Despite having slept on a ratty old pad on the browning linoleum floor of our room at the Sea View Hotel, I awoke quite rested and to find Scott and Claudia already awake and in the hotel’s lobby accessing the free wireless Internet, about which our energetic friend at the hotel cautioned us to always consult him, for it was protected by a password that changes all the time.

“Today the password is ‘123abc,’” he explained, which fell in line with all the wireless passwords that we’d encountered in the Middle East. Network security is apparently not of primary concern here.

We unlocked the cycles and dragged them out from where they had been parked underneath the stairs, hopped on, and headed out in search of breakfast, which we ended up finding in the same restaurant we had visited our first morning in Jordan. We decided that in all our excitement over the standard Middle Eastern pastes, salads, and flatbread meal, we may have missed out on some lurking delicacies. We couldn’t skip the hummus, but in addition, this time, we got a plate of lamb and potatoes in a central Uyghur-tasting tomato sauce, a plate of pilaf and lamb with a kind of cheesy, salty sauce, some kebabs, and few other lurker delicacies.

It was splendid, and as we were finishing, the owner of the place came by our table to chat with us in English and hear what brought us to Amman. He seemed puzzled but pleased by our response and explanation of the adventure. From there we headed out in search of more coffee, which we found in abundance at a nearby coffee stand. We made fast friends with the fellows who owned it, and hung around the place drinking a few cups, doing general coffee shtick, and posing for photos with our new coffee-slinging buddies, who had, for the latter cups, begun to refuse payment.

From there we headed off in search of a place to sit down and work on our pitiful backlog of correspondence for you, dear reader. And we found an amazing place. It was a coffee and hookah joint, situated in an ancient building, nestled in a tree and vine filled cul-de-sac. And they advertised Internet on a fantastically faded sign. Unlike the sign, however, the Internet was sorely out of service, with, the owners of the place assured us, no hope of repair.

Despite the lack of Internet, we barreled head long in to the giant pile of correspondence yet to relate, making great progress, halting all too soon when our laptop batteries died with no available outlets in sight.

The Middle East was proving a very hard place to get things done. So we drowned our sorrows in games of whist, cups of sweet tea, and hookah smoke, and left to head back toward the bus station in very high spirits.

With some help from a few locals, we finally found the way to our bus departure spot, which turned out to be actually a few blocks diagonally away from where our dear energetic friend at the hotel had informed us it would be. When we got there, it was beginning to get dark, and the crazed energy of those just about to board an international bus was palpable in the dry desert air.

We stood there as night fell around us and looked up at the bus. The bus was nice, shiny and adorned with plenty of LED lights and signs advertising the glorious constellation of amenities to be found inside. I’ll go ahead and say it was one of the nicest of the trip, in fact, which puts it up there with some truly luxurious Thai buses. Scott collected the entire team’s passports and headed into a kind of administrative building to get our tickets registered to our passport numbers. Meanwhile I worked to load our stuff into the belly of the beast. Claudia headed out to find us some food to eat on the bus.

With all the things loaded, and with the helper boy who had mostly sat back and watched me position the bikes heartily tipped,  I sat down on a piece of busted concrete and leaned against the side of the bus company’s administrative building and began to play the uke. No sooner had I strummed a few chords than I was approached by a number of gentlemen and a few boys, who were very interested in conversing with me despite their lack of English skills. The crowd consisted of a few bus officials, including our driver,  a smattering of general street children, and one fellow passenger wearing the Gulf-style dish dash.

It was thus that I began a great circular dance of cultural missteps and miscommunications. By the time Claudia arrived back from the restaurant, grinning and laden with falafel wraps, I was attempting to repair a terrible blunder that had indicated to the group that Claudia was both my sister and my wife. Meanwhile, I was operating a parallel and similarly dismal conversation with our bus driver about the America-Iraq war and our policies in Afghanistan. As you see, things were not going well in either conversation. The dish dashed fellow was shaking his head, frowning, and explaining in bits of English and bits of Arabic, that what I had done was frowned upon and would be a crime in the Arab world. The bus driver meanwhile was fuming and pacing.

Claudia’s arrival was none too soon, for she was quickly able to sort out my inadvertent admission of incest, which resulted in a great amount of belly laughing and back slapping with the dish dash wearing fellow who, realizing he had misunderstood me, was now quite thrilled at the experience. In the midst of the laughter, the bus driver  threw his hands in the air in disgust and disappeared, grumbling angrily. He was no fan of America or Americans, as the Syrian fellow next to me tried to explained, apologetically. I had, of course, lacked any of the delicate linguistic skills to express my own views on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and had been only able to express that I was not myself a soldier, which had involved a lot of dangerous pantomime, and possibly offensive messages.

“That guy really doesn’t like you,” Claudia commented “I hope he’s not riding on our bus.”

“He’s actually the driver,” I replied.

“Really?! Oh no.” Claudia sounded genuinely disturbed.

“What have we been learning about these ‘oh no’ statements?” I replied, feeling none too excited about climbing on the bus.

It left at 8:30 and was headed all the way to Damascus, and, as such, was probably an overnight bus, though our investigations into arrival time had all yielded “she’ll-get-there-when-she-gets-there”-esque statements. So we ate our falafel, which had come with some free salads, when the Egyptian owners of the shop realized Claudia had studied in their home country.  I have to admit, I had a bit of the heebee-jeebees at this point. The interaction I’d had with the driver was the first of all our time in the Middle East that had exhibited even a mild bit of anti-American sentiment.

Considering some of recent history, it had me unsettled. Tonight we were headed into Syria, and Syria was, at least in my own twisted perceptions, one of the most hostile places we would visit. What would it be like? Would we be welcome? Our great helmsman, David Campbell, had assured us that we would be welcomed there, so I continued to attempt to relax and take things as they come.

Then we were suddenly at the border. We all climbed off and filed into a giant hall. The entire rest of our bus was populated by Middle Easterners,  and the Middle Easterners were ruthlessly efficient in their rush to get through customs. By the time we had even identified which line was ours, many of them had already gotten stamped and were on their way back to the bus. We lingered in what we thought was our line, and watched as all the people from our bus climbed back on, and the engine started.

Then I was up to the window. The fellow took a few looks at me, frowning behind his mustache ,and then asked me in a kind of a sneer: “What happened on the 16^th of July?” It was still June. So I stuttered an incoherent babble of words ending in “16^th of July? … I’m sorry?”  Then the fellow coughed out a bit of laughter, twitched his mustache around like a bunnies whiskers, and stamped my passport.

