered up at our next stop with a joke that Sarah and I were out of range for, but Sarah managed to drag everyone back to reality by asking about the evacuation procedure should there be an eruption. Apparently the biggest danger with an Icelandic eruption is that there will be a flood from melted glacial ice so the best procedure is to stay where you are when the warning sirens go off then drive like hell in whichever direction you are directed. During the Eyjafjallajökull eruption the guides were still hiking the glacier through all the ash but the glacier was completely covered in the black ash so you couldn’t see any ice at all.
We drove to our hostel in Vik, a cute two storey cottage where we were the only guests. We had our traditional hot pot soak (we were the only people in the outdoor pool), cooked up some pasta then curled up in the cosy front room, I drinking Cuban rum and Sarah reading her Jordan and Israel guide book while the wind threw rain around outside in the freezing temperatures. It was very pleasant.
On our final morning in Vik we went for a walk over the headland and watched the terns (accuracy unconfirmed) wheel about in the sky trying to land on their cliff-side nests. One guy had terrible trouble getting its feet on the ground. Every time it came in to land with feet stretching for the ground a gust of wind pushed it back into the air again. Eventually it just bombed in from the front straight at the cliff and landed to a great chorus of bird calls probably letting him know what a pork chop it was. The walk was scenic but bitterly cold. It was a cloudy day, not much above freezing, but the wind was the real killer. Going up to the top of the headland was ok as we were generally walking into it, but going downhill we had to really push to make any headway. Despite having five layers of clothing on (t-shirt, thermal top, long-sleeve top, coat, rain jacket) it was still freezing and my lips were too numb to form even my usual mumbled sentences. It was sweet relief to make it back to the car and head off for another misty drive, this time back to Reykjavik.
The drive from Lake Myvatn to Höfn was almost stereotypically atmospheric. We started in the darkness of 8am and drove through the volcanic mountains as dawn leaked across the sky. Snow streaked the black ground. As the sun came up we climbed into more misty mountains. The main highway in the east of the country turns into a gravel single lane road. Fair to say that not many people come this way. Sarah did an amazing job driving for the whole trip. We skimped by not paying for an extra driver – I had the somewhat easier job of navigating is around the island on one road most of the way. It was a tough road, very potholed, near zero visibility, one lane, and what we assumed were sheer drops on one side. When we did get clearer weather the scenery was stunning. Steep mountains covered in little streams and waterfalls, gorges and winter grass.
When we got to the other side the east coast the landscape turned Scottish with huge mountains heading straight into the sea. The black volcanic rock makes the scenery more brutal with a cold broiling sea washing over dark black sand beaches studded with black volcanic rocks. We came across reindeer grazing by the side of the road having a black Christmas.
Nearer to the small port town of Höfn you start to see fingers of the giant glacier Vatnajökull that covers about 20% of Iceland. It really is too big to grasp from the road. A scenic flight would do the trick but didn’t really fit with our budget travel. In fact, a lot of the tours shut down in the off-season for lack of tourists so we booked a glacier walk for the next day further west and closer to Reykjavik on a different (but still massive) glacier.
Höfn was a small place with a fishing fleet, a working town with a few tourists added to the mix. They had a fantastic new library / university with fast wireless, something that always makes me happy. The hostel we stayed in was basic but we had a nice fish dinner (cod and trout) next to the swimming pool after soaking away the day in a very hot hot pot and acting like big kids on the water slides.
The drive to Lake Myvatn exceeded our expectations. We set off before dawn, which is easier to do when the sun rises at 9:30. After about an hour of driving we saw a magnificent dawn rise over the mountains and the scenery did not let us down for the rest of the day, unless you include a small period driving across a mountain when we were in a thick fog. This was a bit like an London pea-souper, but as those acrid fogs were in part caused by the industrial revolution it would be insensible to tar Icelandic fogs with the same brush. They are more of a fish-soup fog, pure white and thick.
As an example of how expensive Iceland is, we stopped for lunch at the petrol station / supermarket / cheap diner to buy some bread and cheese. In a locked glass cabinet they were selling some locally crafted wool products. The wool in Iceland is famous, sheep being the lifeblood of the economy for many years. There are special designs for the jumpers which locals actually wear. A small pair of woolen gloves in this diner were selling for $100. We saw jumpers being sold for $230. You can see why they keep them under lock and key. We also bought some dried fish from the supermarket which Icelanders snack on. It is truly horrible. Chewy, dried, thick pieces of fish. Sarah had two pieces just to make sure she didn’t like it. I didn’t even chew mine, it went in my mouth and straight out again.
