Day 19 Shabak Castle and Mt. Nebo

Today we are on our way to Amman, Jordan so that we can tour the city of Jerash and then fly back out to Cairo. The drive to Amman from Petra is about 5 hours. In order to make the drive more interesting, we made a few stops.

The first stop was to Shobak Castle which is about 30 minutes outside of Petra. This is one of a few crusader castles in the area. Please go to the following website for the history: http://www.atlastours.net/jordan/shobak.html.

We had a tour of the castle by a local boy who lives nearby. He is 15 and is in the 10th grade and just started learning English about 6 months ago. We thought his English was pretty good. He was a nice kid and we enjoyed our 30 minute tour. His name is Amjad. There were also some Italian archaelogists there that were excavating the site and trying to rebuild it to look like the original. We only saw one level but in the past it is thought to have had 7 levels. It sits on top of the highest mountain in the area.





The second stop was to the city of Madaba which means the city of mosaics. We stopped at the Greek Orthodox church of St. George. It’s open from 8am-6pm and cost 1 Jordanian Dinar. This church is famous for its mosaics, especially the one on the floor in the middle of the sanctuary which shows the entire holy land including Jerusalem, the Dead Sea and the Jordan River.

After lunch at a local tourist stop, we drove to Mt. Nebo. The church there is open from 8am-7pm and costs ½ Jordanian Dinar to enter. This is the presumed site of Mose’s death and his burial place. It is where God told him he could see the promised land but could not enter. There were some spectacular views across the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea as well as the rooftops of Jerusalem, Jericho and Bethlehem.


After that visit, we drove on to our hotel in Amman. Amman is the capital of Jordan and is very modern. All of the buildings look like they are made out of the same white stone. Almost half of the entire population of Jordan lives in the city of Amman. Seventy percent of the population of Jordan are Palestinian. They live in mostly the northern half of the country and make up nearly 90% of the population of Amman. Our hotel is called the Amman International Hotel.

We have decided that we have had enough babaganoush, hummus and pita bread and are heading to Pizza Hut.