Scott and Claudia got through with even less hassle. Soon the driver began running out after us, scolding us for taking so long in line. We apologized, and climbed on the bus. The bus drove for a few meters past what was to be the first of hundreds of portraits of the Syrian President.

Inside of the Syrian passport hall, we were shown directly to the diplomatic line, where we were very politely and courteously admitted into Syria by a slick-haired fellow, sporting the exact same well-trimmed mustache as the Syrian president.

He stamped our passports with the official Syrian entry, which proudly explains that “When staying for more than 15 days, he must register with branch of indication.” Women apparently did not travel much, or were of little consequence here.

Happy to be back on the bus and safely into Syria, I fell promptly into a deep sleep.

Our second day in Aqaba, we woke up, grabbed our bathing suites, a bottle of sunscreen, and the ukulele, climbed on the bikes and, tired of the usual Aqaba restaurants, headed out in a new direction. Claudia’s tire patch job appeared to be holding well as we pedaled toward the bus terminal, a neighborhood in which we thought we might find a good value on breakfast. I am quite pleased to report that we did. We sat down at a small local shop and ordered a delightfully affordable and quite succulent feast of fried eggplant and cauliflower, an array of pastes, and a pile of flatbread.

It was basically the standard AsiaWheeling Middle East edition meal, which we did not seem to grow tired of. It did take a while to arrive, however, so we spent the time working on better figuring out a number of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros tunes that we had been working on arranging for the ukulele.

There was plenty of good strong coffee and sticky sweet tea for Claudia. The owners of the shop also seemed quite thrilled to have us as customers: Claudia with her blond hair and formidable Arabic skills, me clowning around on the ukulele, and Scott with his ever more awe-inspiring facial hair.

From there we wheeled down to the public beach where we spent the next few hours, hanging out in the sun, singing songs on the uke, and taking turns watching our collective belongings while the others headed out to the sea to wade. The water here, though not as terrible as yesterday’s beach, was quite filthy. You would never know, though, unless you ventured in, for even at a relatively close distance, it looked a pristine sapphire blue.

We were soon joined by some very drunk Jordanian guys who were just full of lies, among which was that they were Turkish. They hung around for quite a while, smoking our hookah and singing along with us. It was a strange experience, strung up somewhere between a pleasant social interaction and being ridiculed. Needless to say, we were glad to see them stumble off.

We climbed back on the cycles from there, and thinking of our dear friend Mr. Jackson Fu, we began to hatch a plan in his honor. You see, dear reader, our whole time in the Gulf, the illustrious Mr. Fu had been talking about how much he wanted to fry an egg on the hood of the car. Fearing that it might damage the rental Previa’s paint, we had voted against it. But here in Aqaba it was startlingly hot and sunny, and we thought we might be able to fry on egg on the pavement, or perhaps a manhole cover.

So we headed down the street, and stopped at a restaurant to ask the proprietor for a raw egg. The owner turned out to be a very good English speaker, educated somewhere in the midwest, and more than happy to provide us with a complimentary egg.

In high spirits, we headed off in search of a place to fry the egg.

As you can see, dear reader, the “frying” produced not a sunny side up egg, but a lone yoke estranged from its once comfortable home of a shell.

Well, with that done, we headed out to buy some strange sports drinks. We found a little spot, and haggled for some 15 minutes over the price before sitting down triumphantly, diluting the drinks with water, and salting them. From there we headed back to the hotel, where we indulged in a quick jaunt around the corner to an Internet café.

Scott purchased a half hour’s worth of connection, and used Internet sharing to broadcast it via wifi to our computers. Claudia and I then logged on and we all spent a little while scanning our overflowing in-boxes for fires that needed putting out.

We slammed closed our Macs, and headed back to the hotel, where our bags were waiting for us. We strapped everything onto the bikes, and headed for the bus station.

Halfway there, Claudia got another flat tire, this time in her front wheel. The Knog bike porn patch was still holding well. That was good, but my faith in the D7’s tires’ ability to put up with the savage hazard-strewn roads of Jordan was quickly waning. Rather than fix it right there and then, we just rolled it the last couple of blocks to the station, and began to await our bus.

It arrived in no time, and we promptly loaded our things on. I then sat down on the pavement to watch our carry-on stuff and wait for the ticket taker to begin admitting passengers, while Claudia ran over to the same restaurant at which we’d eaten breakfast to purchase some food for the bus ride. I had just taken out the ukulele and begun to entertain myself when we noticed the bus pulling away.

No ticket taker had ever appeared. And now it was not only about the time our bus was scheduled to leave, but it was also actually leaving… with all our stuff on board. Scott sprinted off after the thing. Meanwhile Claudia and I waited back, talking with the other people around trying ascertain whether they were our fellow passengers or not, trying to stay calm.

Scott reappeared some minutes later, explaining that the bus driver had just left to refuel. The bus was just leaving late, and all was well. Soon our food was done, the bus returned, and the ticket taker showed up. He was a burly and stern man, who explained to us that food was not allowed on the bus, so we ran around the back of the bus and hid it in Claudia’s bag to sneak it on. There was certainly no way we could make it back to Amman on empty stomachs.

We headed straight to the back of the bus, where we could be secretive. As soon as the lumbering vehicle pulled out of the station, we opened up the bag to find that the food had exploded from its packaging to soak many of Claudia’s belongings. She seemed unfazed, pointing to some previous similar experiences that had occurred with chocolate, and we began to salvage the remaining food and feast.

The bus stopped at an interesting border zone, presumably between Jordanian provinces (though the exciting thought did cross our minds that we might have, in fact, boarded an incorrect bus, bound for Saudi Arabia). At the crossing, everyone was asked to get off the bus and unload their stuff, to be screened and ID-checked by a group of officers. That is, everyone except us. We were told by the driver to just stand by the vehicle and wait. So we did.

Soon everyone emerged, loaded their things back aboard, and sat back in their seats. Strange.

We began chatting with the fellow in front of us on the bus, who turned out to be in the bicycle business. He spoke very little English, but was thrilled to learn about AsiaWheeling. He twice called a friend and put Scott on the phone with him. Each time this friend welcomed Scott and AsiaWheeling warmly to Jordon, and offered to help us in any way we required. Scott was quite courteous and thanked him each time.

