Rolling down without incident along a straight-as-an-arrow, well-lit road right into the center of Aqaba, we set about looking for a hotel. Reaching an intersection located quite close to a neon-shining street, we started to dumbly look around to no avail: for the first time, a track laid right to our destination, and even the address, didn't help us. A few attempts to fish out information from the bystanders failed: most were clueless, and one sent us god knows where, a kilometer away from where we were. We skillfully chose not to follow the advice, being too seasoned, and sensing a mistake, even if it was made with a desire to help.
Some young guys passing by deigned to lend us a hand, starting to google everything possible on their smartphones (quite the same as you'd see on any random young guy in Daugavpils), but eventually they pointed us to a completely different hotel, claiming that it was the one we needed, just the name had changed.
And only in this beautiful hotel (Cedar Hotel) a well-dressed, groomed, and pomaded young man dressed to the nines, in shiny shoes, a suit and a tie, managed to help us. With a wave of his hand, he summoned a genie-helper, that is, a level-one worker, who in a couple of minutes led us exactly where we needed to be through junkyards and courtyards: when we were walking in circles searching, we were just ten meters short of reaching it.
Although the elevator was out of order, in all other respects the Amir Palace hotel simply blew my mind with its cleanliness, glamour, and decor. Wood, huge reproductions, tiles, and pleasant little decorative elements made up the picture of what proudly called itself a “boutique hotel”.
The place looked and functioned in some ways better than a mid-range European hotel like the Days Hotel VEF Riga that I'm familiar with, and the price was very reasonable. True, for some reason, instead of a receptionist, we were checked in by a janitor who didn't speak English, but he handed me a phone with a girl on the other end who had the most wonderful pronunciation, and from then on everything went like clockwork. Without asking, we dragged the bikes into the room, since there was a spacious, though narrow, balcony.
We didn't have cash to fork over for the lodging, but we were told not to sweat it: there are currency exchanges a dime a dozen around here, though they did ask us to pay by midnight for bookkeeping purposes. Having settled in so comfortably, we took a shower and stomped off to see the city. It didn't disappoint: after so many littered and not-so-littered villages, dirty tents with sheep and signs falling on our heads, we were almost knocked off our feet by a wave of wealth, glamour, and conspicuous consumption: shining neon everywhere, restaurants and shops, plenty of fashionable boutiques and equally well-dressed people, expensive cars (by the standards of such a poor country, of course; I didn't see any Ferraris or Bugattis).
The contrast is staggering: if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, my picture of Jordan as a country would be completely skewed. Now we beheld that there is money to be found here, and the gap between the rich and the poor is huge and obvious. Of course, it's not India, where it would have blown my roof off completely, but still. We had just driven out of the desert, where there were only two trees the whole way, rocks and sand, and suddenly plunged into a riot of colors and life: on one of the central streets everything is planted, and there are even illuminated fountains. Pocketfuls of impressions.
Alas, I have almost no photos of the nightlife: we were very hungry, and out of exhaustion we weren't up to it, plus you can't shoot shit on my point-and-shoot camera. I'll just say that having wandered back and forth, and having exchanged money without any problems, we went to a weekend craft bazaar, where music was playing in full swing, and there was a ton of various eco-handmade stuff.
The dudes dressed like this for kicks, everyone else is in normal clothes
We searched for a simpler restaurant for a long time, so as not to leave a day's wages there. Rybakov was beside himself with hunger, and even grumbled that we should go back to the hotel to eat Joylent. As a result, I firmly said: we're going into the first one we come across and having dinner. The first one we came across turned out to be an unsightly and plain-looking restaurant with an ugly glowing menu design, and what's more, on the first floor there was a straight-up canteen for locals, while the restaurant was on the second.
Sasha ate a simple meat dish, and I had seafood soup, which I really, really liked. The appetizer platter served beforehand and the bread with it, too.
It turned out later that we were once again amusingly lucky in a completely paradoxical way: according to TripAdvisor ratings (maybe not the most reliable source of information), this simpleton joint (Al Shami restaurant) is number one in Aqaba. What a surprise!
The service in the restaurant glitches a bit: they brought me a fork for my soup, and generally one of the waiters was quite sluggish, although the second, an older one, was very attentive and accommodating. He offered us to move to the balcony with a sick view of the mosque when a spot opened up, and poured us some free tea, far from the worst I've tried in Jordan.
After such a refueling with foodstuffs, our mood improved; we walked some more, admired a hookah lounge packed with people, where we were intercepted by a Wadi Rum guide thirsty for communication. Having shaken him off, we walked around an island of vegetation on one of the main streets, dropped into a souvenir shop where we could have bought all the junk for the whole trip and wouldn't have had to drag it through the mountains and desert. We also checked out a bakery and a liquor store. Booze, by the way, is sold at every turn in Aqaba, for every taste and wallet—another shocking fact after the teetotaler villages where we had been. Beer for some reason is expensive, but hard liquor is about the same as back home, if not cheaper.
Drunk and loud people, whom I don't really like (unless they are my friends, whom I already know from their good side), immediately started appearing. The dark side of the moon: so much for a resort, so much for glamour.
Then I once again found the things I bought in a shop on the mountain after Petra, only even cheaper. When I asked for an additional discount for buying two pieces, the seller grinned for a long time and said that I was sly as a fox, and that at the bazaar they would have charged me ten times more. To this I replied that I was aware of how things are done around here, and that I was already doing him a favor by buying crap for that kind of money.
Having walked to our hearts' content, we returned to the hotel, where we started asking ourselves the burning questions of our time.
First, is the border checkpoint through which we have to cross open tomorrow, on Saturday. Second, we continued frantically writing to all friends and strangers on Facebook, Couchsurfing with a request to swing by a bike shop and get some boxes for us. We even wrote to the hotel. In this quest we failed miserably, and decided to rely on the mercy of providence, since so far it had favored us with terrifying force.
In Israel there is a saying “Everything will work itself out”, and from our trip we realized that it's just as fitting for Jordan too.