Cave man

Well I'm closing in. Petra is just a few kilometres away, but a fruitless chase around Amman to find a cheap flight ticket from Amman to Istanbul for next week made for a late start (expensive tickets are available in any number), and by the time I got to Wadi Musa, the accommodation centre for Petra, it was getting dark. So I will leave the goodies for tomorrow.

So instead of going to Petra in the dark,I went into a local store to buy four apples, got invited to tea (drank here with lots of sugar and fresh mint) by the elderly gentleman, who runs the store, and found myself treated to Beduine hospitality by a REAL Petran. The gentleman, called Khaled (anyway something like that), was born in Petra. Not in Wadi Musa but in the acutal Petra itself, in a cave, where his family had lived for generations. Apparently about 22 years ago as the tourism increased, the government of Jordan threw out all the original Beduines living in Petra and built a new Beduine village for them somewhere about 10 kilometres away. Some of them, like Khaled, also ended up working and living in Wadi Musa.

It was nice to just sit in his little shop sipping my mint tea and watch the succession of locals coming in to buy their goods. And whatever they required, Khaled would nip off to the back room of his little store and come back with the goods - whether it was 2 diapers (clearly a luxury item sold individually), or a bit of piping with some strange hoses sticking out of it, his little shop seemed to have endless resources and no-one went away empty handed.

Today's picture is not Khaled, but my lunch kebab man, who was amazingly interested in the sight of a tourist taking a picture with a camera.

The tale of my culinary distress continues in Jordan. Indeed, I have descended even deeper into the region of totally non-descript cuisine! Kebabs. Kebabs. Kebabs. It seems Syrian grub is good (??!) compared with Jordanian food. Oh ye gods! I am seriously considering temporarily becoming a fruitarian and eating nothing but apples for the rest of my stay here.