Our pickup truck bumped and jostled down the unpaved path, the driver weaving around the deep pits and pot-holes by rote, each piece of this desert clearly as familiar to him as the lines on his darkly tanned hands. For twenty-five minutes we plodded a slow path through stark and open plains, the raw and […]
As an American I get the best of many worlds in terms of food – we have a diverse immigrant culture in the United States and nearly every small town has its token ethnic restaurants: Thai/Indian/Mexian/Middle Eastern/Italian/Cuban. But flip side to those restaurants are the huge national chains perched alongside the mom-and-pop shops and often […]
The gentle vibrations from my iPhone slowly cut last clingy strings of dreams from my thoughts as I pulled myself awake. Looking at the gaps in the tent wall showed just the faintest tint of color lightening the morning sky. The dead silence surrounding me at the Desert Tent Camp in Wadi Rum invited me […]
Arriving at the Dead Sea in Jordan earlier this month, I wasn’t prepared for the starkness of the landscape. Conjured up images of the Dead Sea in my mind were of two varieties: an exotic, remote, and barren desert landscape with an inhospitable lake of water stretching out for miles. a smiling and slightly accented […]
Culture shock doesn’t have to be, well shocking, sometimes it’s more of a gentle adjustment. My recent trajectory took me from Thailand, where I lived for several months, to Jordan, a country I had never visited in a region I had also never visited. A read through Jordan’s Wikipedia entry before I left Thailand yielded […]
Regular readers may recall my ever-so-brief plan to visit the Middle East last fall – it was a goal, an ambition really, because I’ve always wanted to travel to the Middle East but didn’t make it there on my RTW trip, nor my travels since. Six months later, as I wrap up my time in […]
