That next morning, as we woke up amidst the sleeping hordes at Talal’s New Hotel, Claudia was not feeling well. She had managed to pick up a food-born pathogen that Scott and I had somehow escaped. As a result, the team was moving very slowly, hopping from bathroom to bathroom, making our way from the hotel to breakfast, which we decided it would be easiest to execute back at the Le Chef.

Moving so slowly through the city gave us plenty of time to notice and appreciate the strikingly European buildings that were all around us. It was still AsiaWheeling, but there was certainly not a lot of Asia in this place.

Breakfast seemed to do little to help Claudia’s state, and so we returned her to the hotel, where she would spend the day relaxing. Meanwhile, Scott and I headed out to the meeting with Red Bull, with Claudia safe and sound, and hopefully on the mend, in the company of the owner of Talal’s New Hotel. The owner was unfortunately not named Talal. He was, however, a self proclaimed nurse and promised to take good care of our dear West Asia Cultural Liaison.

So with that we hopped on the Speed TRs, just the two of us again, and began wheeling toward a certain Starbucks, a few kilometers down the coast in the less touristy business district of Beirut.  Wheeling to the place was certainly raw. We made our way along a very large and busy road. The traffic was fast, and cyclists were very uncommon, which meant that our fellow travelers knew little about what to do when they encountered a cyclist in front of them. At one point on the wheel, Scott caught his long broken dynamo hub-powered light in his spoke, which made a sickening sound and savagely bent the thing. We stopped to tear the broken light off and tighten the spot back up, then hit the road once again. We rode fast, signaling our intent early and often, and eventually we made it to the Starbucks.

Not long after we’d sat down, and well before our sweat soaked shirts had begun to dry, we spotted a laid back, sunglassed character wandering into the shop, making that kind of tentative eye contact that is so common among those who are scanning a room for someone they’ve never met before. It must have been Mueen, our Red Bull contact, and we walked over to make ourselves obvious.

He was indeed Mueen, and he stuck out his hand, and introduced himself. We then sat down and enjoyed the biggest cup of coffee we’d had since we’d arrived from the Gulf. We discussed AsiaWheeling’s philosophy of travel, our adventure to date, and the role that caffeine plays in our lifestyle. You see, dear reader, we ride, day in day out, on some of the gnarliest traffic in the world, literally taking our lives in our hands each day. Preserving our lives requires alertness, vigilance, and lucidity. The number one thing that we can do to encourage that state of mind is to sleep plenty each night, and practice good wheeling technique. But sometimes that just won’t get you there. So thank goodness there’s also caffeine.

We had enjoyed the added lucidity and energy that came along with all the Red Bull we drank while road tripping the Gulf, and we were excited to add it to our lifestyle again.

With the coffees done, we headed around behind the Starbucks, and folded the cycles throwing them into the back of our new friend’s SUV, for the drive over to Red Bull HQ. As we rode, we discussed Lebanon and Lebanese food. “You know of this salad called the fattoush?” he asked. Of course we did, having been eating it nearly daily for a month now. “You see there was a time in Lebanon when there was not much food to go around. We invented this dish as a way to avoid wasting our stale flatbread. The hard, stale bread would be crumbled, blended in with greens, and dressed with oil..” The notion certainly sounded great to us.

Mueen then asked us when we’d last eaten. The answer was, of course, a few hours ago at the Le Chef not far from our hotel. But that seemed enough time to him to be justified in insisting we stop at a restaurant on the way, specializing in a local flatbread called Manakish.

Once there, Mueen ordered us two, and a couple of bottles of Ayran, the local salty yogurt drink.

We finished those as we battled the traffic to get the rest of the way to the headquarters. Inside, we were quickly introduced to the team, all of whom were fantastic people.

We spent a particularly large amount of time chatting with the head of the “sports” division, which in Lebanon, at least, consists largely of motorsports. To give us an illustration, he and Mueen shared a few of their “drifting” videos with us.

For those of you who do not know what drifting is, it’s a motorsport in which the driver exceeds the amount of torque that can be placed on his wheels sending them spinning in smoking, screeching blurs against the ground, and launching his car sliding around a parking lot, drifting like a pat of butter in a hot pan, left and right on burning rubber. Red Bull had sponsored a number of such competitions in Lebanon. And I must admit, the videos were pretty impressive, with the drivers squealing in manic arcs through open lots, around cones, and even through the tight corners of parking garages.

Having finally caught our fill of drifting videos, we headed out to grab some cases of Red Bull and strap them to the bikes.

It felt great to strap so much delightful elixir to our Speed TRs, and we made sure to pause for a group photo before splitting.

And then off we went, back downhill and into town, working our way toward the hotel where we hoped to find Claudia  on the mend.

It took us a while to get back, as we battled traffic, laden down with Red Bull, and confused by the lack of signage.

We were forced to stop quite a few times to ascertain our position. Luckily, plenty of the locals spoke bits and pieces of English and all knew where our hotel’s night club district was. So eventually we succeeded in arriving back at Talal’s New Guesthouse to find Claudia looking better, but still far from 100%.

From there, the three of us wheeled to the bus station, which was hidden in an enclave underneath a giant raging highway. In true AsiaWheeling style, we bought the last three tickets on the next bus to Byblos, and commenced sitting around and waiting for our departure time.

I sat down on the side of the platform and played the uke, while Scott chatted with the locals, and Claudia snoozed against a pile of bags, cases of Red Bull, and folding bicycles. In a short while, the bus arrived and we climbed on.

It was a surprisingly short ride to Jbeil, which is the Lebanese name for the city, which surrounds Byblos, and it seemed only seconds later that we climbed off into the night. It was not a touristy bus, evidenced by the fact that we were the only people to get off in Jbeil. With all our bags unloaded and piled nearby, we took a moment to take stock of our surroundings. We were on a street corner, next to the inter-city highway. There were a group of Lebanese army officers nearby us, holding fancy automatic weapons, and scrutinizing our behavior. We openly scrutinized them back, and watched as a few more of them arrived with bags of falafel wraps, handing them out to all the soldiers.

Claudia headed over to ask directions to the center of town, while Scott and I unfolded the cycles. Then we were wheeling again. It was not a big place, and finding our way to the center was quite easy. We checked out a few of the hotels in the city center, but found them all to be well over $100 a night. Even with Claudia sick, we needed some place cheaper, so we wheeled on.

