Madaba, Dead Sea

After a few days in Amman it was nice to escape to the little town of Madaba, home to Jordan's most famous mosaic, which is saying something given the number of mosaics in this part of the world. The mosaic is known as the earliest map of Palestine. It was created in 560 AD and has 157 lables in Greek showing all of the major biblical sites of the Middle East from Egypt to Palestine. Though not that much of it remains, it used to be about 20m long and 6m wide.

We used Madaba as a base for a day trip to Mt Nebo where Moses supposedly saw the Promised Land. We caught a taxi right to the top and spent a few minutes looking at the surrounding area sandwiched between groups of religious pilgrims.

A real highlight of our trip through Jordan was our visit to the Dead Sea. Now, on paper I don't think it sounds like much: hyper-salinated water that makes you float. But there is something unnatural and very fun about the whole experience. It feels a bit more like what I imagine zero-gravity would be like than swimming. We spent about an hour bobbing around super-buyonantly watching other tourists coat themselves with the local black tar-like mud. The only downside of the experience was accidentally getting a few drops of water in the mouth; it tasted like burning.