So we left Jordan. And Petra was beyond fantabulous but you can keep Jordan and I’m never going back. Not that its such a big problem in my life, its not like saying ‘I’m never going back to Manchester’, or I’m never going back to the Emirates, its just that I didn’t feel comfortable there for one moment. Other than those lost in the total magnificence that is Petra. Which is just brilliant. It’s not Pompeii and its not Atlantis, its just a load’a rocks. And two and half thousand years ago lots of Jordanians lived in caves in those rocks. And buried their dead in many more of the caves that they dug out from the sandstone. Though they weren’t Jordanians then, Jordan didn’t exist til about 1946. And then you see ‘a building’ of immense beauty. But its not a building, its just a facade carved into the rock, complete with columns and doorways and all manner of adornment. But it was never used as the ‘Treasury’ that its name would suggest. Even though loads of people have dug holes in it trying to find the ‘buried treasure’ that any normal treasury might have once house. But this one ain’t no-one’s house.

But the rocks there are divine. I’d worship them. If I was some proto-Jordanian cave-dwelling type person. And they extend over about 30 square miles. Petra’s big. I got that. Having walked half of it in about 35 degrees with all our worldly valuables in my ruck sack.

The drive back to Aqaba took 75 minutes. The driver seemed as keen to get us back to Israel as we were. If not keener. What a fucking madman. There would apparently be no Arabic translation of ‘lane’, speed limit, blind bend or brow of a hill. It’s just flat out, in whichever lane happens to have the smoother surface.

We hung out in Eilat for a bit, not having been down there for over 10 years. And its changed. From a kind of Red Sea South of France to a kind of Red Sea Blackpool in just a decade. If I’m honest I was never a big fan when it was decidedly and presumptuously up itself and poncey, now it impresses me even less. Not ‘real’ Israel.

So we had lunch and set off 350 kilometres back to ‘home’. The length of the Negev Desert and then on to the Mediterranean splendour of Tel Aviv.

Nice to be ‘home’.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx