Amman

A the hostel in Damascus, a Canadian managed to convince me to come with him to Amman. I was planning to go on that day but not that early in the morning. He said the border formalities would take ages (which it did) and was shocked to learn that I was planning to go at night. As it turned out we met other people who were going to Jordan that day. So getting a shared taxi to Amman was easy.

Our taxi driver was a right dodgy one. It seemed like he was using the opportunity to smuggle all the duty free stuff into Jordan. At the Syrian border he bought cartons of ciggarettes (more than allowed) and bought more when we got to the Jordanian side. To make sure he hadn't miss out on anything, he bought a big bottle of whiskey as well. He even slipped some money in his passport for the border guards. The ciggarette cartons were unpacked and stuffed into his socks. The remaining was given to us so that we pretend it was ours. The whiskey was not his, he said. "Pretend it's yours". He was hoping to keep up the pious Arab facade for the general public. Everything was done in a systematic fashion, with an efficiency I thought could never occur in the Arab World.

Once in Jordan, he refused to drive us to our hotel and dropped us off instead in the middle of Downtown Amman. He was really rude about it - he got out of the car and took our stuff out. To add to the insult he was asking more money than agreed in Damascus. We argued and argued by the busy roadside. When we counted all of our money, we didn't have enough to even pay him the (cheaper agreed) fare. As a retaliation, we just left him there while he cursed us with a spat on the floor. Spit all you want.

Unfortunately, things didn't go too well for me in Amman. I was down with a fever and a cold which rendered me hostel-bound for 3 days. I didn't explore Amman as much as I wanted as well. It could be the curse of the taxi driver but I think it was most likely my indiscriminate eating in Syria. I began to feel unwell a week before in Aleppo. (An Aussie who stayed in the same hostel in Aleppo told me he became ill since Aleppo too - we met today at Pyramids in Cairo after almost 2 weeks).

I don't mind the illness too much but it was the fact that I had to cancel my attempt to get into Israel/Palestine that pissed me off. I've had it on my mind since I started this trip so it was pretty disappointing to be just few kilometres away from Jerusalem but stuck in my bed. Maybe it's divine intervention. Oh well. Come to think about it now, I would had to endure a great deal to enter Israel and the Palestinian territories. Malaysia and Israel don't have any diplomatic relations. (Useless passport!) In fact, Malaysia hates Israel's guts. So God knows what would've happened if I did go. But like my previous failure to get into Tibet last year, this would be a reason for me to come back to this beautiful region.