One week we wanted to go hiking, not on a guided tour but by ourselves. Also in our minds was the newly established Jordan Trail, which is a continuous route crossing the whole length of Jordan from North to South, over 650 kilometers long. If you would hike the whole way, it would take you approximately 36 days. That’s a lot of hiking!
The Jordan Trail association has a website which offers all the information about the trail, including dividing it into eight regions and inside those regions to shorter routes. You can see the distance, time needed, difficulty level, things to see on the way, if it’s marked or not, and also information about food, water, and toilets, sometimes also phone numbers of taxi drivers working in the region. Plus, you can download the route via GPS or even Google Maps. How awesome is this? We chose to hike from Fuhais to Iraq al-‘Amir, which was a 5+-hour hike covering about 15 kilometers, easy level. Easy in this case meant that mostly we were walking on roads, asphalt or dirt, but not on paths. Still, there were some challenges since the landscape was full of hills and some of them quite steep! We enjoyed very varied views: hills and valleys, citrus and animal farms, green grass and rough rocks, almond trees and cactus fruit, tents and sheep of the Bedouins, villages.. You name it! Our end point was the village of Iraq al-‘Amir, where we visited caves that were used for storage and probably also for living at some point, and Qasr al-‘Abd, a ruin of a Roman mansion, that no one really knows what it was for. Local legend says that it was built by a humble man, who fell in love with an aristocrat’s daughter (hence the name Qasr al-‘Abd, the castle of the slave), and for her hand, he had to build the greatest home of all. But all his troubles were for vain, since the father of the girl had him murdered, since it would not be appropriate for the daughter to marry a commoner. Oh well, who knows. Taking a taxi back to Fuhais, we ended our day trip to the Carakale brewery and sat sipping our craft beers watching the sunset over the hills. Pretty good day.
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