It suddenly became apparent that it was time to eat again, so we pulled over at a shawarma place, and ordered some wraps.

The wraps were delightful and we were even able to plug in our computers and consult the Lonely Planet. The news was not good. It seemed that the entire city was essentially devoid of reasonably priced accommodation. There was one place though, called the King George Inn, which was only $60 a night. This, we decided, would be our next target.

And so with that, we left Claudia to look after our stuff, and continued to compute, while Scott and I headed out on what turned out to be quite the lengthy uphill battle toward the King George.

When we finally arrived, we found the place to be staffed by a very friendly young man, by the name of Tony, and his somewhat curmudgeonly father. The asking prices turned out to be significantly more than what was printed in our perhaps outdated Lonely Planet, but after a fair bit of inspecting of rooms, and heavy bargaining with the son, we were able to arrive upon something that we figured would be manageable for a couple days at least.

We then began haggling over what would be a fair price to have them drive us back down the hill to pick up Claudia and the bags. That too was a tedious affair, but eventually we found common ground.

So we climbed into the father’s shiny black Mercedes, marveling at how Lebanese people all drive such fancy cars, and headed down to pick up Claudia. The man spoke very little English, but was quite fluent in French. So I tried on my old French skills from Grinnell Public High School and began to converse in a most broken way. As we drove on, chatting imprecisely, the father began to renege on all our agreed-upon pricing and started once again inflating the room toward $100. When he found that Claudia was also going to be sleeping there, he redoubled his efforts.

We waited him out, though, and eventually through continued exhausted bargaining and general pricing shtick, we arrived at the same price as before, turned over our passports for registration, and collapsed into bed.

We woke up once again amidst the sea of bodies at Talal’s New Hotel in Beirut and headed out in search of breakfast and connectivity. The hotel had advertised wireless Internet, but the wireless network was actually more like a tiny drizzle of information, which was being split between countless unwashed laptop-toting backpackers, where actually loading a page was an excuse to celebrate.

We had been corresponding over e-mail with our Red Bull contacts in Lebanon, and we needed to call them to confirm a meeting for the next day. Doing this over Skype, on this network, at least, would be impossible, so we set out in search of SIM cards.

Before we got too deep into that endeavor, however, we would need to feed ourselves. Today we headed out in the opposite direction, searching for breakfast.

We ended up selecting an interesting and quite delicious place, by the name of “Le Chef.” It was decently affordable, and massively tasty. The staff was also quite fascinating, for they had been trained to yell at people as they passed by on the street, and to whoop in celebration when people entered the place. However, in all other interactions they were the most somber, understated and disinterested service people you’d encounter anywhere. They were particularly baffled when Scott and Claudia came in, but I lingered outside, doing some quick repairs on Claudia’s bike, whose chain had lost tension. They ended up whooping twice in false alarm as I busied myself with her Speed D7.

Stomachs full, we picked up once again the search for SIM cards. After repeated attempts to purchase them, however, we were sorely disappointed to discover that even the cheapest cards were in excess of $50 USD. After paying only two or three bucks in most of the countries we had visited to date, this seemed positively ridiculous. So we decided to head out in search of a payphone, ducking in and out of the little call shops which are attached to many of the gas stations here. Payphone prices too seemed unreal, charging 60-75 cents a minute for local calls, so we wheeled on, determined to find a way to make the contact without paying more than a night in a Chinese business hotel to do so.

Finally we were able to locate a seaside beach-resort-restaurant-and-bar type place, which allowed us to make a call for free on one of their waiter’s cell phones. Scott paced around, triumphantly talking with the folks at Red Bull and scribbling data onto a spare AsiaWheeling business card. Meanwhile Claudia supported our benefactors by purchasing some ice cream.

With the meeting all set for tomorrow, and directions to our meeting place in hand, we left in high spirits and climbed onto the Speed TRs. We headed back up the hill that overlooked that classic Beirut seaside view, and made our way back down the gentle incline toward the city’s many beaches. We had strapped swimsuits and sunscreen to the bikes and had all intents and purposes to spend the day at the beach.

Most of the beaches, however, were attached to swanky clubs and restaurants, and charged for entrance. We were much more interested in finding the people’s beach. So we wheeled on for some time,  when we spotted a particularly beautiful section of coastline that was not your classic sandy beach, but did appear to be a people’s swimming hole. We decided to take a Rauschenberg and head in to investigate.

We made our way down the cliff, along a rather treacherous stretch of gravel road to the seaside, where we found plenty of people swimming and fishing in close proximity, along with a plethora of cobbled together structures that  housed restaurants, bars, and hookah spots.

We locked the bikes next to a bunch of fisherman’s mopeds, and headed out on foot, picking our way over the rock formations and following the sound of people yelling and splashing in the water.

The swimming hole we found was gorgeous. It consisted of deep, crystal clear blue water, surrounded by startling picturesque cliffs. The water was easily approached by the network of large plate-like formations that were so emblematic of this coastline. We found an open spot on the rocks and began to relax.

I whipped out the ukulele, and we began to strum and sing. Soon we attracted the attention of some picnicking Lebanese chillers, who invited us over to join them. They were all college age chaps, enjoying an idle summer soaking up rays in Beirut. They spoke only a tiny bit of English, but we managed to joke around and even find a few songs that overlapped between their taste and what I knew on the ukulele.

Before we knew it, the sun was sinking low and it was time to jump in the water. So in I went. The water was cool and welcoming. It was also plenty salty, making it quite easy to float. Getting out of the water, on the other hand, was none too easy. The tide was low enough that the rim of the rocky plate was about two feet above me. So I watched the other swimmers and studied their methods. It seemed that the way to get back on land was to wait for a wave to come in, and let it take you up high enough to grab onto the edge of the plate and scramble up.

I swam over slowly, biding my time, and paying attention to the approaching waves. As I got closer to the edge of the plate, I could see that it was indeed a very lively place, covered with sea plants, and all kinds of little spiny creatures moving around, squirting out little jets of water, and generally being crustaceous. I took a deep breath and hoped I was not about to get a torso-full of sea urchin spines and began to scramble.