When we finally arrived back in Amman, we unloaded our stuff only to remember that Claudia’s tire was still flat. Seeing this, our new bike-related friend sprang into action, changing the tire with a kind of speed, precision and agility that we had not seen since China. It seemed no more than five minutes and we were back in action. He was particularly impressed by the in-seat pump on the Speed TRs. The pump on Claudia’s D7 never quite worked right.

With bikes fixed and fully loaded, we prepared to head back toward the Asia Hotel, where our ex-U.S.-military-translator friend would no doubt have a place for us to lay our heads. Just then, a young and excitable fellow came out of the night, and began chatting with us. We asked him about catching a bus to Syria, and he explained that we were in luck, he owned a hotel just next to the bus station, which, we were also in luck, was right here, and which could provide a room for all three of us for only $4.00 a night.

It’s tough to beat that, so we followed him back to the “seafront” hotel. While Scott and Claudia checked out the rooms, I waited outside and endured a bunch of harassment from tiny children. Finally I capitulated, removed the bags from my bike and Claudia’s, and allowed them to take the Dahons out for a spin. While the kids disappeared on our cycles, I looked up at the glaring yellow sign of our place. Seaside…  Amman was nowhere near the sea, and the hotel was one of the shabbiest and filthiest of the whole trip. But the price was right, and soon we locked up the bikes underneath the staircase, and headed upstairs. I had to sleep on the floor that night, where tiny beetles mostly left me alone. But man oh man was it cheap.

Aqaba waited patiently, growing hotter and sunnier as we slept in. We had gotten the air conditioner working, and bathed in cool air, had fallen into a very deep and sound slumber. Soon, however, the call of the road became loud enough to rouse us, and we headed off in search of breakfast.

We selected the place mostly because its tables were made from intricately patterned hammered copper. The coffee came with milk, which was an interesting new occurrence. Other than that, the food was the normal delicious Jordanian fare: flatbread, pastes, and salad.

The tables and the food were so delightful that they almost made up for the shameless addition of items to and inflation of prices which occurred on the bill. We haggled a bit over the bill, making some insignificant progress, and eventually paid, leaving with a quickly healing chip on our shoulders.

Nothing is better for healing chipped shoulders than wheeling, of course, and today proved no different. We headed onto Aqaba’s main street and wheeled hard and fast through the town. Traffic was reasonably dense, but our fellows seemed very excited to see us on the road, slowing down from time to time to pump fists out the window, and honk horns in recognition of either our fine folding cycle and daring maneuvers or our insanity.

We headed on, past a giant Abu Dhabi-funded housing development, toward the ferry terminal. Our plan was to investigate the option of taking a quick ferry hop over to Egypt. The road skirted along the region where the rocky desert met the coast, weaving its way through a steady band of industrial operations. We rode by factories, chemical refineries, and the like, all nestled between jagged lifeless desert and impossibly blue and sparkling sea.

The traffic speed began to increase as we ventured further from Aqaba, and soon we felt compelled to take to the sidewalk. The sidewalk was even more covered in sharp pieces of broken glass than the one from the Amman airport had been. It was startling. For a culture that generally shuns drinking, it seemed that almost every car on the road would have to have been drinking bottles of liquor and throwing them out onto the sidewalk in order to maintain this level of sharp detritus. There were plenty of scraps of label as well, advertising vodkas, rums, and beers, so it was not that we had misidentified a vicious soda bottle littering habit.

But on we rode, figuring careening trucks were at least slightly more dangerous than piles of jagged glass, trusting in the Kevlar lining of our tires, and stopping from time to time to investigate giant churning industrial operations.  We rode up and over a cliff to skirt a cliff-side overlooking the container port, where we paused for some time investigating the operation of the cranes loading and unloading all kinds of goods from all over the world. The shipping industry has always been a particular fascination of AsiaWheeling, and we are always happy to indulge in a little port viewing whenever the opportunity presents itself.

We rode on past the port. There was a large police van on the side of the road ahead of us, full of cops looking at us. As we rode by, they got on the van’s loudspeaker and blasted “It is very hot” at us. We giggled and kept riding.

Then we hit the passenger ferry terminal. It was a ghost town, populated only by a few old man clustered in the shade of  the large concrete building. Just as we pulled in, Claudia’s tire popped. Our spirits briefly fell as we crouched down to investigate the damage. It was certainly quite flat. We looked down at it in disbelief. We had hitherto had no problems with flats in all our wheeling. We had even come to think ourselves made invincible against such things by the fine Kevlar linings of our Schwalbe Big Apples.

These tires on Claudia’s Speed D7, however, were no Schwalbes, and were looking pretty flat. So now we were 20 miles or so outside of town, somewhere near the Saudi border, with a flat tire. Luckily, Jordanians are pretty friendly, and we figured we could likely hitch a ride back into town, especially with a flat tire and a blond girl.

So we locked the bikes and headed out to investigate ferries. On our way over we passed this Saudi truck, which sported a “no women” sign, which we found alarming, but also quite interesting.  Was it to ensure that no Jordanian female drivers got behind the wheel before crossing the border of Saudia Arabia where they would meet trouble?  Was it to remind the drivers to exercise willpower on long missions through the desert?  Your guesses, dear reader, are welcome in the comments.

We were able to discover very little, and not having our passports with us, were firmly forbidden from entering the passenger boarding zone. So we put the ferry plan on ice and headed out on foot, thinking we might find a beach. We had even brought bathing suits with us, just in case. So we grabbed the suits from the bikes, and headed out along a barbed wire-lined drive, past an oceanography institute. We briefly considered breaking into the institute, which had a nice looking beach, but thought better.

Some ways down the road, we did break the law, though, crawling under a fence and down to the seaside. Some difficult to interpret signage produced almost conclusive indication that it was illegal to be down here, but we were also in the middle of nowhere now, and doing nothing but wading. Or at least wading had been the plan, until we realized how filthy the place was.

It was a unique kind of filth though, for the water remained crystal clear and blue, though it was filled with floating trash. The beach too was strewn with all kinds of trash. We dared not remove our shoes for here too we found nearly the same level of broken glass strewn in the sand.

We spent a great deal of time investigating and eventually dissecting a desiccated puffer fish that had washed ashore. We climbed back up onto the road just in time to have a cop car full to the brim with Jordanian officers drive by, slow down, and roll down the window. Inside, the officers were all smiles, and were delighted to hear that we were Americans, that we were riding bicycles, and that we thought Aqaba and Jordan we beautiful. They drove off, and we waved.

Back at the cycles, we did not walk more than 30 feet before a large white van pulled over and insisted on giving us a ride. The fellows who drove the van were on their way into Aqaba anyway, and even spoke a bit of English. They were thrilled to hear all the same things that the cops had heard, and we relaxed into the ride.

Back at the Hotel Amira, we dropped off our wounded cycle and, discovering that our Indonesian wrench had disappeared at some point during the journey, headed out on foot in search of the right sized wrench. We walked for a while, asking at various places. Eventually, after getting another authoritative and resounding “no” followed with a similarly toned “and I have no idea where you can in this city,” we walked right next door and bought an adjustable wrench and a few allen keys while we were at it. Back at the Amira, we flipped Claudia’s D7 over and I began dismantling the thing. Her bike has no rear derailleur, relying on just the seven-speed internal transmission, so the chain is quite tight. It took a bit of raging to get the thing off, but off it came. When we went to investigate what had given her the puncture, I was surprised to find that it was not the glass, but a random bit of wire, with a sharp end. Fair enough.

The fellow at the front desk was more than happy to give us a bucket, which I filled with water while Scott re-inflated the tire. We took the inflated tire and plunged it into the bucket, moving it around and looking for the bubbles. We found them coming out in two places. I put my finger over them to remember where they were, and pulled the tire out of the water.

Scott was ready with our Knog patch kits, which feature ready-to-go, self-adhesive patches with cool semi-pornographic hipster cartoons on them.

We stuck a couple on the tire, waited a few minutes, and put the thing back in.

Good as new.

We awoke once again at the Valantine hotel in Wadi Musa, and finding the hotel room no less grubby and uncomfortable than before, promptly checked out.

We loaded our stuff unto the cycles and headed down into the city to find food and then a bus station. We decided that asking directions to the bus station was best, since food would undoubtedly present itself en-route.

And it did. We settled down at a road side café, to drink a little coffee and feast on our standard meal of pastes and bread. Scott’s new hair and jagged beard were no less inspiring than they had been the day before, and as we munched breakfast, I found the hair on his head to have an effect somewhat like an orchestra crescendo or a particularly charismatic marching band on my demeanor. I couldn’t wait to get out of Wadi Musa and move on to more hospitable zones.

The bus station proved to be not too far outside of town, and it was easier to get to than it had been in Amman. We were in luck. We arrived just as a bus was loading with people to head to our next destination, a city called Aqaba. Finding the bus was easy. Getting tickets for anything close to the price a local would pay was a completely different story.

The ticket seller and driver of the bus had no shame in resorting to theatrics. They made all kinds of comments in English, punctuated with swears in Arabic, about our bicycles, the size of our backpacks, the recent changes in the price of gas, and the like. We stuck to our guns though, attempting to meet snarls with giggles, pacing around hoping that time was on our side, and eventually folding up the bikes to show him how small they got. This bus, unlike the one we had taken to get to Wadi Musa, had a roof luggage rack, which meant that there was also no reason for us to buy extra seats.

In the end, with the help of Claudia’s Arabic skills, and some polling of our fellow passengers as to how much they paid for their tickets, the powers that be were willing to reduce the price for us. And so we sealed the deal. I then climbed up onto the top of the bus, followed by Claudia. Scott handed the bikes up to us, and I used our bungees, supplemented by a spool of rope that the bus operator grumpily threw up at me to secure the bikes to the rack that was bolted onto the top of our bus.

With the bikes secured, I headed uphill to use the bathroom, while Scott and Claudia chatted with a very interestingly dressed, and massively sunglassed fellow. I managed to gain admission to a billiards hall not far from the station, where I was invited to use the bathroom, offered tea, and invited to discuss football. It was World Cup time, and Jordan was aflame with soccer fever. I failed miserably in having anything intelligent to say about the World Cup, but my business card was extremely popular among the clientele, who went to great lengths to show me how they were secretly drinking vodka from a bottle in a black plastic bag in the corner. The owner offered to walk me back to the bus, explaining that these men were bad Muslims, but very good customers.

I bid the billiards shop owner goodbye and joined Scott and Claudia to climb onto the bus. And with that we relaxed into the bumpy climb out of the valley that held Wadi Musa and across the desert toward the coastal town of Aqaba. While I had been in the billiards hall, Scott and Claudia had made good friends with the well dressed and massively sunglassed fellow, who now rode with us on the bus. He explained that he was a bartender in Aqaba, an unusual job for an Arab. He also wore a pair of very expensive looking Italian shoes, which Claudia had fallen in love with. He promised to show her where to buy them in Aqaba.

As I worked to unfasten the bikes from the roof rack of the bus, the driver yelled up at me to hurry. Not a very relaxed guy this one. I paid him no heed and took my time.

Our well healed and sun-glassed friend disclosed, as we were strapping our things to the cycle’s racks, that he knew of a cheap hotel, not far from here. So we followed him down the road. Aqaba was interesting. It was very hot, and quite humid. The sun blazed, and expensive cars whipped by us. This city was very close to the boarder of Saudi Arabia, and was rumored to be a kind of B-level Saudi vacation spot. Sounded like a place for AsiaWheeling.

The hotel he showed us to was not incredibly expensive, but not quite as cheap as what we were seeking. And unless prices had risen steeply since the articles we had read about this place on the web were written, we felt we could find a much cheaper joint… maybe even with Internet. It had been some time since we’d indulged in that luxury.

So we headed off, wheeling fully loaded, and stopping in hotel after hotel. None of them seemed to have Internet, but we were beginning to find cheaper options, which was encouraging from a budgeting standpoint, if not from that of  corresponding with you, dear reader. When the first three had no Internet, we gave up on that requirement, and began to select a hotel based purely on quality and price.

Eventually we settled on a very nice and delightfully affordable place, by the name of the Amira Hotel, which had been coincidentally run by another immigrant to Jordan from Egypt. We were beginning to learn that Egyptians offered us invariably a special deal based on Claudia’s experience in Egypt and her Egyptified Arabic. We were instantly celebrities at the hotel, offered a prime spot in the lobby to park the cycles, and shown, dripping with sweat from our ride, up to the room where we gratefully dropped our things down onto a giant king-sized bed, which dominated the room, shrinking even further the tiny table and dorm sized bed with which it shared the space.

Though the temptation to relax into the air-conditioning was great, we decided to put it off and take advantage of the last bits of sunlight to do a little bit of wheeling in Aqaba. The first goal would, of course, be to find and consume some more food, which turned out, as was becoming the trend in Jordan, to be an easy, delicious, but none too cheap task.

After another standard meal of pastes, breads and oil, we hit the road. The streets here in Aqaba were wide, recently paved, and gentle on the cycles in a way that those in Wadi Musa had not been. We took the cycles around in a big, loop, searching in vain for the fabled Aqaba coastline. We did not find the coast, but we did stumble across an interesting looking coffee shop, from which a fellow called out “AsiaWheeling!” as we drove by. This is always reason enough for a waypoint in our book, so we headed over to investigate.

It turned out to be a café run by none other than the best friend (and possibly lover) of the well healed fellow we had met on the bus here. We began chatting with them and soon found ourselves compelled to be their guests. So we took our cups of complimentary coffee and sat down to listen to the proprietor play us a tune on his Jordanian oud.

The coffee was great: thick, black and just barely sweet.  We were plenty amped by the time we managed to wheel away from this social engagement. Before we departed, which was by the way no small task, we asked for directions to the seaside.

Now we had read online, and it had been corroborated by Jordanians on the bus and in Wadi Musa that there was no such thing as a public beach in Aqaba. We are pleased to announce this is resoundingly untrue. There is a giant public beach in Aqaba.

In fact, it was quite the popular place. We pulled off the busy main road and onto a paved beach-side walkway, to wheel along at a slower pace, and take in the coastline. Most of the bathers were men, but some were women. Most of the women chose not to enter the water, keeping their bodies covered in the traditional way. But a few of them chose to use a certain halal wetsuit-type bathing outfit, which was totally fascinating. It seemed also that the Hotel Previa culture was alive and well here, as evidenced by this sign.

We pulled over at a very strange restaurant so I could use the bathroom, and when I emerged this fellow was riding Claudia’s cycle. He appeared to have enjoyed it greatly, and we explained to his great chagrin the folding capabilities and the jaw-dropping nature of the in-seat air pump. With another local sufficiently impressed by the majesty of the Speed TR, we got back on the road.

A few kilometers down from the beach, we took a moment to quell our urge to visit Saudi Arabia. They of course would not let us in. In fact, they don’t even issue tourist visas. But that was just all the more reason to want to go. “One day…” we told ourselves.

The sun was hanging low, so we headed back to the Amira to drop off the cycles. After a brief recuperation and frustrating battle with the reluctant air conditioner, we headed out on foot in search of food and further adventure.

Aqaba is a city that does not shut down in the evenings. As we headed out, we found it to be every bit as crowded as during the day, perhaps even more, with most of the shops still open, now brightly lit. There was some interesting, NRA style graffiti on the whitewashed walls, which we stopped to inspect as we rounded the corner onto a street filled with freshly roasted nut merchants.

The smell of nuts was so strong; it had us uncontrollably salivating before we even reached the first vendor. Luckily, all the shops were more than happy to give out samples. The nuts were piping hot and delicious. So we bought a mixed bag, and headed on in search of more snacks.

Next we found a shop with this giant chunk of homemade halva, of which we would certainly need a piece. We supplemented that with some drinks and chips, headed back to the hotel to call it dinner.

We awoke the next morning in Amman, Jordon and promptly hopped on the cycles. We parked our Dahons down the block at the same outdoor coffee place that we had discovered the morning before, now more properly ordering unsweetened coffee, which is in Arabic “Kahuah Sadah.”

We sat down on a low-lying wall near a lower story alley, and began to drink our coffee. A group of fellows who were working below us to move some furniture and rugs around waved up to us, asking us to come down and interact. Scott obliged them, and soon the interaction evolved into a kind of comedic photo shoot. Here are the results.

We climbed back onto the road and started wheeling. We struck out in the opposite direction than we had the previous day.

We had another meeting, this time with a Finnish friend of Claudia’s. We met her in a large touristy market, which we discovered was one of the few places that was still operational, as it was run by Christians, of which there are many in Amman. It was Friday again, you see, and many of the Muslim-owned businesses had halted operation in observance of the sabbath.

We ate street food at the market: more hummus and pita, and falafel, and some shawarma wraps.

We spent the rest of the morning wandering around town with Claudia’s friend and learning about her unending frustrations with the administrative and bureaucratic hassles of trying to comply with the ridged requirements of the western powers that be. It turns out that in the face of no Jordanian ethical controls on studies, western researchers were required to jump through all manner of hoops to prove the ethical nature of their work. This is, in principal, good. But if it keeps people from getting any work done at all, are they not throwing the baby out with the bathwater? In the end it looked like our new friend would be spending the summer in Amman, but would not be able to do any research due to foot dragging.

As we were bidding goodbye, she taught us our new favorite Finn joke:

Q: “How do you tell a social Finn?”

A: “She’s staring at your shoes.”

We continued to crack up all the way back down the hill toward the city center. We loaded up on water, and after a quick session of furious work on correspondence for you, dear reader, we checked out and climbed onto the cycles. It seemed wise to put something more in our stomachs before heading to the bus station.

So we wheeled our fully loaded cycles over to a nearby falafel house and indulged in some of the house specialty and greasy cardboard containers of deep fried cauliflower. Outside the stand, a man peddled fan blades.

The meal was scrumptious in a most oily way, and feeling refueled, if somewhat laden with grease, we began to lean into the long climb out of the crater of Amman, back up to the bus station.

It was a long wheel up and plenty of climbing for three fully loaded wheelers. We stopped many times to make sure that we were on the correct route, to drink water, and to rest. Claudia was quite generous with her Arabic skills, stopping repeatedly to chat with large crowds of men outside of cafes, most of which she returned from with reports of thorough, though somewhat subdued, sexual harassment. Sometimes the sexual harassment would become slightly less subdued, and Claudia would find herself batting away stray hands. “This would be so much worse if I were not traveling with you two,” Claudia explained in exasperation. Scott and I continued to be flabbergasted at the behavior of Jordanian men, uncertain of how we could best protect her, and in total awe of Claudia’s ability to endure it.

At the bus station, we were soon surrounded by fellows offering to drive us to our next destination for unreasonable prices. Finally, we were able to find the fellow who ran the bus. He took one look at the cycles, and began a drawn out and tedious bargaining process. Finally, we were able to agree to a price to get us and all our stuff onto the bus. There was no luggage compartment, so we would need to pile our things onto the seats.

