The next morning, Sasha's wonder-watch Suunto, which he had left on the balcony overnight, showed that it was six degrees Celsius outside. So much for the desert!
Inside the room, water was practically streaming down the glass door. We really fogged the place up!
We bundled up properly, had some Joylent for breakfast, and were just about to hit the road when the hotel staff intercepted us with a pitiful look: “But what about breakfast?”. For some reason, I thought breakfast at this hotel wasn't included in the price, especially since they flat-out refused to make us dinner yesterday because there was no staff around.
Well, breakfast it is, then — the folks tried, put in the effort, and we're just gonna leave, especially for free? (Though that last point was still up in the air).
In the end, we didn't regret it. It was probably our fanciest meal of all — a whole beautifully furnished restaurant just for the two of us, yogurt, honey, jam and cheese, endless croissants, muffins and fruits that the waiter caringly kept bringing over, everything reasonably tasty, even if it was out of packages.
A tasty and interesting dish — a mix of spices and salt that you can spread over a pita brushed with olive oil.
Sasha can't believe his luck
Having thanked the staff and grabbed some muffins, oranges, and apples, since they were endless here, we set off to conquer yet another peak. Right next to the hotel grew colorful peppers, though their taste clearly lacked moisture.
Hardly had we ridden away from the hotel when we spotted signs of a bike path, but we had to fix them — in Jordan, it's pretty much a given that everything around is broken
The only bike path sign we saw. But look at how solid it is!
We attached a head to the cyclist
We kept climbing higher and higher, and the beauties opening up before us were absolutely incredible. The wind matched it perfectly. You could practically lie on it without falling.
The wind got to the point where if it blew in your back, the bike rode itself up the rocks, but to go against it, you had to use every ounce of strength you had, and even that sometimes wasn't enough. A 1:1 match with what we had in Iceland, in some spots even sand was flying into our faces, luckily not in such amounts. All of this, however, was compensated for by the mountains of different colors and terrains. The route was well worth riding.
Along the way we found a little stream with a waterfall, where we snacked on the buns from the hotel
We were totally screwed again: constantly riding uphill, off-road on top of that, and with this satanic wind. After many hours we finally dragged ourselves to the highest point of the route, at 1700 meters altitude, where the wind was absolutely brutal. There we found a local guy who was plowing rocks with two donkeys. It looked surreal: look at the photos above and tell me, how could anything grow there? And yet back home, people complain about rocks in their fields.
While we sat behind the wall of a shed, trying to hide from the wind even a little bit, our buddy left his donkeys and hiked 200 meters uphill just to come say hi to us, didn't even mind the effort. A dialogue didn't happen due to the lack of a common language, so he bowed to our offer of a cookie, placing his hand over his heart, and went back to plowing rocks.
Incredibly, the road went downhill from there, though riding it in some places was almost as hard as going up. A rare case where, despite a huge downhill slope, the bike doesn't roll at 50 km/h, but instead just flat-out stops. I can hardly remember anything like that ever happening.
By the way, NASA really missed the mark here with their elevation data, and for the first time — by underestimating it. According to the profile estimates, we were expecting about a kilometer and a half of climbing, but in reality we cranked out 1940 meters — another damn record. That's cool the first or second time, when you're prepared and aware of it, but not just randomly like this, with bags, off-road and in the wind, with a fever, and when a route of similar difficulty was just a day ago.
I don't even know how we managed it, but eventually we made it out onto the King’s Highway, where somehow, slowly and agonizingly, we could finally make our way to the world-famous ancient rock city — Petra. Here we were pretty damn glad we didn't just take the asphalt right away — even though the mountain pass was brutally hard, riding on the asphalt among cars would have been monstrously boring and nasty.
In Wadi Musa, a rather funny hotel was waiting for us: the Musa Spring Hotel. Insanely cheap, around 14 dinars a night for a double room, but at the same time the trashiest of them all, with stains on the carpet, a moldy shelf in the closet, and, as usual, an accommodating and polite host. We had to wait for hot water for almost three minutes here, but at least it didn't run out on Rybakov. The smoke in the lobby was thick enough to hang an axe on, but dinner was perfectly affordable — they charged a dinar for fried eggs and a dinar for a salad. The guy at the reception desk cooked it himself — that's just how they do things around here.
The flip side of Jordanian chillness is an open manhole on the sidewalk, and not just one. I already got up close and personal with one of those in Daugavpils last year, and I don't recommend anyone repeat that experience.
When we went out for a walk, another funny story happened — right in the middle of an empty, windy highway where a car drove by maybe once a minute, a local stopped his car and got out just to ask if we needed any help!
This was probably the weirdest case of hospitality we've encountered. Just imagine you're driving along on your own business, you see a Mexican crossing the road in your residential neighborhood, and you pull over to ask, "Do you need anything, bro?" It was nice, of course, but still weird.
Next to the hotel there was only a hookah lounge and a couple of village-style corner stores, with no price tags, as usual. We wanted to buy a few bottles of water, but the seller goes: “Why would you buy a few? That'll be expensive, just take 7 liters at once!”. And he was right!
What absolutely blew our minds was that crates of Coca-Cola or laundry detergent just sit outside on the street, and the store closes up for the night. I don't think there are any cameras around, but nobody messes with the goods. So much for the high civility of Europe — back home they hang air conditioners so high you can't reach them without a stepladder, but here nobody gives a damn about the goods, let alone the ACs. And yeah, we didn't see any one-armed people (for those, you gotta go to Saudi Arabia).
I forgot to mention, by the way, that back in Shobak, when I was buying a malt drink in a shop, a souvenir vendor from the castle came up, and together with the shopkeeper, who unexpectedly spoke decent English, they put in some incredible effort to help us, practically bending over backwards. They asked where we were heading next, whether we needed directions, and said we could come by at seven the next morning and the shopkeeper would already be at the store so we could stock up on supplies.
That's just the kind of good people who live in Jordan.