It worked, and with only a few minor slices, I made it back onto the rocks. It must have looked gnarly, for neither Scott nor Claudia followed me in.

We continued to idle there with our new friends until the sun sank below the horizon.

We woke up in our room at Talal’s New Hotel in Beirut, Lebanon. Despite the fact that it was well after 10:00 am,  we picked our way over the bodies of the other sleeping guests, which were strewn all around the place, in order to get outside.

The first order of business was, of course, eating. And we found a reasonable looking place not far from our hotel. It was a kind of a delicatessen, advertising falafel wraps, hummus and the like.  Being accustomed to the normal Middle Eastern practice of ordering a number of plates and eating them with bread, we did so.

The owner was more than happy to oblige us, making sure, however, to caution us that plates would be more expensive than sandwiches. The sandwiches were very affordable, though, so we figured all would be okay. Wrong we were, for when the bill came, it was so large that it could have bought 25 sandwiches easily.  It was probably time to protest, but, perhaps in a moment of weakness, we just paid the bill and left in a foul mood, hoping that a little wheeling might help to erase this expensive and distasteful experience from our minds.

And that it did. We headed first down to the oceanside, where we began to skirt the coast, taking in the city of Beirut, which rose into the hills to our left.

It was quite an impressive place, bustling with giant new construction projects, and already punctuated with modern-looking high rise apartment blocks.

Looking to our right, the geology of the coastline proved not only interesting, but strikingly beautiful.  On top of it, giant cast concrete shapes provided an intended erosion barrier between the beach clubs and the sea.

The city was perched on a bank of cliffs, overlooking the luscious blue of the Mediterranean Sea. As the cliffs made their way down to the water, at the point where the surf made contact, they spread out into large plate-like structures which served as the perfect spots to harbor all kinds of sea plants and animals. The structures themselves, I had a suspicion, might even be the result of many years of habitation by creatures that left some kind of sediment behind. These days the wide seaside plates, also acted as a perch for the many sun-baked local fishermen who dotted the coastline.

Traffic was, in a completely unprecedented way, completely insane. We were becoming accustomed to the sound of squealing tires and the smell of burning rubber; the sight of young Lebanese men in luxury cars drag racing at stop lights was also no surprise. I even saw a few cars pull hand brake turns in relatively empty intersections.

Given all this automotive madness, we were quite glad to move off the street and onto a kind of seaside promenade, which had been constructed in what one might call the European style. We rode along this, enjoying the sun, the water, and the various seaside operations that were scattered along our route, many of which seemed to be focused on scraping muck up from the seafloor and monetizing it in some way.

We were forced to join traffic again when the road rounded a corner and we began to climb, following the cliffside as it grew higher and higher above sea level. Soon we were rewarded with a grand view of the Mediterranean Sea.

It was a vision we were familiar with from the posters that hung in most Lebanese restaurants in the U.S. It was the impossibly blue-green glassy ocean, out of which giant golden rocks jutted, accented with tufts of green plant life. The idyllic scene was only slightly marred by a giant flotilla of plastic post consumer waste, which had, due to the prevailing currents, been corralled just below the epic rock face.

On we went, tearing ourselves away from the view and continuing to slug up and over the hill, which spilled out into a long easy downhill back toward sea level. Partway down the hill, however, we spotted a bent and crumbling barbed wire fence, which separated us from a giant abandoned lot overlooking the sea.

We decided that with the fence in so dilapidated a state, and with Lebanon being, as it is, mostly devoid of government, it was likely no one would mind if we just wheeled right on in.

Inside we found a grid of half finished concrete streets that might, at one point, have been intended to serve a small grid of housing blocks. They had long been neglected, though, and were now strewn with trash, and overgrown with coastal grasses. We continued to wheel on into the abandoned lot, past a number of shipping-containers-turned-housing structures. Most of them showed signs of at least semi-recent occupation, but we did not run into any inhabitants.

All around us were the remnants of half built buildings, and the refuse of vagrants. It was delightfully raw. As we rode on, we wondered: what had ceased completion of this housing project? What had taken this prime piece of seaside real estate and turned it into a post apocalyptic wasteland?

At the end of the crumbling half-built road, we were rewarded with a delightful view of the rich blue sea and the patchwork of plate-like formations which were to be found where the cliffs met the ocean.

We took a moment to sit down and rest in a makeshift cliff-side bungalow, where we found a couple of serviceable plastic chairs and a little shade.

We spent a while taking it all in, perched up there with the magnificent view, before climbing back on the cycles and riding back to the main drive.

We headed on, past a rather large road-side sheep-selling operation, which heralded our entrance into the older and poorer part of the city. Lebanon is a very mixed place, with Muslims and Christians of many ethnicities living together, now at least in relative peace. We had been staying in the richer, Christian part of town, but we were now heading into the poorer Muslim section.

We rode on past fruit sellers and countless auto parts shops.  The architecture in this part of town took a turn for the fascinating, with the return of the Damascus-style intersection between traditional Islamic buildings and 1970s brutalism.

Our pining for Syria was only strengthened by this bit of pro-mayonnaise graffiti.

On we went, deeper into the Muslim part of Beirut. Not more than 20 years ago, these two parts of the city had been at war with one another. And though peace had returned to the city, one could defiantly feel that the Christian part of town had come out on top. The streets here were more crumbling, filth was more prevalent, children wandered with no shoes, and the general nature of the buildings and businesses around us was less about flash and glam, and more about getting things done, putting food on the table, and the like.

Speaking of food, we noticed we were hungry and stopped when we saw a few vendors selling bananas and  Arabic sweets out of the back of a bread truck.

The sweets were amazing, though the vendors proved particularly grumpy when they discovered our order was just a small sampling of each.

So on we went, wheeling harder now, really pushing ground by. We stopped at a couple of bike shops, in hopes of buying some new bike lights, but it seemed that in Beirut all bike shops were actually toy stores, which just placed bikes outside to lure cyclists in and them sell them beach and sandbox-related products.

As happens from time to time on AsiaWheeling, we took a wrong turn and ended up in a family’s yard.

This one was particularly interesting as it contained a smiling child holding a rifle. He was more than happy to point us back toward the main road, and waved us off leaning on his firearm.