Once we finally got on, the driver pulled a last ditch attempt to get Scott and me to cram into the seat-and-a-half -sized space between our cycles and our luggage. Here again, Claudia came to the rescue. She was already hard at work making friends with our fellow passengers, who turned out to all be recent graduates of the Amman police academy.  She asked them how much they had paid for their tickets, and once we found out how drastically overcharged we had been, we found a more solid basis for an argument that our things might take up the back seats of the bus, with us occupying the following row.

In the face of our knowledge, the fellow began to exhibit what we would find to be a common Jordanian trait: rather than make any attempt to repair bridges or laugh it off (which would be the Indian, Indonesian, Cambodian, or Vietnamese style), the man simply became cold as ice, and refused to treat us with an ounce of respect for the rest of the journey.

This was fine, however, for he was at the other end of the bus, driving, and we were in the back with a whole crowd of new police friends. They asked about my ukulele, and I took it out, beginning to play. The driver of the bus promptly turned the radio onto a local pop channel and cranked the volume up.  Fair enough. I put the uke away.

With that the bus pulled out of the station and began its long crawl across the desert toward Wadi Musa. The bus ride was about four hours, enough to get comfortable, but not so much that we began to tire of the journey.

Meanwhile the desert landscape was beautiful in a completely unique way, compared to the desert we had seen in Oman and the UAE. It was a place of large flat lands, mesas, and south-western-U.S.-style rock formations. As we drove on, we continued to chat with our newly christened police officer friends.  It turns out they were all coming back to Wadi Musa for a kind of graduation party.

They had been proudly showing us their newly printed diplomas,which they all proudly carried with them. Unfortunately, when we stopped to stretch our legs, one of them left his diploma somewhere in the middle of the desert rest stop. He began to dissolve into madness, searching the bus wildly. We attempted be be helpful by moving our stuff around as well, engaging with him in the doomed mission to manifest the lost diploma. Then, just as quickly as the madness had set in, it passed. The fellow became relaxed and cheerful once again, and we continued the ride as if nothing had happened.

When we finally arrived in town, the sun was just setting. Our new friend who had lost the diploma got on his mobile phone. He knew of a good cheap hotel, he explained, and soon a driver from the hotel had arrived in a van to take our stuff. We ended up loading our larger bags into the van, and wheeling up behind him.

The party was already well under way in this city. People were driving around in over stuffed cars, and all around us we could hear the unnerving sound of automatic weapons fire. It seems the new grads were firing their machine guns into the air in celebration.

This was a hilly place, some of the steepest wheeling of the entire trip to date, in fact. The roads were also polished to an unnatural slickness, perhaps by sand, or wind, I have no idea. But I found my back tire slipping and loosing traction on the steepest sections. Once we reached the hotel, we were somewhat disappointed to find it to be your classic backpacker-type joint. The clientele were almost exclusively foreigners, and the interior of the place was so cluttered with a mixture of advertisements for touring services to the surrounding sites,  old faded posters of the most beautiful places in Jordon, or large advertisements for Petra brand beer. Needless to say, we were already a little wary upon entrance.

The initial asking price was monumental by AsiaWheeling’s and most Asian backpacker’s standards. Further inspection of the room confirmed that this was no Chinese business hotel either. The place was grimy to be sure, and expensive. But it was late, there was gunfire all around us, and we were hungry.

So we started bargaining. It was the most drawn out, energy intensive and multifaceted bit of bargaining we had yet experienced. In the hotel’s corner there were two chaps, one good cop, friend-of-the-owner-just-trying-to-help-us-out-type guy and then the grumpy and predatory owner. One was a short portly smiley fellow. The other was a rail thin chap, with sunken eyes and a jagged scowl.  His teeth, blackened and disintegrating with decay, sat like sharp stones in his small mouth. In our corner, there was one Arabic speaking blond girl and two weathered fellows in Panama hats and mustaches. It was going to be a close one.

We dithered back and forth, frowning, stroking our facial hair, making clicking noises, and generally play-acting. Finally we settle on a price that was still quite high, but doable. We asked to have a moment to chat, and after a quiet word outside returned in to seal the deal. During the chat, however, it seemed that the price that had been offered had been either repealed, or never was valid to begin with.

So in frustration we continued the assault. Finally, when the two fellows continued to refuse to return to the aforementioned price, we began to prepare, as much as we did not want to, to leave. Just as were turning our backs, the wiry, scowly front desk attendant called out to Claudia in Arabic, “Where did you learn Arabic?”

“Egypt,” she replied.

They then began to ask her a series of questions aimed at confirming that indeed she had lived in Egypt. And Claudia seemed to pass this test.

“I am an Egyptian,” he replied, Gitanes cigarette bouncing in his mouth, and stuck out his hand.  He revealed a tattoo proving that he was a Coptic Christian, hailing from a particularly poor neighborhood of Cairo.

Finally it was over. We paid the man; relieved to be on to the next task, we headed up to our room and threw down our stuff.

From there, we climbed back on the cycles. Barely able to keep from sliding on the steep, slick pavement, we ventured downhill toward the city center to find a little dinner and an ATM. The ATM was easy, and while Claudia was “WarBucks-ing” as we had come to irreverently refer to the replenishing of the steady trickle of money which is AsiaWheeling’s lifeblood, a child appeared from the dark street. He pulled up on his bicycle, and hopped off, flicking down his kickstand with a sickening rusty squeak. He was very interested in our Speed Series Dahons, and we decided to let him take a little ride. He did not seem 100% trustworthy, though, so I headed off next to him on Claudia’s bike to accompany him for the wheel.

While I was wheeling next to this kid, making sure that he didn’t disappear into the desert night with the Speed TR, another round of nearby machine gun fire sprang up. It was a startling kind of noise. I knew it was all in good fun, but something about mixing the sounds of war with those of celebration, was making getting used to this particular piece of culture harder than usual. By the time I returned back from my little wheel with this kid, Scott and Claudia had already asked a fellow for directions to a restaurant recommendation.

We followed his advice, and found ourselves wheeling not more than a block up the street to an pricey tourist-filled joint.  We sat down, taking our seats next to a bunch of British 17-year-olds, who were traveling in Jordon after graduating from high school. This place was way too touristy for AsiaWheeling… but we were hungry and tired, so we capitulated. We gave our order to a somewhat grumpy and overly costumed waiter, who spoke perfect English.

