Our flight to Amman from Gatwick left on time and had nothing to distinguish it from any other easy jet flight other than an above average density of veiled English ladies with Midlands accents in the company of Arabic looking men and numerous children. On arrival, the wives were in the visa queue with me, so maybe their “belonging” hasn’t gone beyond the veil as yet…
We landed on time, at about 8 p.m. local time, and it took about an hour to buy our visas, get through customs, recuperate our luggage and find the Europcar desk, where they had no trace of our reservation, but were cooperative in helping us find it (try entering your easy jet account details backwards on an Arabic computer). In exchange for our credit card details, we left the terminal with a battered car and set off for our hotel, in the centre of Amman. Sorting out the easy jet anomalies would be a task for later…
The roads are good in Jordan and weren’t too busy on a Sunday night, but on arrival in the city centre we got hopelessly lost – most of the streets don’t have names and what they call “circles” (roundabouts) are in fact interchanges so you just end up guessing where you have to go… and we thus got more and more lost. We ended up stopping and asking some traffic police the way. Contrary to the impression given by their powerful motorbikes, they were anything but menacing: “Welcome, where are you from?” They offered to escort us and Erik enjoyed slaloming through the city with a police outrider for a while, but our scout couldn’t find the hotel either… and sped off apologetically into the night leaving us to find our own way. I should maybe say at this point that this being a holiday aimed primarily at rest and recuperation, we hadn’t opted for a backpackers’. The hotel the Amman Police, for all their goodwill, couldn’t find was the Intercontinental! Imagine a similar scenario in Geneva! Anyway, to cut an overlong story short, we found the hotel, were upgraded to a wonderful room and enjoyed a delicious Lebanese dinner in one of the hotel restaurants (Mexican or Indian were the other choices but we had just arrived in the Middle East after all!). The only Jordanian ingredient of our first Arabian night was the full-bodied red wine we drank over supper.
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