Soon the city fell away and we were out into a rocky desert. Up ahead we could see a large tunnel looming, and we decided to take it. It was a particularly hairy mission, pedaling through that deafening tube, enduring strange puffs of wind, and close calls with mad Lebanese drivers.

We discovered it was a tunnel underneath the Beirut airport when we found ourselves suddenly outside again, squinting in the sunlight, ears ringing, and surrounded by barbed wire fencing and radar towers. Perhaps even more interesting than the airport was the fact that we had found ourselves also at a giant sewage outlet, where it seemed all the excrement of the city of Beirut was being let out into the sea. We paused to catch our breath and watch the complicated merging of the river of filth and the beautiful blue sea.

When we climbed back on the cycles to head onward, we found ourselves riding though a remarkable wasteland of trash. The garbage was piled high along the side of the road for kilometers. It was as though a thousand buildings had been torn down, still full of stuff, and all the refuse piled along this freeway.

Now well out of the city, and free of traffic lights, pedestrians, and other obstacles, the traffic speed picked up greatly.  Once again, it seemed prudent to move from the road proper onto the large sidewalk that ran alongside it. And once again, like in Jordan, this sidewalk proved to be just littered with broken glass. We once again trusted in our Kevlar tires, and our general ability to avoid especially pointy bits, and wheeled on.

Not far after the sewage outlet we found ourselves arriving upon a new city, by the name of Saida. There, we decided begin our journey back to the Beirut. We seriously considered making some great loop, but it appeared to us that one might end up trapped in some restricted airport zone ahead of us. So we pulled our Dahons around, and started the long retrace back to the city.

We arrived just as the sun was setting, and we were absolutely starving. We dined that night at a pretty swanky Lebanese place, ordering our usual Middle Eastern meal of hummus, salads, kebabs and flatbread. The meal was glorious, and at a white tablecloth, multiple-forks-per-person type place.

As I ate I tried not to let the fact that our mediocre breakfast at a random sandwich joint had cost almost three times as much…

The next morning we woke up in our room at the Ziad Al Khabir Hotel and hopped right on the cycles to head out in search of new experiences in Damascus. We wheeled directly out of the Sudanese flophouse district, near the old city, and into the newer, richer, flashier, university district.

We ended up selecting some food from a “Chicken from the Machine” joint, and supplementing it with a few salads from a nearby salad joint. While Scott and Claudia dealt with the chicken, I headed over to the salad place, to make our selection. While I was waiting for the diligent chaps there to put together our order, I chatted with the owner, who had spent the last 15 years working and living in Saudi Arabia, in the kitchen of a similar salad place.

When I asked him about his views on the country, he described it as a clean place, with lots of money and opportunity. “It is a place for good Muslims and rich Muslims,” he said. When I asked him what brought him back to Syria, he commented, “Damascus is my home,” and added with a chuckle, “and I must say I was neither a rich nor a good Muslim.”

And with that he handed me my salads. We bid each other farewell. He assured me that if I returned, he would happily call his friend to hold down the shop for a few hours so we could drink tea and talk more about the world. I thanked him warmly for the offer and walked back out into the dry warm air and the sunshine. I was falling hard for Syria as I walked back toward the park where we’d all agreed to meet.

I found Scott and Claudia setting up shop at a picnic table. A group of schoolgirls had gathered round them, and were in the process of queuing up to take the Speed TRs for a ride around the park.  While they took turns riding the Dahons, we dug into our little picnic feast.

With that done, we headed out in search of coffee and a little wifi, which while it had been nigh on impossible to find in Jordan, proved quite plentiful here in Syria. We decided to have our first cup from a roadside espresso bar ,which we cycled past. The coffee was delicious, and the fellow who owned the place was a delight to interact with, humming little haunting bits of melody as he pulled the rich frothy shots.

We ended up more fully setting up shop at a café a few blocks down the way, where we were able to, for the price of a few more cups of coffee, connect to the Internet and finally begin to make a more serious dent into our long neglected electronic lives.

After working for a few hours, we hopped back on the bikes and began pedaling once again through the fascinating streets of Damascus. We stopped on a large triangular median so Claudia could ask a couple of fellows, who were sitting on plastic chairs watching the traffic, for directions. They were supremely helpful, if somewhat boisterous, and we hung with them for a while discussing our trip to date, and our quickly growing infatuation with Syria.

Back on the road, we quickly found ourselves engulfed in quite the traffic jam, which encouraged us to head out on a more atypical route, attempting to avoid the smothering exhaust of the gridlock, and bringing us, somewhat unexpectedly, back around to the other side of the old city. So we decided to work our way through the old city, riding through the tiny streets, and reveling in the richness of our surroundings.

Suddenly it was time to eat again, so we picked up a few 30-cent shawarma wraps on the street. Here in Syria, the shawarma comes with the most delectable garlic mayonnaise. In case we had not underlined it in previous posts, AsiaWheeling has a real soft spot for mayo, and this was certainly some of the best mayo of my life.

Armed with the sandwiches, we headed a block or so down the road and leaned our bikes against the ornate doors of a museum.

However, no sooner had we begun to eat than, low and behold, the great iron doors began to open. We hustled to move our bikes in time to let a team of grunting and sweating fellows move some giant panes of glass into the place.

On our way back, we headed to the large covered market, to give it another once over. It was certainly an impressive concentration of buyers and sellers, and thanks to the giant patchwork of tarpaulin that covered it, the midday heat and sun had done little to slow the rate of commerce.

On our way out of the covered market, we passed a couple of fellows with this modified bicycle.

It had been modified so that it could be powered by a tiny little deafening gasoline engine. They offered us a ride on the thing, but, not confident in our ability to pilot the beast, and fearing for our lives, we declined. Instead, we just settled, rather, on a demonstration of the starting of the motor.

From there, we headed out of the old city, and found ourselves briefly getting trapped in a large and smoggy bus terminal.

Navigating out of the byzantine overpasses, we stumbled upon a quite ancient looking courtyard, where a number of people had set up touristy shops.

As soon as we got off the bikes to poke around, we were swarmed by children interested in taking the Speed TRs for a ride.

We obliged, and while we wandered around, the kids raced in circles through the courtyard, whooping, yelling, and generally exhibiting the common response among individuals first exposed to a folding cycle.

From there, we headed back out onto the streets. The sun was growing low now, and we paused outside a large unsettling-poster vendor, while Scott wandered around through the Syrian rush hour pedestrian traffic, chatting with his parents on the phone.