Soon the young kid who had ridden our bicycle showed up and sat down with us. He immediately ordered a Coke and began to chat us up. He took out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, and began smoking. Then he made a faux attempt to light my mustache on fire with his lighter. Pulling his hand back at the last minute and blowing out the flame, he proceeded to roll back into his chair consumed with laughter; we looked on confused.

The more time we spent with him, the more uncomfortable I became. Something was off about this guy. We couldn’t quite put our fingers on it. His English was okay, but not quite good enough to communicate consistently. He was likely not really dangerous in any way. He certainly wanted to get some free Cokes out of the relationship. But there was a strange performance aspect to the way he interacted with us that was really unsettling. Picking up his mobile phone, he fabricated conversations of business deals in an attempt to impress us.  In the end we hustled through our  mix-plates of falafel and pastes, and headed out the door.

Back on the cycles, we decided to indulge in a quick spot of night wheeling, letting the physical activity calm our somewhat frazzled minds. Wadi Musa… it was quite a place. It was the gateway to the splendorous world of Petra, an ancient city carved into the desert rocks. But had the beauty of its surroundings somehow turned its people into tourism-fueled predators?

We awoke the next morning, bid Sid a very fond farewell, heaving our packs onto our backs, the cycles, folded in their bags on our shoulders, and teetered our way downstairs.

There was no problem finding a large van-taxi to load all our stuff into, and with one last tip of the Panama hat to our dear friend Sid, we were off. Our driver was, of course, Pakistani, and he made small talk with us in very entertaining English as we raced along the brand new highways of Dubai, toward an airport-shaped shadow that loomed in the distance, enshrouded in dust.

Our cab dropped us off outside the Jazeera Airways terminal, and we headed to check-in for our flight. Jazeera Airways is a low-cost Kuwaiti airline. As a low-cost airline, they have a reduced luggage limit. We had encountered such things in the past. We consider reduced luggage limits to be one of the main enemies of AsiaWheeling Global Enterprises, but generally a little bit of sweet talking paired with perhaps a small fee gets us through, and gets the bikes onto the airplane.

Unfortunately, it seemed this time would be different. We were a fair bit over the (dare I say skimpy) 15 kg per person luggage limit, and the charge for the extra luggage was going to be huge. I’m talking hundreds of dollars. So we began pleading, begging, presenting business cards, explaining AsiaWheeling and our mission of peace, complimenting the airline’s graphic identity, the check-in counter attendant’s uniform, and Kuwait in general. Eventually, the attendant got on the phone with her manager and, low and behold, all extra luggage fees were forgiven.

“You are very lucky, you know that?” she said to us in English.  We know. We thanked her again and again, praising the glory of Jazeera Airways, in their infinite mercy. And with the bags and cycles headed down the conveyor toward Kuwait, we strolled on through security, and got our passports stamped by men in flowing robes who earned hundreds of thousands of dollars a year; we were leaving the UAE.

With this stamp, Scott and I would be retiring our passports for a while, switching over to our second passports, which we had begun to affectionately refer to as the “moon” passports. So I took my slightly fatter 10-year “sun” passport out of my Hong Kong fake leather cover and replaced it with our totally blank “moon” book.

The departures terminal of the Dubai airport was just as expansive and luxurious as our arrivals terminal had been. In particular, we were impressed with the duty free time planner they had posted.  It let the duty free shopper time his or her shopping adventures down to the minute, while still ensuring an on-time departure. Why doesn’t every airport have this?

We purchased a couple of drastically overpriced cups of coffee and falafel sandwiches from a Starbucks clone in the terminal and climbed on the flight.

The flight to Kuwait was all too short, but we were able to make good use of it, oscillating between looking out the window, and getting a little work done in the AsiaWheeling mobile offices, Jazeera Airways edition.

Soon the sprawling capital of Kuwait City began to loom below us, a uniform dust colored grid-work, smack dab in the middle of the uniform dust colored desert. As the plane flew lower, the city began to take on slightly more color, and we felt an almost uncontrollable urge to wheel it.

While hard at work in Sid’s apartment, we had already tried to convince Jazeera airways to let us spend a night or two in Kuwait, but it had proven dreadfully expensive to change the ticket. So in the end we had to resign ourselves to spend just a few hours in the international terminal of the Kuwait International Airport. When we finally unloaded into the airport, we found we had even less than the two hours we had coveted. We were quickly ushered by Jazeera staff through the airport to the ticket counter, where our connecting tickets were issued to us by a man who looked uncannily like a friend of mine named Max Strasser. We moved on toward our gate, just bubbling with curiosity about this place.

The flowing dishdash robe was definitely alive and well here, as was the female Islamic outfit, in all iterations from simple hijab to full burka. There also were a fair number of white and Arab fellows in military fatigues roaming around as well. We wanted so badly to learn more about this place, to wheel its streets, but we could not. So we reluctantly joined the line to board our flight.

We landed in Jordon and filed off the airplane and into the customs room. We changed our Omani Reils and UAE Dirhams into Jordanian Dinars at a large glass booth and then got in line to purchase visa’s upon entry.  The Jordanian Dinar is actually linked one-to-one with the British Pound, so calculating prices would be slightly easier than usual.

I must admit, part of me was worried that my entering this country on a completely virgin two-year passport might cause a red flag, even encourage some detainment or interrogation. Luckily this was quite far from the case. The man who sold me the 10-pound visa barely even looked at me or my passport. His counterpart asked me a number of questions in a very thickly accented English including whether or not I had a Jordanian phone number. I explained to him that I did not, but he just stared blankly back at me, made a face like he had just discovered a bit of sand in his mouth, puffed out his cheeks and lips, making an noise like a mare, and stamped my passport violently.

Claudia and Scott got through with even less hassle.

We collected our cycles, and headed outside the airport, where we unwrapped and began to re-assemble them.  There we attracted the usual crowd of baggage handlers, fellow travelers, and security personnel, all interested in witnessing the majesty of a Dahon folding cycle. We indulged them happily.

From our previous research, the airport should have been positioned about 25 kilometers outside the capital city of Amman. This seemed doable. So after some discussion, we decided to wheel into the city fully loaded. Armed with some directions from members of the crowd, we hit the road.

