Days 105: Jerash, Jordan

The start of my trip to Jordan didn't begin well. My plane is running almost an hour late before it even begins to board, meanwhile a bunch of young Arab boys are running amok in the terminal. Apparently a cultural tradition which requires your wife to cover herself from head to toe doesn't extend to stopping your boys from trying to pilfer chips from a vending machine.

As the flight boards, we are greeted with the soothing sound of a hysterical Arab man, pleading for his life, in tears, and expressing his fervent wish not to die. This continues for the full half hour it takes to load the plane, and judging by the looks of the other passengers I am not the only one unnerved by this. As it turns out, he is being deported back to Ethiopia, and this performance is a last ditch effort to avoid his due, and once the plane takes off he gives it up. When I move to the back of the plane during the flight, his wailing has ended, and he's leafing through an OK magazine.

As the flight goes on I get a splitting headache. It feels like my left eyeball is slowly being wound into a vice. It gets so bad that by the end of the flight I am sitting with my head in my hands and pressing my palm into my eye socket in an attempt to counteract the pressure. A long queue at Jordanian immigration follows and when I finally emerge into the terminal my booked airport transfer has failed to show. It takes my remaining cash to get a cab to the hotel.

In the morning I'm feeling a lot better, and within an hour I am wandering the ruins at Jerash. It's a lovely, sunny day and I'm wandering one of the best preserved Roman cities from antiquity. I've traded an awful flight for warm weather, majestic colonnades and cobbled squares, breathing in the depth of history. My middle east trip is off to a fine start, well, by 2nd day it is.