From there, we found ourselves unexpectedly wheeling into a mechanical components dealership part of town. When we caught sight of an NSK bearings dealership, we immediately called a waypoint. NSK is our favorite bearings manufacturer, and we decided we might as well indulge in a few spares, in case one of our wheels started eating bearings again as Scott’s had in Laos and Cambodia. The fellows in the bearings shop seemed very interested in our ridiculous look. We attempted to flatter them by complimenting their bearings, but they would have none of it. They knew their bearings were the best in the world, and no amount of flattery could do any more than beat a dead horse.

Outside of the bearing shop, we ran into a German man, living in Damascus and studying Arabic.

He was quite the gearhead, and we spent the next 40 minutes discussing bicycle engineering and in particular the Speed TR’s SRAM internal planetary transmission.

We had been quite happy with ours, and as it turns out he was in this neighborhood looking to buy a planetary transmission for his own bike.

We bid him farewell, wishing him luck in his search for the perfect planetary transmission, and headed back to the Zaid Al Khabir. At the advice of the front desk, we hauled our bikes up to the lobby, where they would be safer from vandals and rapscallions.

We paused for a moment to admire the front desk’s phone before heading back to the cozy confines of our somewhat crumbling room.

I was suddenly jostled awake by a firm hand on my shoulder. It was the driver of our bus from Amman to Damascus, shaking me. He dared not touch Claudia, sitting next to me, and after I was awake to some degree, he indicated that I should wake her too. In fact, it turned out, men and women were not even technically allowed to sit next to each other on this bus, and we had been inadvertently perpetrating another Gaijin Smash.

Regardless, I woke Claudia, and, in a somewhat addled state, wandered off the bus and out into Syria. It was pitch black, cool and dry outside. I looked at my watch. It was just a little after three in the morning. The bus driver had removed our bags and bikes from the belly of the bus, and they lay on the road in a puddle of streetlight. And with a rev and a squeak of the suspension, the bus was gone.

We were soon approached by a small gang of young men, who emerged from the shadowy alleyways of this highway side in Damascus, shouting about taxis. When we began to show them our bicycles and unfold them, indicating our intention to wheel into town, they began to giggle and switched from selling mode into inquisition mode.

Soon we were in the midst of an uncomfortable conversation, in which lines of communication were fraying and the topics included the war in Iraq, Barak Obama, and Obama’s relative comparison to George Bush. Here, in the middle of the night in Damascus, left on the side of a nondescript highway by a grouchy bus driver, being harassed by random cab drivers, you might think, dear reader, that we were a little on edge.

Drastically the opposite. For one reason or another, we were calm, cool, and collected.  In fact, we were feeling quite positive about being in Syria. We strapped our belongings down, climbed onto the bikes and headed out, calling out our goodbyes as we rode, though the gang of men yelled at us to stay for more parlor talk.

The road on which we traveled had been recently paved in a most absurd way, with giant piles of asphalt in some places, and huge rounded, deliberate looking potholes in others. To make matters worse, many of these obstacles were hiding in the shadows, and occasionally cars would whip by us at startling speeds, careening through the night.

Despite all this, we were in very high spirits, singing as we rode, “She’s a Lady, Oh Oh Oh, She’s a Lady!” and generally feeling good. At a large roundabout, we stopped to ask a man wandering the streets which way into the city center, but he turned out to be either very drunk, or on some other kind of drugs. Luckily, another, also slightly inebriated chap emerged out of the night, and directed us to ride subversively across a bridge toward a cluster of Gothic looking buildings.

And then we were there. It was the center of Damascus, and it was beautiful. Most of the buildings had a very old world imperial look to them, with ornate decorations, and good number of spire-like attachments. The city was also quite clean, and smelled faintly of roasting nuts. It was great to have arrived in such a comfortable and interesting place. Unfortunately, it was now about four in the morning, so we had a few choices to make. In the end, we decided that we might was well take this one all the way to Brooklyn and just stay up all night.

So we headed over to a nearby 24-hour hookah and tea café, parked our bikes outside, and to the great chagrin of all involved headed in.

“This is definitely a place where women are not normally allowed,” Claudia mentioned as we all sat down. It was true, the clientele were all men, sitting at little square felt tables, smoking hookah, playing cards and drinking little cups of sweet tea. The staff was all smiles, as were our fellow clientele, who seemed quite interested and amused by the foreigners who came out of the night on folding bicycles.

I left Scott and Claudia there to head out in search of an ATM. I found a few of them, but none appeared to support my American MasterCard. So I returned to the café empty handed. By that point, it had been ascertained that the staff was willing to accept Jordanian Dinars, so knowing that we could pay our bill, we simply relaxed into our seats, dealt the whist, and let the morning work its way around.

In Syria they use mostly a local “Arabic” system of numbers, which is coincidentally actually the Indian system of numbers, while the ones they use in India (and the U.S.) are Arabic numerals. Regardless, we needed to learn to read the new style of numbers, so Claudia, as our West Asia Cultural Liaison, insisted that we keep track of the whist in Indian numerals.

Amidst the multilingual calculus, a young man at the neighboring table leaned over and began chatting with Scott.  Clean shaven but firm, he introduced himself as Hosam.  As his friends chuckled over the smoke of hookah and the slapping of playing cards, Hosam introduced himself as a friend in the unfamiliar city of Damascus.  Son of a local sign maker, and employee of the Yellow Pages, this enterprising chap plied the market for advertising and promotion.  Exchanging phone numbers with Scott, he leaned back into his chair and carried on with his cronies, periodically bouncing his watchful eye back to our table.

As we folded up a game of three-person whist, another fellow came over to our table to take a look at my deck of M&Ms branded playing cards. He seemed to approve. We were soon to discover that Syria was perhaps the only country on the trip thus far where popular Mars products like Snickers and M&Ms were hard to find. We decided to take the opportunity to ask him if he knew of a cheap hotel around here. In fact he did, and since the sun was now beginning to spill over Damascus, we decided to take him up on the recommendation.

