Jordan

Yes, we are visiting the Middle East for our latest adventure. After flying from Atlanta to Cairo (with a short layover in Istanbul), we spent a day in Cairo touring various houses of worship. However, our first full week was spent exploring Jordan, so that’s where I’ll start (and I’ll add our “Coptic Cairo” pictures to a later post).

We spent our first 2 nights in the country’s capital, Amman, with our first day heading north to Jerash. According to Wiki, it has been inhabited “since the Bronze Age”, but it is mainly known for its very well preserved Roman ruins.

This is Hadrian’s Arch, built in the 2nd century. The detailed carving still present was fantastic -

The whole site was huge and spread out, but one of my favorite areas was the forum, surrounded by 56 columns:

The main street, the Cardo, led out from here, and the original Roman road is still present:

Up the hill were the Temple of Zeus and the South Theater -

The Theater could seat 5000. When we wandered in, a Jordanian in traditional garb was serenading some tourists with a bagpipe (??).

This is a good bird’s eye view of the forum, the Cordo leading away, and the columns on the right from the Temple of Zeus -

Sorry I don’t have people in there for scale, but you can see the height of the columns next to the full size trees. We actually didn’t cross paths with many tourists throughout all our wanderings. Now on to Ajloun Castle -

That is only one corner of a very large castle, but I liked how you could see the “drawbridge”, the slit in the wall out of which they could shoot arrows, and the rock base of the mountain top where they built this 12th century castle. This was looking out over the countryside through one of those slits:

You might end up seeing Steve in a fair number of shots, because he’s there for scale, not Instagram. ;)

Before you start harumphing…I won’t bore you any more with pictures of ruins (for this post), but I’ll share a view of the surrounding countryside. Remember this greenness when you’re seeing later posts of our travels in southern Jordan:

So this was our first day of driving through Jordan, visiting all the top sites. I’m stopping now so I can send this out and leave you wanting more.