Month: December 2018

Sunset from Santa Lucia, directly above my apartment. Christmas Day. Rita and I drank very tasty wine as we watched the sun go down. The owner was a character and he had a beverage or two. We got to chatting and he refused to let us pay for the wine. Great restaurant. Will go back.

Again, the shadows…

December 26 is Saint Stephen’s Day. A nearby town, Nocchi, has a new tradition of holding what they call a “live creche.” Rita and I went. Very popular. Had to park far away and walk up. Very fun. Totally worth it.

Nocchi had many different crafts people doing traditional crafts: laundry washing, making bread, cobbler, sharpening knives, ironmongery, wood carving, chair weaving. Such fun to see it. Plus they had mulled wine, tastes of bread and polenta, cooked sausages. Ran into some friends. A fun evening.

Pietrasanta had an exhibit of hand-made creches. Very cool. Here are my selection:

This was a lifesize creche in the main square of Pietrasanta.

[Another Jordan post…]

After Petra, we stayed in a hillside village in the Dana Biosphere Nature Preserve. Our hotel was right on a cliff, so the view was gorgeous.

The village was in a state of transition, with a lot of broken down abandoned houses and some newly restored places as foreigners move in.

On the way out of there, we had to take a bus. As we drove, we passed a lot of road side shops. Jordan is a very poor country, so the “shops” were often fairly simple.

We stopped at a coffee place, a hut really. Arab coffee is strong and sweet. Very tasty!

Finally we ended up at the Dead Sea and got into the sea itself. The mud is supposed to be good for you. Here’s my roommate…

I got completely behind on the Israel-Jordan trip that I never finished this post, and I have two more to do. Stay tuned…

This is just a selection of shots at dawn and dusk of the desert near Petra. Enjoy!

The Nabataeans  used Petra as the hub in a huge trading network. It was an important and lively city, but from 106AD when the Romans annexed it until 1812, when Johann Burckhardt (who’s related to the famous Jacob Burckhardt, author of “The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy”) cheated to get access to the hidden city. Petra lies in this cluster of dense rocks.

Coming back from our sunset jeep tour. We flew up and down the sand dunes and wadis, but nobody fell out of the open seating in the back.

The big dome was where we ate meals. It worked fine but had a vivid echo. You could hear your voice travel along the curves and resound everywhere. Unsettling. Made us talk more quietly, which was hard. 🙂

This is our camp. I climbed up into the rocks in the early evening, just before it got too dark.  We stayed in the dark tents. The moonscape domes were a  bit larger. A group of Chinese tourists stayed in them.  Our “tents” were full cabins with a bathroom/shower attached. Very comfortable but small. 

This is a magical place. When the shadows lengthened, the colors deepened. Dusk and sunrise brought views of astounding beauty.

Dusk coming in after the sun goes down…

This is where the movie “The Martian” was filmed. They cut the branches or leaves of anything that was growing and covered it with sand so the ground looked empty. Watch the opening ten minutes and you can see this terrain. It’s truly awe inspiring.  

SUNRISE… I got up early and wandered out before dawn. It was cold, but I didn’t care about my stiff fingers because it was so beautiful.

And the day begins! Ochres and reds soak across the sands…

We rode along a busy highway. Lots of trucks that honked at us, mostly friendly I think. There were goats everywhere, including on the highway. No shepherd that I could see and certainly no fencing. I guess they figured out to stay away from the bigger heavier faster trucks. I didn’t see much roadkill.

The rest of the post are desert shots. I spent hours wandering through this terrain.

We stayed in a very fancy resort hotel in Aqaba. It had several pools and its own stretch of beach.

In the evening of the first night, we heard loud drumming in the courtyard. What was up? When my friends and I got there, we found a wedding procession underway.

A large group of men were singing and dancing to the tune of a drum that one of them was beating. Someone was video taking the whole event. I couldn’t find the bride until I went behind the procession. She was there, long white gown, completely made up, looking very serious, on the arm of a tuxedo’d gentleman. Perhaps even the groom.

There was a large group of women around her and another large group of to the side.

The Jordanian flag colors are what are referred to as the “Pan-Arab” colors: black for the Abbasid caliphate, white for the Umayyad caliphate, and green for the Fatimid. The red triangle symbolizes the Hashemite kingdom and the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans and has a star in the center. The Palestinian flag is the same but without the star.

Just inland from the beach and tourist walkways was a large patch of allotments. They looked well cared for and productive.

The shopping was pretty rudimentary. No fancy shops. Sometimes no actual shop at all.

You could buy any kind of pickled veggie…

And goat meat too:

Aqaba was an important trade hub centuries ago. We saw ruins of an older city and this castle. Beautiful in the afternoon light…

Some evening shots as we walked back to the hotel.

Mosques are everywhere in Jordan. Even tiny villages have something. Must have loudspeakers for the muezzin’s 5 daily calls to prayer.

And to finish: our bikes on the trailer ready for their bedtime. 🙂

We’re now in Jordan… I’m a bit behind on my posts.

The last place we stayed in Israel was an eco-kibbutz, complete with vegan food.

It amazes me how the Israelis can drop down into the desert and create a rich green space. This place has ponds, trees, a vast array of solar panels, and comfy cottages.

They had lots of goats and in the middle of their main camp, they had a show that looked very Hindu, but was a tall cooling tower. There are vents all around it just below the green top and the cooler air is piped throughout the village.

We rode along the wall a long time.

Some border crossings aren’t really open. As we rode past this one, I wondered what kind of lock they might have on the gate to match the strength of the fence.

Well, turns out they use a lot more than a lock. How about concrete blocks and barbed wire and more blocks?

After that we rode down into Eilat, on the Red Sea. The terrain became red and dramatic.

Finally we got to Eilat and had lunch in a mall. Talk about culture shock!

Then the border crossing…although you could also bird watch…

This is the view from my Aqaba hotel room. Jordan is a fairly poor country, with the vast majority of purple loving up north in Amman. Aqaba felt very third world: small shops with inexpensive plastic and tin his spilling out into the sidewalk, coffee stalls everywhere offering gritty Turkish coffee, very few women anywhere…