We paid our bill, which, in spite of the high exchange rate between the Syrian Pound and the Jordanian Dinar, was still quite affordable. Back on the cycles, we found the city to be even more beautiful in the daylight than it had been at night. It was so much cleaner than the cities in  Jordan had been, and the buildings were a delightful mix of the very new and very old. This should have come as no surprise, since Damascus was in fact the oldest city we would visit on the entire trip, having been continually occupied since about 2000 BCE.

Before riding too far from the 24-hour cafe, we were stopped by a group of Iranian tourists. They were mostly women, dressed all in black, toting fancy DSLRs and video cameras.

They were especially interested in Claudia, though being Persian language speakers, her Arabic did little to help us communicate with them. We were soon to learn that Syria is just packed with Iranian tourists since most of the Shia Muslim pilgrimage sites are to be found in Syria.

We continued to wheel on, ostensibly looking for the hotel, but mostly just loving Damascus.

Eventually, with a little help from a few pedestrians, we found the Hotel Ziad Al Kabir. The place turned out to be a Sudanese flophouse of sorts. It was nestled on the third floor of a very old building, mostly full of tailor shops and printers.

The hotel consisted of a central lobby for reception and prayer, followed by  a long, high ceilinged hall, lined with cracked wood and sanded glass doors, leading into similarly high ceilinged and crumbling rooms, outfitted with ratty steel framed beds cradling thin aging mattresses.

A small kitchen emitted the tantalizing smell of caramelizing onions and Sudanese spices. Our fellow lodgers were mostly from Sudan, and milled around the premises in flowing robes, and tending to their magnificent mustaches. The owners were all smiles and spoke bits and pieces of English.

Perhaps it was an increased romanticism induced by the lack of sleep, but we instantly fell in love with the place, especially Claudia. They claimed a fixed rate of $4.00 per person, and by then we had fallen in love with the delightfully grimy vibe of the place. So we booked a few nights.

We headed to the rooms, and flopped down onto the beds, trusting they would be clean enough to prevent any skin infections, and pondered napping.

In the end, however, with the sun shining and Damascus calling, we decided we had better head out on wheels.

Breakfast would be key. It had been some time since we had eaten anything. Luckily the city seemed full of delicious looking food. We ended up stopping at a flatbread joint, where one could select from a variety of pizza-esque flatbreads.

We were still in need of an ATM that would work with our foreign cards, but the fellow here too, seemed happy to accept Jordanian Dinars, albeit at a somewhat slanted rate. The flatbread, which might be best compared to Turkish “pide” was delightful, and the plastic chairs outside the place, were just operational enough to provide us with a place to sit and eat.  In search of a refreshing diet cola for the team, Scott headed out on a mission while we waited for the oven to warm.  In the process, he found himself in the thick of a pilgrimage troop, all haggling on the street for Chinese made garments and houseware goods.

One man even posed for a photo with his Polaroid 600 SE.  A true devotee: to the camera, to the mustache, and no doubt to the pilgramage.

So with food in our stomachs, we headed out, continuing to wheel, passing giant 1970s-looking brutalist Islamic architecture and thousand-year-old stone bath houses.

Suddenly we found ourselves in a giant outdoor used goods market, where all kinds of bizarre products were for sale.

We dismounted to walk through the area, investigating everything from old appliances, watches, and books, to wired telephones and other 1980s technologies.

Outside the market, we finally found an ATM (probably our 7^th or 8^th attempt) that accepted our foreign MasterCards. Now we had some Syrian pounds in our pockets and my goodness were they beautiful.

From there, we wheeled on, continuing to soak in this delightful town, riding past fountains and mosques, down palm tree lined streets, and impressive government buildings. We stopped for a snack at one of the many Arabic sweet shops, where we were able to load up a plate with baklava and other similarly honey-and-nut-based pastries for only a couple of dollars.

Our next goal would be to repair Scott’s Sri Lankan sandals again. The fellows in Amman had done a decent job, but the rigors of hiking through Petra had managed to tear the new stitches out. We headed into the “old city” part of Damascus to find a shoe repair shop.

The old city of Damascus is quite the hectic place, with plenty of traffic whipping around with little regard for lanes and general protocol. The streets become narrow, and pedestrian traffic intensifies. Meanwhile, the concentration of little shops selling all kinds of amazing foods and goods spikes, as does the number of people burning things, cooking in the street, yelling, making noise, carrying swords, welding in public and generally getting Syrious.

While we were wandering around, we were approached by a local chap, with a quite enviable mustache, who offered to help us get our bearings in this new and complex neighborhood. He even offered also to help us haggle with a shoe repair man to get Scott’s sandals fixed.

For the price of about $1.00, we got a full repair to both sandals, with very thick white thread, going over the ripped seams multiple times. From there, the same chap who had helped us before began insisting that we wander with him into a giant covered market, which he assured us was unmissable.  We wandered for a while inside, but finding it too crowded to safely wheel, we explained to him that we would need to revisit the spot on foot in order to properly experience it. He thanked us for letting him guide us around, and we thanked him for his kind help, bidding fond farewells. Syrian people were proving to be absolutely sweet as pie.

From there we proceeded to get hopelessly lost on the tiny and interwoven streets of Damascus’s old city. It was truly a glorious wheel. We must have passed by hundreds of structures which were over a thousand years old, many of which were covered with intricate tiling or hammered bronze accents.

Mosques, bathhouses, shops, homes… they were all so delightfully intricate and unique, yet somehow all of a cohesive overall style. Damascus was such an esthetically pleasing and intellectually tantalizing town.

Another thing that we were noticing was the pharmacy signs. Rather than the standard western move of the cross, or the mortar and pestle with “Rx” on it,  the pharmacists use this fantastic serpent looking into a goblet.

The cars in Damascus were also incredible. The streets were filled with the full spectrum, from brand new BMW SUVs to Ladas, to 1950s retro sedans, to cars that seemed to be frankensteined together from pieces of 2 or 3 different original machines.

The drivers were generally friendly, yielding space to the cycles, and due to the sheer number of cars on the roads, the speed, in the city at least, was generally slow. It was amazing traffic to be part of.

We continued to wheel, back through the covered market, which this time had cooled just enough to allow the cautious wheeler to make it through at slow speeds. It was about then that we realized it was high time to eat again.

