11th April Madaba, Jordan

Along the Dead Sea coast yesterday we came upon the stragglers of the Dead Sea Marathon that appears to be an annual event. These were the walkers, sweaters and intermittent joggers. This morning we met the winner of the women’s section, an American studying in Amman. We had decided to go around the gorge to the village of Dana where the views were once more quite amazing. She is the girl in one of the Dana photos on the blog. Appears she made the equivalent of 2 months wages by winning. We also got talking to a girl from Brisbane who was visiting for the 3^rd time. This time she was staying for 5 weeks at Dana, doing a bit of trekking, reading and just veging out. It was that type of place.

Looking forward to catching up with Emma on Wednesday. There are now 3 border crossings between Israel and Jordan, she will come over on the Allenby Bridge crossing near Jerusalem and go back across the one in the south of the country at Aqaba. We still have 3 days up our sleeve before meeting her which is great as it gives us both a chance to have a breather before the onslaught of Africa. We were going to head to Sharm el Sheik on the Sinai Peninsula for a break but having it here gives us a couple more days to get to Cairo to organize our Sudan visas. At the moment the only deadline we have on the trip is to be at Aswan by the 28^th April to catch that boat.

13^th April

Madaba has an amazing number of mosaics dating back to the 6^th century. Every ancient Byzantine Church has intricate mosaic designs. Even the Persian invasion in 614AD did not destroy them all with the ones depicting humans & animals, which were forbidden, being covered by other ones containing geometric designs only. The material used were not tiles but tesserae made from local stone. The variety of colours shows the range of coloured rock around. We were witness to some of them driving along the Dead Sea the other day. There is now a school here in Madaba teaching young Jordanians the art.

The VW crowd has advised us to get new brake linings on the vehicle. I would normally not bother as it has only done 61,000kms but we are carrying quite a load and might need the extra efficiency if some dirty big bull elephant steps out in front of us.