We drove through green high-sided valleys sprouting waterfalls which housed cute little farms and churches, small towns perched on the edge of fjords in between towering mountains. We were driving on the ring road, the number one highway, which goes around the country. Most of the road is single lane each way without much traffic to speak of. Iceland has about 300,000 people, nearly two thirds of which are in the capital. The next biggest city is Akureyri with 17,000, located in the prettiest spot you could imagine. We blew right through on our tight schedule, trying to get to our accommodation on Lake Myvatn before the limited light ran out.
We did not succeed in this and got to the lake when it was pitch black. Luckily there are not too many roads around here so it’s pretty difficult to get lost. We were the only guests in a set of around 20 cabins, very well constructed in pine so that they smelled a little like a sauna, with slate floors and underfloor heating. The reception and breakfast spot was a cafe built next to a dairy. In fact they had a glass wall separating the diners from the cows so that you could get up close and personal with them as they were being fed and milked, all from the safety of your table. I’m not sure having a closeup view of a cow’s bum is the most appetising sight but it gave some interest to a dark winter’s night.
On check-in we asked about local hot pots, sad addicts that we had become. To our horror the owner said that the natural hot springs were closed for maintenance and the local pool had shut for the night and would not be open the next day because it was Sunday. She did mention a natural pool in a cave which was about 44 degrees but advised us that it was our own responsibility if we used it. To give you an idea of the geological rawness of the region, when we tracked down the hot water cave in the fading light of the next day we found that it was literally a huge crack in the earth which had filled up with steaming water. There were warning signs about rock falls and to not use an open flame to investigate the caves. We shone a head lamp in but sitting in a pool amongst the fallen rocks waiting for the next one to land did not strike us as a relaxing end to the day.
If the drive up had been spectacular the day around Myvatn Lake was unearthly. We started with a short walk through a beech forest in close mist as a weak sun tried to penetrate the fog. It was serene and beautiful. The trees were planted artificially. I’m not sure Iceland even has trees naturally. The only trees we saw seemed to be plantations. The walk took us to the edge of the lake where tiny fish swarmed through the crystal blue icy water. Small volcanic formations dot the water.
Next we walked up a volcano. Unusually for us this was not an active volcano but still had an impressive crater. We didn’t see the point in walking all the way around it and given the limited light in our day we decided to head to the other side of the lake to climb the impressively steep mountain while the sun hung in the sky just long enough to give us some light. The climb up starts on a farmers dirt track where the puddles had iced over. Ice was creeping over the lake verge and extended further the more the temperature dropped and the less sunlight it was exposed to each day. We zig-zagged straight up this huge hill, through the black volcanic rock as the slowly setting sun beamed its last golden rays over the frozen landscape. At the top the wind was strong and the shadow from the top of the mountain stretched over the countryside. From the top we could see pseudocraters below us.
It was really too cold and windy to stay up there until sunset even though that was maybe half an hour away. In the end it was a good decision to head down as the sunset was not spectacular and we managed to explore the rent in the earth otherwise known as the most dangerous natural hot spring in town. After we had decided not to risk a cave-in for our by now very necessary nightly hot pot action we travelled the short distance to the natural hot springs which were half-closed. They had a water issue. For some reason the level of the water had dropped by half. While they were investigating this they threw the doors to the steam room open for free. We dragged ourselves through the half empty outdoor natural pool with black sand at the bottom and a big volcanic rock in the middle. There wasn’t enough water to even sit up but it sated our fix for the moment. I went to check out the pool next door which had steam rising from it and some water pipes filling it up. The smooth rocks by the side of the hot pool were slick with water and I went ass over tit as I gingerly inched my way towards the water. I slid right into some hotter than expected water but thankfully it wasn’t at boiling point. Night had fallen and the temperature along with it. Sarah and I dashed back to the steam room trying to limit our time in the biting wind. Once we had heated up to the core it was time for dinner and bed.
Lake Myvatn was our best chance to see the Northern Lights as it is less cloudy in the north of the country. Luck was not on our side. We had a couple of clear nights but no solar activity that we could see.
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