Dead Sea and Entering Jordan

We woke up early on Sunday morning to drive down to the southern Israel boarder to cross into Jordan. There are three boarder crossing points from Israel to Jordan; one in the north, one in the center, and one in the south. We were already in the northern part of Israel, but we read in the tour guide books that if we were traveling without a tour group, then it is easiest and cheapest to cross at the southern site. When we woke up we checked a few things online before leaving the hotel and we read on one website that the southern crossing was closed to anyone but Israelis. We spent an hour trying to figure it out, but then decided that we just had to go and see what happened.

We drove for about 30 minutes before we crossed into the West Bank area of Israel. There were armed guards there, but they just waved us through. It was a little scary driving through that part, but we just stayed on the freeway and we didn't see anything dangerous. A couple hours later and we were out of the West Bank with another security checkpoint.

Our first stop was going to be Masada. Masada is the ruins of a city that the Jews built up on the very top of the mountain. There are two ways to the top, a cable car ride and a trail. We really wanted to hike to the top and we read that the trail closed at 11 am if it gets too hot outside. We got there at 9:05 am, but they told us that the trail closed 5 minutes earlier at 9 am because it was an extra hot day. We were a little disappointed, but we were also eager to get the boarder crossing taken care of so it wasn't too big of deal.



Our second stop was the Dead Sea. This was amazing. It was really cool just walking out into the water and all the sudden the ground was gone, but I was still standing upright with the water up to my chest. When I was on my back I could also just lay there and even sleep without moving at all and still float right on top of the water. We only spent about 20 minutes there, but felt like we got to experience it enough in that amount of time. Unfortunately that 20 minutes was enough time for them to give us a parking ticket. I missed the sign saying that it was a pay for parking spot.





After the Dead Sea it was a couple more hours until we got to the southern tip of Israel. During this drive we saw a lot of dessert area. At one point we saw Sodom and the area where Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt. We kept driving and got down to Eilat, the southern most city in Isreal. From there we could see Jordan on the east side and Egypt on the west side.





We left the rental car in a parking lot and walked across the boarder. It was really easy and there were no complications at all. Once we got across the boarder we were going to take a 5 mile walk to our hotel except the taxi drivers got us. They told us that by the boarder was a military zone and if we tried to walk it they would make us go back to the Israel side of the boarder. We ended up paying about $20 for the trip. In Jordan everyone was celebrating Ramadan and so there weren't really any places to eat open until about 7 pm (they couldn't eat until 7:45 pm). So, we walked around for a little while exploring Aqaba. While walking around we found a couple really good restaurants that were crowded with people getting take out food so we got some to take back to our hotel. For about $2 per meal we got a huge thing of rice, half a chicken, a pita, and some soup. It is hard to describe the flavors of it, but one of them was a little spicy that had maybe a red curry sauce on it. The chicken was roasted. The other one had a more white yogurt sauce that I think is a traditional Jordanian dish. At that place the chicken had been cooked and soaking in that. Both were really good and we only got about half way through them.