Travel Day: From Egypt to Jordan By Way of Israel

We were all a little sad to leave the beach at Dahab, especially considering before we did anything else we had a long day of traveling ahead of us. The next stop on our trip was Petra, an ancient town in Jordan, and it is apparently easily accessible from the Sinai by a ferry from Nuweiba across the Red Sea. However, we heard horror stories about the ferry. Not about the actual ride itself, because it is apparently a very nice, large ferry that makes the trip quickly, but about the waiting at the points of embarkation and debarkation. Apparently, what should be about an hour ride can take up to eight hours. Not wanting to lose time in this way, we decided we would bypass the ferry. The only way to do this is to travel from Dahab to Taba (about a two hour drive north) and then cross the border on foot between Taba and Eilat, a city in Israel. After arriving in Eilat, we planned to take a Taxi to the border between Eilat and Acqaba, Jordan. Then a taxi ride for Acqaba to the town just outside Petra is another hour and a half to two hours.

I'm happy to say our plan went off with only some minor glitches, which actually turned out to be for the better. When leaving from Taba, there was some confusion about visas. Egypt does not issue a student visa, and all of us are in the process of getting our visas validated through AUC. Up until the point we were leaving Egypt, our visas were valid for six months but only good for a one month stay in Egypt. For those of us with multiple entry visas, this was fine because it meant that even though our duration of stay was technically expiring, we were leaving and re-entering the country within the granted two week grace period. We would simply have to be sure to continue with the renewal process once we were back in Cairo. For those of us with single entry visas, there was a bigger problem. Even if the visa was changed from a single to a multiple entry visa at Taba (where they offer that service), the new visa granted would only be good to enter the Sinai, of which Cairo is not a part. They recommended to everyone with us with a single entry visa that we go to the Egyptian embassy in Eilat to have new visas issued. Of course, it was a Friday, so the Egyptian embassy in Eilat was closed. This was not a problem because we would be crossing back into Eilat on September 29, and we were assured the embassy would be open then. So we had added another task to our list of things to do on the trip!

Crossing into Israel gave us less problems than expected, though two people with us were submitted to fairly rigorous security checks. And most of us were successful in receiving stamps on separate sheets of paper. In my passport, there is actually no record of my leaving of Egypt. It probably would not have been a problem if there were because I do not plan to go to Lebanon or Syria before I return home, but for those who do it is important to not have any record of being in Israel, as Lebanon in particular reserves the right to ban you from entering the country with such documentation in your passport. After successfully crossing the border and not so successfully trying to pay a visit to the Egyptian embassy, we were successful again in crossing into Jordan (where again most of us did not receive stamps on our passport).

In Acqaba, the seven of us loaded into two taxis for the two hour ride to just outside of Petra. Our cab driver was one of the most interesting and helpful people we met on our trip. We told him what hostel we were planning to use and he said alright but then brought us to a different hostel, telling us it was cheaper and better. We never saw the other hostel, but the Valentine Inn (where he brought us) was very nice. For nineteen Jordanian pounds (which translates to about thirty US dollars, we stayed for two nights and received four meals, two of which were excellent dinner buffets. The exchange rate in Jordan was definitely an adjustment after being so used to the unbelievably good exchange rate in Egypt. Thank goodness we would only be in Jordan for three days before heading back to Israel where the exchange rate is almost as good as it is in Egypt (though the cost of things is somewhat higher).

At the Valentine Inn, we stayed in dorm style rooms, so we were sleeping in seven beds in a fourteen bed room. That was definitely a little weird, but the beds were comfortable, the bathrooms and showers (two for the fourteen of us) were decent, and our dorm mates seemed nice. It was a bit odd that the man who slept underneath my top bunk on the second night was burning incense from a stick that he lodged into the bed, but it did make the room smell nice, so no one complained. And we really didn't spend too much time in the room. We basically only slept there, and not for very long periods of time on either night. Our first night in Jordan, we went to sleep early after dinner because we had had a long day traveling and we wanted to be up and out early because we heard Petra was definitely worth exploring for an entire day!