We ended up selecting a rather posh Syrian Colonial style restaurant, tucked into an old building. The food was incredible, and not too expensive, at least by the standards of what we’d been paying in Jordan. We dug heartily into a giant fatush, an array of pastes and yoghurts, and some egg-roll-esque cylinders, filled with an oily and salty Syrian cheese blend.

Back on the streets, we kept wheeling, calling waypoints from time to time to investigate all kinds of interesting items that were for sale or attached to the surfaces all around us.

Not far outside the city, we stopped at a bike shop to buy Claudia a new bike bell. Hers had broken at some point during our transit from Amman. The new one we got her was a fantastic Chinese bell, with a deep rich tone, and amazing packaging.

Now armed with a new loud bell, we wheeled on, past hundreds of pictures of the Syrian president posed in all kinds of situations: as soldier, fighter pilot, statesman, or generally keeping it real with the heads of Iran and Lebanon.

We had been going for a while now, but the sun was still high it the sky. Was it time for a nap? Perhaps, but AsiaWheeling generally forsakes midday napping for midday coffee drinking. So we headed out in search of coffee. When we stopped to ask a fellow wheeler where we might find a cup, he said he knew a good place, and asked us to follow him there.

So we did, wheeling behind him through increasingly tiny alleyways, and eventually to the door of what turned out to be his own shop. The shop consisted of a small central room, with a couch, two chairs, a table with three telephones on it, and a glass cupboard full of examples of the types of hammered pots and pans, which it appeared he sold wholesale. The other room of the turned out to be a kitchen, when his wife burst out of it, with the first pot of coffee.

We were to be his guests, it seemed. He asked his wife to get started on the second pot of coffee, and, while we dug into the first, began to converse with us in Arabic. Claudia did a fantastic job of playing translator. The coffee was glorious: thick and black, just barely sweet, with cardamom pods floating in it. The man’s wife was also quite friendly, though she was asked to stay in the kitchen most of the time and was not invited to participate in the group photo.  A shame indeed, as she may well have been the least awkward character in the snap.

After spending what we felt was a respectable amount of time chatting and drinking pots of coffee with this man, we climbed back on the bikes and headed onto the road once again, riding past a giant street of watermelon sellers, which led us far from the old city out to the newer housing developments.

We eventually had wheeled out into the semi-agricultural suburban lands that surround Damascus. Many of these suburban Syrians seemed to have pretty large plots of land on which they grew fruits and vegetables, which we found quite impressive.

Many of the suburbs of Damascus are positioned in the foothills of the Ante-Lebanon mountains, which flank the city. So it was into these foothills that we rode, stopping after a particularly intense climb to try some of that amazing Syrian ice cream, which our dear Mr. Fu had so often raved about.

The ice cream was indeed fantastic, as was the graffiti on the buildings around where it was sold. Fueled by coffee and ice cream, we headed deeper into the foothills, calling a waypoint at this Islamic cemetery.

Up and up we went, higher into the Ante-Lebanese mountains. Soon the city of Damascus spilled out beneath us, and the sun began to sink low.

At this point, Scott decided to head back to the Hotel, but Claudia and I decided to keep wheeling on in search of a sunset view of the city.

We headed up a somewhat crumbling and rather empty side street. We were making very good progress getting up the mountain, and were just about to approach the perfect viewing spot, when a group of three Syrian military men began yelling, and running towards us. It appears we had accidentally taken the access road to a Syrian military base. In fact, we learned from the soldiers, the entire top of this hill was a base, so all spots that might have a view of the city were actually off-limits.

Fair enough, we thought, and wheeled back down the mountain to meet up with Scott.

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 woke up that morning and headed downstairs to the lobby of our scummy hotel in Wadi Musa, Jordon. It was a place by the name of The Valantine Inn. Rough place. Despite the scummy nature of the joint, we had slept decently. That is at least after the machine gun fire ended. The celebratory shooting had continued until perhaps 1:00 or 2:00 am, but died off after that, allowing us some reasonable hours of slumber.

Meanwhile in the lobby, a couple of the guests were engaged in a noisy argument with the proprietor. It seemed the in-house breakfast is advertised at one price, scrawled in Magic Marker on the wall, but only if booked in advance. These poor travelers had inadvertently sat down to a breakfast that turned out to be double what was marked on the wall, and now were claiming false advertising.

The osmotic pressure of the travelers’ stress was intense, so we headed out to where we’d locked our bikes to an air-conditioning unit, and down into the city. It was the first time we had seen the place in the light of day. It was an interesting looking town, spread out over a section of rolling hills and valleys. It was not a big place, and very few of the buildings were over a few stories.  In the distance, we could see the complex immensity of the geologic formation into which Petra is carved. It’s a kind of bulbous rocky maze, full of spires and crevasses, all in the shadow of a great mesa.

We had been researching how to best explore Petra the night before, since sleeping was initially not an option, due to all the gunfire. Our research had been a disappointing story of expensive rates and restrictive rules. Wheeling, it seemed, was not allowed at all in the park. To make matters worse, we would also be charged at least $40.00 per person to enter, plus be forced into working with the monopolistic bus companies and water vendors therein. How were we to choose freedom?

That was a question too large for pondering on empty stomachs, so we climbed on the cycles and began the slippery slope downhill past the core of the tourist zone into what we hoped would be more of “the people’s” city. We selected a roadside restaurant for breakfast. We ordered some hummus with meat sauce, cucumber yoghurt,  a plate of fries, “special rise,” and an onion and tomato salad. This was all to accompany the central dish, which they most accurately dubbed “chicken from the machine.” These rotisserie chickens were to become a staple of our travel in the Middle East.

We drank the coffee and did “Chicken from the Machine” B-horror-movie shtick until our food arrived.  The food was good, and after haggling a bit over some dubious fees that had been added to our bill, I paid the man, and we hopped back on the cycles. We wheeled on past this tethered horse, and began to explore.

We stopped when a man wandered out of his house to flag us down. He asked us where we were from, and whether he could take one of the Dahons for a quick spin. We were more than happy to indulge him. He then invited us to come into his house for tea. We had just eaten and caffeinated ourselves, and were all set for wheeling, so we politely declined his offer, heading off in search of the Wadi Musa that was for “the people”, not just tourists.

