Nearly the end of the trip, but certainly not the end of the blog.

There are so many more things I remember that I would like to share in this blog. But I won't catch up on them now. For now, I'm updating live from an internet cafe in Jerusalem.

I took a sample of a Jewish spirituality class for that last few days. I met Mottle, the guy who runs it, at a synagogue and he invited me to do it for these few days, giving me room and board and everything. He was hoping I'd decide to stay and extend my trip, but when I said I didn't want to, he didn't push it at all. He proved that he truly wasn't doing it only to get me to join. When he said I could just chill there for a few days and he only wanted to share his awesome program with me, he really meant it. Good guy.

The program was quite good. It didn't turn me around and make me feel more religious, but it did show me that, as I thought, I have a good potential to be a religious person. Or a spiritual person. Or whatever you want to say.

Some of the way the teachers talked about Judaism were as foreign to me as Christianity or Islam. They taught it as a more loving, almost Eastern religion in which YHWH is more like the infinitely faceted Hindu gods, or like the Tao that flows through everything.

And the dorm/study space is located in the most picturesque neighborhood in all of Israel: Nachlaot, Jerusalem. It resembles the Old City, with buildings made of stone with tiny yars behind walls, and blue metal shutters. But it lacks the claustrophobic and touristy feeling of the Old City. The buildings are farther apart and, well, there are no tourists. it's full of hippies and super religious folks. There are some cars, but they are few. it is full of parks and gardens, but they are all compact and personable. It all has a very compact feeling, but along with that is a sense that they wasted no space. Nothing there is big enough to make a person feel small- in fact, it's all so small that it makes you feel a bit big, but not so big that you can't fit in it (which is how the Old City makes me feel sometimes.)

And best of all, the city was built by Jews, for Jews, in land that never belonged to anyone else. Before the Jews settled it, it was nothing but forests full of coyotes. It, in fact, was the first building built by anyone outside the Old City walls, and it was bought fair and square from the Ottomans in the 1800s. I may have problems with the concept of Israel as the biblical, millenial homeland of the Jews, and in Nachlaot, the knowledge that Jews had lived here for more than a century moved me more than Massada or any other ancient monument. I felt more invested in the history of that place than the history of anywhere else I'd been in Israel. I could see my ancestors there just as much as I saw myself.

That's not to say the Western Wall doesn't still blow my mind. It still does, for sure.

Now I'm headed to Tel Aviv to track down a Jewish Brit named Joe Dale who I met at the beginning of the trip. He was a great guy, and seeing him again would be a cool way to end my journey.

Ahhhh running out of money in Jordan!

Sixty five dinars (about 100 bucks) have left my pocket since the last post. That's more than half of the budget I planned for. Wow.
I can withdraw cash, of course. It's survivable. And Jordan, in fact, is a relaxing place so far. I'm in Aqaba now, and it's a bit like Eilat except it feels less like a shopping mall. It has many small chain stores (a Quiznos!) lining thin streets with islands of trees in the center. There are many fancy houses colored pinkish-tan with balconies overlooking curved swimming pools, which I believe are owned by rich Saudis. And the guys in the internet cafe are decent to be around. And the place is only 1 dinar an hour, which is slightly less than the Israeli price (in Israel it's about 4 bucks an hour, 1 dinar is under 2 dollars.), so I won't be an Arab peasant by the end of the day.

It all started when I got to the Jordanian border. I was told by many people that, from the border, it would be easy to find a taxi going to Petra with other tourists to share it with. Also, according to the Jordan Jubilee site, there was a bus from Aqaba to Wadi Rum ever day. So I went in figuring somehow it would work itself out.

I met nobody at the border besides two Canadian women. We walked across the empty border crossing and took each other's pictures. They both were picked up by a friendly Jordanian driver. He offered to take me to Wadi Rum for 30 dinar. I knew that was bad, but I felt lazy, so I did it, and I figured I could be stingy later on.

I'd heard that at the Wadi Rum visitor's center, it's easy to find a jeep tour to hop on, since Wadi Rum charges by the jeep, not by the passenger.

That's true, but the driver didn't drop me off at the visitor's center. He dropped me off at an office of some Bedouins and told me I had to get a jeep tour for 35 dinar. I argued with him until I was exhausted and gave in. I ordered the jeep tour. I got in the jeep and it took me to the visitors center, and, from there, to the rocks of Wadi Rum.

I felt like I was once again a victim of the notorious sleaziness of this region, but I let it slide. I focused on the Lawrence of Arabia vistas. Wadi Rum is only subtly different from the rest of the desert; it takes a little while before it hits you how cool it is. Like the Sinai desert, and the Jordanian desert between Wadi Rum and Aqaba, it consists of monochromatic, stark, jagged rocks. But Wadi Rum is different. It looks as if large pieces of the Sinai desert crumbled into orangey sand, leaving pieces of the rocky desert behind. In the rest of the desert, you can get tired of seeing stark rocks, but in Wadi Rum, it's different- the desert around the rocks makes them a lot more impressive. I think it's best described as a mutant child of a sandy desert and a rocky desert.

The interesting, but sometimes boring thing about a rocky desert is that the massive amount of jagged rocks can distort your spatial orientation. They all blur together into one big, intimidating moon of biblical rock. The Sinai always intrigued me because it's scary (because of how it looks and how the rocks are interrupted only by the occasional truckload of religious pilgrims, frequent checkpoints, and nice beach and diving resorts) but Wadi Rum has a majestic, sublime quality to it. The rock formations have smooth sides that help you to appreciate how tall they are.

Close to the visitor's center is the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which looks a little bit like a hand or an oyster shell. More than those things, it looks like a giant, wide rock.

The driver took me farther into the desert until a formation called the canyon. It's not a canyon as much as a giant rock which you can walk into for a good distance. It has both Arabic and Nabatean inscriptions on the wall, which is cool as well.

In the canyon, I met two German guys. One was a diplomat in Israel and the other was visiting him. Winfrid and Tom were there names. Tom had a nice camera, and when I told him about the destruction of mine, he snapped a few pics of me in the canyon and said he'd send them to me. I asked them where they were going later, and they said Aqaba. I told them that if I didn't find a taxi or bus to Petra, I'd go with them.

I went back to the visitor's center before they did, and looked around for a taxi. I ate a few candy bars and got offered a few more jeep tours. I found out that you can stay in Wadi Rum for 3 dinars a night, but I realized that I really didn't want to spend that much time there. It was the kind of place that I knew could lose its magic if I stared at the Seven Pillars for the next five hours. It'd be cheap but really boring. So, when the Germans came back, I went with them to Aqaba.

Now, I have to decide if I'm going to stay here for the night and attempt to find fellow taxi riders to Petra tomorrow, or to spend the absurd 40 dinar to Petra tonight.