Jerash has Roman ruins in the middle of Jordan. Fascinating! I’ll show you some of my favorites here.
My first stop on the road trip through Jordan was Jerash, which includes the ancient city founded by the Romans in the 1st century BCE (called Gerasa at the time). It’s my first time seeing a city that was part of the Decapolis (Greek: Deca = 10, Polis =
town/city), a grouping of ten towns in what is now Jordan, Syria and northern Israel.
This is a story about the worst airport in the world. Or at least I felt that way at the time! People were so unhelpful in so many ways, that I almost thought it was deliberate.
Welcome to Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, Jordan – the least helpful international airport I’ve been in. The tourist “information” booth didn’t have any information. His English was quite good, but he couldn’t answer ANY of my questions, which were rather basic. This is the biggest airport in Jordan, and their only non-Arabic map they had was in Russian.
Also, I had booked a rent-a-car through the Budget Rent-a-Car airport office, which didn’t actually exist. The guy at the information booth had no idea what I was talking about when I asked about it. One of the vendors said he knew them but that he hadn’t seen the Budget guy since the morning, so my best route is to just wait and hope he comes back. Apparently they don’t have an office; it’s a guy with a clipboard, credit card machine, and keys.
Hours later I finally found the guy, and after filling out some paperwork he took me to the car. They leave the car in long-term parking; he said the guard knows him and wouldn’t charge me, but that wasn’t the case. The security guard said he knows the Budget guy, but the new renter always pays the bill. So your total cost is actually dependent on how long ago the guy before you left the car.
Off to a great start…
[note – after a week of traveling through Jordan, I found Jordanians to be among the nicest of anywhere I’ve been. Quite the contrast! I’ve explained in this linked posts]
