Jordan: Jerash, Umm Qais and the King's Highway

With a sad heart we left Turkey 2 days ago after 3 wonderful weeks and are happy to be in Jordan for the next part of our adventure!
Turkey was an amazing country to travel to...so many fascinating things to see, great food, friendly people, sunny skies...I highly recommend it to anyone.

We left Istanbul Tuesday and flew 2.5 hours south into Amman, Jordan. Amman is the capital city of Jordan and huge with a population close to 3 million. We decided to stay outside the big city in a smaller town just 20 minute south of Amman called Madaba. This friendly small town was a great base for us.

Jordan is a great place to travel in so far. I was expecting things to be similar to Egypt with pollution, crowds, garbage, insane honking traffic, hassle everywhere....but to my surprise it is nothing like that. It's clean, the traffic is safe and orderly with no significant honking, the locals are very friendly and very genuinely kind, no hassle and no scamming coming from anyone so far. It's a beautiful country with stunning scenery and some great tourist sites that you practically have to yourself. Not many tourists visit northern Jordan (usually they say in the south for Petra and Aqaba) so no crowds at all...especially with the civil war going on in Syria they say that the tourist numbers are way down as people are scared that there are problems here in Jordan too...which there aren't at all: it's very safe here.

Yesterday we met a nice couple from France and shared a taxi with them to visit two archaeological sites in northern Jordan; Umm Qais and Jerash. It was a full day trip by the time we returned.

Umm Qais is located in the extreme NW of Jordan on a black basalt hill...it is so far north that we stood on the hill at the rear of the site and to the left we could see the Sea of Galilee, Israel beyond it, Lebanon beside that and to the right at the other side of the valley is Syria. How many places in the world can you look down into 4 countries at the same time! The panoramic view of the sea of Galilee and Golan heights was spectacular!
In earlier times this city was known as Gadara and is the city noted in the bible where with a miracle Jesus sent the demented spirits out of two men and into a herd of swine who ran down the hill and drown in the sea.
This was eventually a Roman city and the ruins here are very well preserved.

That's the sea of Galilee to the left and Israel on the other side, Lebanon is off in the far right corner.

The hills in the background belongs to Syria, the valley below is Jordan.

Jerash was another Roman city that is also very well preserved. This was a huge site, similar to Ephesus in Turkey but without the crowds!

Sarah beside a fallen pillar...they were huge!

Today we shared a taxi again with our French friends to travel down to Petra via the stunning scenery of the King's Highway! We narrowly missed getting stuck in a protest in Madaba this morning over that movie insulting the Profit Mohammad...we had to stop at a bank on the way out for Adrian to change money and the protest that we passed a few minutes earlier turned down the street we parked on and was advancing from behind us...Adrian and the taxi driver literally jumped in the car and we sped off as a wall of chanting people came up from our rear.
The King's highway was an incredible drive and the vistas were jaw dropping. Deep canyons, extinct volcanoes, wildlife nature preserves... Jordan in truly a beautiful country.