Desert Castles

"The deeper you go into the desert, the closer you come to God" Arab Proverb

Jordan's eastern desert is a flat, dry and featureless expanse. It was not sandy but instead had "badia", a stony black basalt desert without any vegetation. We stayed the night in the Oasis town of Azraq with our German friends Thorston and Tanya. Located 30 miles from the Saudi border and 100 miles from Iraq the town is little more than a truck stop for trade and pilgrimage routes between those countries and Jordan and we had little interest in staying there very long. Our reason for seeing the eastern desert is because we visited a string of buildings (pavilions, caravansaries, hunting lodges and forts) known collectively as "desert castles". Most were built by the Damascus based Umayyads (AD 661-750) as their agricultural or trading complexes and country retreats.

Al-Azraq was a castle made up of blocks of black basalt. The ruins are somewhat intact but little remains of decoration or purpose of the building. Still it was interesting to climb through the ruins and see it.

Qasr Al-Kharrana is a desert castle which was located in the middle of nowhere. It was cool to climb on the roof of it and stare out over the expanse of desert in all directions.

The highlight of the day was Qasr Amra, an ancient royal bathhouse that has wonderful frescos of hunting, dancing and musician scenes. UNESCO has designated Qasr Amra as a World Heritage Site and it feels like it as the small building barely contained the throngs of tourists that were bussed in and out of the site. It was nice but not for seekers of solitude.

That evening we returned to Madaba, our base for the north of the country. We stopped into a restaurant to grab a sandwich before heading to the hotel. I saw a delicious looking filling called the "fajita chicken" and ordered a sandwich of that, as opposed to the falafel that everyone else ordered. That night the nausea hit and I spent most of the night retching my guts out. After getting everything out of my system I slept the whole next day. I felt like I had been run over by a truck. The following day I dragged myself to the bus station and we headed to Petra.

Steve