Our pickup truck bumped and jostled down the unpaved path, the driver from Feynan Ecolodge weaving around deep pits and potholes 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 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/Middle Eastern/Mexican/Italian/Cuban. On the flip side, those mom-and-pop shops are perched alongside America’s huge national restaurant chains often serving up barely seasoned, run-of-the-mill generic dishes designed …
The gentle vibrations from my iPhone slowly cut the last thin thread of dreams separating me from consciousness as I pulled myself awake. Looking at the gaps in my tent wall showed just the faintest tint of color lightening the morning sky. The dead silence surrounding me at the desert camp in Wadi Rum, Jordan …
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 vendor in any one of America’s super-sized malls rubbing dark brown Dead Sea mud onto the back of my hand, extolling it’s many virtues.
Neither version prepped me for the actuality of the Dead Sea – the region’s bare landscape was the very element lending beauty. And as far are remote is concerned…not so much – it’s a mere 45 minute drive from Amman, Jordan’s capital, and surrounded by a handful of significant religious biblical and Islamic pilgrimage sites.
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 located in a region I had never before visited. Jordanian culture has a unique flavor to it that wowed me with the welcome …
Visiting the Middle East was a goal for my travels for a long while. I had always wanted to travel to the Middle East, but didn’t make it there on my round the world trip, or in several subsequent years of travels. Why? Well, some of it came down to perception—I travel solo and I …