The countryside was beautiful. It was arid, but not as striking a desert as we had found in the Gulf. The farther we rode, the more we began to notice quite a large amount of agricultural activity. Also, for much of the way, there was a wide sidewalk that ran next to the road. This was especially nice, since it saved us from having to ride in the fast and sometimes reckless Jordanian highway traffic.

Unfortunately, the sidewalk was also littered with a hitherto unprecedented amount of broken glass. It seems the practice of throwing glass bottles out of your moving vehicle is quite common in Jordan, though I don’t know if we ever spotted someone in the act… it could also be that for one reason or another all the broken glass from the surrounding area is swept by some municipal team over to the sidewalk. Stranger things have certainly happened.

After riding for what must have been 25 kilometers, we reached an exit indicating it was headed toward Amman. Amman was, however, far from visible from our current junction. So we flagged down a cab and Claudia asked in Arabic how far we were. The man said 20 or 25 more kilometers. This was perplexing, but the day was relatively young, so we kept on. A few kilometers later, with still no signs of increasing urbanity, the hunger hit and we pulled over to a roadside shop to buy some shapes.

As we were purchasing food, the call to prayer began to sound from all the surrounding mosques. The owner of the shop kindly asked us to hurry up so he could close down the operation and go pray. We quickly threw some bottles of water, a couple bags of potato chips, and a jar of halva onto the counter, purchasing them with haste, and heading out to sit on the curb and feast.

While we were eating, we noticed a particularly haunting child, portrayed on the sign above us. Any speculation as to its relevance is welcomed in the comments. Just as everyone was arriving back from praying, we climbed back on the cycles.

We were riding now on a smaller road, running parallel to the highway. It had been quite a while since we’d stopped to snack, and there was still no sign of Amman. What had we done wrong? We must have arrived in a different (perhaps low-cost carrier related?) airport. Regardless, we had been riding for a while and there was no sign of Amman, though we did continue to be reassured by signs and traffic obviously directed toward the capital. Eventually, we came upon a restaurant, poised on hill in the middle of semi-arid agricultural Jordan.

We decided to head in and ask why we seemed unable to reach the capital. Scott and Claudia headed in while I watched the cycles. They were taking quite some time, so I took out the ukulele and began to play. Soon a group of restaurant employees emerged from the kitchen to investigate what I was doing. They were all jovial fellows, and by the time Scott emerged with news of our location, we had a little dance party going.

It turns out that we were at least another 30 or 40 kilometers away from the capital, and that we would probably need to get a cab. Luckily, the owner of the restaurant knew of an unlicensed cab driver, who drove a large car or truck, easily able to fit our three cycles and all our bags. We decided to pull the trigger on the cab, even though the price was high enough that it would use most of our remaining money. We took stock of our remaining cash and decided that, though we were hungry, we did not have quite enough to eat at the restaurant. When we explained this to the owner, he insisted that we eat there for free, bringing out three pizzas and three bottles of water.

This unexpected generosity was going to be a theme of our travels in the Middle East, but especially then, it being so new, the action made me uncomfortable. What was the man looking for in return? What was the catch? Of course, there was none. I was just unprepared for Arab culture. We thanked him again and again, and hungrily enjoyed the pizzas.

The restaurant was nice, filled with flat screen TVs, sporting a large hard wood walled and floored interior, full of solid oak tables. How could this essentially depopulated bit of irrigation-dependent Jordanian farmland support such a swinging place? Thoughts of money laundering did cross our minds…

When the cab finally came, we were able to establish a price that was 30% lower than what had been quoted, allowing us to pay the man after all. In what Claudia assured us would be a “very Arab” way to do it, we thanked him again for the food and hid the full amount of the bill been under a napkin on the table, being sure to let the waiter see us doing it.

We climbed into the cab, which turned out to be one of those half-pickup/half-SUV  vehicles. There was indeed plenty of room for us and all the stuff, and with a few more goodbyes and waves out the back window, we drove off toward Amman. The sky was already becoming orange with sunset by the time we arrived. We felt giddy with our good fortune, and enjoyed the ride,  chatting with our driver in pantomime and through Claudia’s Arabic, and speculating as to what kind of illegal business might be laundering money through the pizza joint where we had just eaten.

Our man had quite the driving style. I felt surprisingly safe in the car, given that he drifted between lanes without signaling, chain-smoked cigarettes, and had wedged his phone in between the prongs of the steering wheel in order to better text while driving.

We unloaded our stuff once we had entered Amman city center, and bid our man goodbye. Amman is a city built in a kind of crater, so that entering it feels somewhat like climbing down from the nosebleed section of a stadium. The architecture and color of all the buildings is also more or less uniform, adding to the unique quality of the view. It is a very old looking city, but with decent roads, and plenty of wild drivers. Now that we were in the center, the city seemed to rise up around us, as though we were sitting right at home plate looking out into the stands.

The hotel that we had selected from our pirated copy of the Jordanian Lonely Planet PDF turned out to have been turned into a hospital of sorts, for when we arrived there, though the sign was still affixed more or less to the wall of the building, we were greeted by a large crowd of people in wheelchairs, on crutches, and sporting terrible scars and burns. They were very smiley and quite entertained by us, but also sorry to inform us that we could only stay there if we first got injured in some way.  This comment, made by one of the ringleaders, a large man of perhaps 50 years, in wheelchair and cast, was met with roaring applause and laughter by the rest of the patients. We smiled nervously and bid them adieu.

Luckily nearby we located another hotel by the name of the “Hotel Asia.” The place was only moderately filthy, not too expensive, and the owner spoke splendid English, having worked for some time with the U.S. forces in Iraq. So we decided to go with this one, paying for a few nights, and hauling our stuff upstairs.

It was certainly time to eat again, so we headed out into the Amman night, finding a large and very popular looking shawarma stand not far down the street. The owners turned out to be Egyptian and instantly took a liking to Claudia, who not only spoke their language, and had exotic and beautiful blond hair, but also had spent quite some time living and studying in Egypt.

Needless to say, she was a hit. The shawarma wraps were also delicious.

From there we wandered through the night to a rooftop café, where we wiled away a few hours playing whist. It had been some time since whist had played a role in AsiaWheeling. It was good to have it back in the mix.

It was good to be in Amman. It was a fascinating town, and despite the fact that the rooftop café charged us what we later learned was about %800 the normal price for tea, I was quickly becoming a fan of Jordanian people as well.