House of the Purple Worms: Day 13. September 9 Mt Nebo Trip to Petra

In the morning I we had our breakfast and then I walked around the grounds looking at the plants and the birds.

The staff put out all kinds of great bakery items for breakfast.

and of course I had to indulge.

I'm definitely looking pretty well-fed on this trip!

After stuffing myself, I thought I should go on a short walk.

The grounds were gorgeous and I focused on birds because there were several different kinds in evidence there.

They had domestic birds too (probably I don't want to know about what happens to these guys.)

There were some lovely flowers and bushes on the grounds too.

The buildings themselves were picturesque, this was the outdoor hall to our room. W\Each building was named after a famous ancient Jordanian city.

It was pretty cool to see a mynah bird on the lawn, although I guess they are an invasive invader and not really a native bird.

There were fruits on the trees that attracted some interesting birds.

I saw a Spectacled Bulbul here.

Soon it was time to leave the Möwenpick Dead Sea Resort and Spa and head to our next Möwenpick hotel in Petra.

We gathered together and climbed into the bus.

Unfortunately our bus had a protective film on the windows which made taking pictures difficult, but of course you know how I like to take pictures out the window, so I did so anyway!

The geography was quite different from Egypt and across the sea we could see cities in Israel.

We saw not only camels in the desert, but also occasional Bedouin homes.

Often the people would wave to us and sometimes even chase across the desert to follow us.

After a relatively lengthy drive, we stopped at Mt Nebo.

Mt Nebo is a ridge in the Abarim mountain range.

These Google Earth shots give an idea of the size, distance and geographic type of the area.

Our hotel is roughly where the horizontal line bisects the right side of the Dead Sea. I am including these shots so you can see where we are in relation to Jerusalem and Jericho. Mt Nebo (our next tourist stop) is roughly a third down from the top if you follow the river down to the Dead Sea and a little to the right.

Here is likely the path we took to get there.

We had to drive roughly 28 kilometers from the Resort to get to Mount Nebo, but it really seemed like it was much further.

This is the entry marker.

You follow a path up to a memorial. The pope visited Mt Neo and this is duly noted here.

It is most famous as the place in the Land of Moab from the Bible where God chose to show Moses Canaan, the promised land that he would never reach because he would die on the mountain.

Nebo was probably named after a Mesopotamian god of literacy and writing, Nabu.

Here he is (from Wikipedia) in an Iraqi museum, photographed by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin.

It has some lovely mosaics.

The ridge has an elevation of about 2300 feet. On a good day you can see not only Jerricho, but Jerusalem which is about 47 km away.

The shot above may be Jericho, but I never really figured out where Jerusalem was. If I had taken a shot from the serpentine cross below that memorializes Moses Jerusalem would have been about 11:00 and Jericho about 1:00.

There was an Orthodox church built on the top of the ridge to honor Moses.

It was uncovered in 1933 along with lovely mosaic floors.

Espec rally interesting were the depictions of various animals.

There were also very nice geometric mosaic floors.

There is also a little museum about the site.

It gives both a geological history and an archaeological one.

Here is the larger footprint of the site.

There were lots of signs to explain the process of the discovery and the history of the region.

Another building was no longer there, but they had erected a roof to protect a lovely mosaic floor that had all kinds of images of animals and birds.

Here are a couple of other remarkable bird mosaics.

You can recognize the quail below as a quail.

This part of the floor has nice visual movement.

An orthodox priest brought a group of students to the site.

Some of our group stood outside of the museum and discussed the knowledge they had gained (no doubt).

After the museum we gathered together and headed back down to the bus.

On the way we passed these sparrows having a good time.

It was pretty hot, so a bath was an ideal way to cool down.

Our next stop was at a place where they made mosaics.

I believe this place was just south of Madaba. We drove there in our big pink bus and then got to take a nice rest stop.

The mosaics place there hired and trained people with disabilities and of course gave us a very interesting introduction to the making of mosaics.

The front room had numerous people working on different sizes of mosaics, using a few different techniques that they told us about.

After watching the craftspeople work, they took us into a gigantic back room so we could purchase Jordanian handcrafts.

Those chairs were lovely, but I couldn't imagine trying to get them home.

We drove some more (because we had a long way to go today).

Rather than traveling past the Dead Sea, we took an interior road that was a bit quicker. (This was good, because we had a 4 hour drive ahead of us.)

There were lots of interesting things that we passed; little hamlets, chicken farms and of course the homes of Bedouins with their herds of sheep.

Some of the towns were fairly large.

More often though, there were long desolate stretches of desert, with occasional tents or domestic animals.

It would have been interesting to get out at one of these smaller towns, but we had to forge on.

Eventually we stopped at a rest stop/gigantic souvenir store called the New Jerusalem Reststop. It had lots of different kinds of handicrafts for sale. I will talk about this later though, since we stopped there a second time and there is much to cover for today.

This is not what I imagine when I think of a shepherd tending his sheep. (Somehow I imagine green pastoral images.)

It was interesting to see wind mills. Our guide said that Jordan didn't really have developed oil resources (although the suggestion was that if they had the money to develop them, they would.)

I'm not sure which crusader castle this is. There are a few of them left over from the First Crusade.

Here is a Bedouin home. They had a big herd of sheep.

and also some camels!

I like this shot with the guard dog in the foreground.

There is a shy little baby back there trying to decide what to make of the big pink bus passing by.

Our next stop was at Castle Shoubak.

This was a castle build by invaders in 1115 during the First Crusade.

You may remember that Godfrey of Bouillon was the first invader to make himself "King" of Jerusalem in 1099. (Actually he refused the title of King and called himself Prince and Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre (Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri), which he was for all of a year before becoming ill and dying.

Long story short, Godfrey had marched into the holy lands along with Baldwin from Verdun and the Norman warrior Tancred and each would establish themselves in the Holy Land through their invasions. Baldwin I took over from Godfrey after he died (He had gotten into a big fight with Tancred essentially betraying him with the Turks in 1097), and Baldwin founded the first Crusader state on March 10 in 1098. The history of this Crusade is insanely complicated and full of treachery and deceit, but I can't possibly cover it all here. Suffice it to say that Baldwin was the leader fighting the Egyptians for Caesarea (which I visited when I was in Israel. Link here.) He ended up fighting the Egyptians again at Montreal in what is now Jordan, causing the castle to be built in the Autumn of 1115 before he marched with his troops all the way down to Aqaba on the Red Sea. The result was that he made the caravan route from Syria to Egypt secure.