We found ourselves on a hilltop, in the parking lot of a cinder block government building . We were staring out over the city and into the tangled rock that made up Petra beyond. Just then, the call to prayer was sounded, and the city began to fill with the voices of one hundred imams, all singing at once, in different keys. The cacophony became a bittersweet, dissonant symphony of rising and falling prayers, all carried up to us on the dry desert wind.  It was magical.

That was when it occurred to us. The way to choose freedom was to not go to Petra… at least not through the main entrance. We would ride out on a road that we could see from this hilltop, which skirted  around the park. From there we would be able to park the cycles and head in on foot. We’d see what we could see, experience the geology, and see whether or not we got in trouble with the authorities. It was an attractive plan: cheap, exciting, and proactive.

So off we went, tearing downhill, across Wadi Musa and back onto the main road toward Petra. We soared right past the turn-off to the main gate, heading back uphill and into the rocks. Eventually, we found the perfect turn-off and parked the cycles there, eventually folding them up, and locking them in a great pile, tucked behind a rock, and barely visible from the road.

And off we headed, into the desert.

Some call Petra an archeological site, but people also definitely still lived out here. Some of them we could even see, crouched in homes dug out of the rock, napping in the midday heat. Others we knew of only by what they had left behind. Even significantly far from the road, the rocks were strewn with water bottles and the bones of dead sheep.  Many, many sheep had been killed and eaten out here.

Off we went, deeper and deeper into the site. The farther we went, the more intense the carvings became. Soon the homes were not just holes in the rock face, but full on caverns with windows, cupboards and the like. Also, the farther we got in, the less occupied the place became.

As we drew farther from the road, the local population diminished. After a while, we had not seen anyone for a few kilometers. That was when Scott began to feel sick. As you many have already guessed, dear reader, this was not the best place to fall ill. But it was also not the worst. Scott needed to drink some water and rest. He needed to get out of the sun and into somewhere cool.

Luckily, there were plenty of options, and we had brought two liters of water each. So we continued up a set of stairs that had been carved into the rock, through a natural stone arch, and scrambled up to a kind of penthouse carved into an outcropping, perched, unsettlingly skull-like, atop a nearby cliff.  We half walked, half slid down the gravelly entryway and into the space.  It was a shocking 15 to 20 degrees cooler inside. We crawled in and Scott pulled himself up against a stone wall; he was soon snoring.

Claudia and I spent the next hour and a half wandering deeper into the archeological site, scrambling over worn stone walkways carved into the rock, and exploring the living spaces and remnants of what must have been a very interesting city.

We could see the places where the steps that had been carved into the stone would have connected to a bridge across a crevasse. The bridges were, of course, long gone, so we needed to find ways to skirt them and scramble over these obstacles.

After we felt like we’d gone far enough in the blazing sun, we turned around and made our way back to find Scott still snoozing. We ran over to collect all our stores of water and returned to the cave. As we entered, my dear friend began to stir, soon rising, looking much refreshed. After we all spent some time sitting and drinking water, we headed back to the bikes, which were as we had left them, just out of sight on the side of the road.

Back on the cycles, we pulled onto the road. We paused for a moment at the shoulder, though, discussing the best plan of action. We could see the next town over, perched on a mesa overlooking Petra.  After some discussion, we decided the pull of wheeling it was too strong to ignore.

So we began to ride now, through the heat of the midday desert, along the side of a cliff, slowly climbing up  toward the mesa. The longer we rode, the more spectacular the view became.

Soon we reached the nearby hamlet. It was certainly a slightly more down home town than Wadi Musa had been. It too, however, seemed to be mostly fueled, in one way or another, by its proximity to this tourist Mecca.

We continued to wheel slowly into this town, rolling down the street, and attracting plenty of stares from the locals. All around us children ran around with few clothes, goats munched garbage from dumpsters, and old men and women looked on from patches of shade with mild looks of disgust.

Near the end of the town’s main (and only) street, we passed a handful of men, all struggling to clean a couple of camels. The cleaning process, it seemed, was producing a fair amount of camel hair, which now was piled in frothing wads in the street.

At the end of the road, we found ourselves facing a protected back entrance to Petra. We paused for a moment to look out over the delightful geology, and the clusters of parked police vehicles parked by the entrance.

Then we turned around and rode back out of the city. Before we had completely made our way out, though, we decided to stop at a large trinkets shop to buy some cool drinks from their humming, and rather beaten up Coca-Cola branded fridge.

We struggled the last bit of the way up and out of the city, and then relaxed into a few kilometers of luscious downhill riding. Whipping along toward Wadi Musa, we rode with a savage upward stretching cliff to our left and the immensity of Petra spilling beneath to our right.

Back in town, we pulled over at a roadside café, and ordered some drinks and hookah.

We spent a while relaxing from the intensity of wheel and the hike, as Claudia did her best to explain Islamic women’s dress to us.

Refueled slightly, we decided to wheel the rest of the way into town and find food. While we were pausing at what was now becoming our favorite water vendor, the van driver from our exceedingly mediocre hotel rolled up. He asked us in English what we were doing, and we explained the story of our day and that we were looking for a restaurant. He told us of a certain restaurant that his friend ran, and where we might get a discount if we mentioned his name.

As he drove off, it occurred to us that the restaurant he mentioned was in fact the same tourist joint we had visited the night before, with that strange kid. So we decided to wheel on, moving intuitively.

Eventually, we found a good looking joint, and immediately pulled up to one of the outside tables and plopped down. We ordered a feast. It was the usual suspects: hummus, flatbread, babaganouj, yoghurt with garlic, fresh chopped tomatoes and onions,  and fowl.

Just as we were about to dig in, our van driver friend rolled by. He seemed a bit taken aback by the fact that we had not honored his offer. He made some awkward remarks from the driver’s seat of his van, and we attempted meekly to explain ourselves. Eventually he just drove off, and we turned our focus back to eating.

When the bill came, we paid and got back on the bikes.  As we were heading back, Scott spotted a barber and decided to walk in for a little trim. We did our best to haggle, but the fellow was insistent on charging an arm and a leg. So we moved on to the next place. This fellow wanted only an arm and a bit of an ear so we left Scott there, to go under the razor, while Claudia and I rode back to the hotel to off-gas.

Scott returned while Claudia was in the shower and I was shaving. I strolled over wrapped in a towel, and opened the room door to find this guy staring back at me.

The Extremes of Experience Indeed.