Just back from Jordan & Syria

[Gecko]

Just had Christmas and New year travelling aorund Jordan and Syria. As it was also my honeymoon it was done in finest tourist style but we crammed a lot into 3 weeks . Arrived in Amman and spent a couple of days soaking up the city and then drove down the desert highway and accoss to the kings highway south into Petra. Spent a couple of days there before heading off into the desert at Wadi Rum where we froze our butts off spending a night with the bedouin. Then onto Aqaba for a night at the coast to warm up before spending Christmas at the Dead sea. It's a bit 'cheezy' there but fun to see. We visited Jesus' baptism site (or so they would have us believe) before heading north to mount Nebo (Moses was there...) then onto the northern town of Jerash where there are fantastic Roman ruins. In total 10 days in Jordan before hopping on a super cheap Royal Jordanian airways flight (very good) to Aleppo in northern Syria.
Aleppo is great - huge crusader castle in the town nice souk (which was closed because we forgot Friday is Sunday out there... !!) Headed out of Aleppo for a 3 day tour all over the country - Apamea , Salidin's castle, Marqab citadel, Tartus on the coast (not a pretty place) then Crak de chevalier, an amazing almost complete crusader castle dating from 1271 AD . From there east towards Iraq and a new years eve night and day in Palmyra where the Roman ruins are truely a site to behold. It pales anything else I saw into insignificance - Palmyra is just incredible. It is vast and you can spend days wandering the ruins. After we drove south to Damascus before stopping at the obligatory 'Bagdad cafe' on the crossroads where the sign points one way to Bagdad and Iraq and the other to Damascus. Nice fella there gave us a cup of tea and taught me how to tie a tea towel round my head
Damascus was our final stop where we chilled out for a few days and wandered all over the town before heading home.

Overall conclusion - very interesting - very friendly people - Syria cheaper than Jordan but both very cheap by western standards. Never once felt unsafe or threatened - very few traders hassling you to buy anything - unlike Egypt - masses of amazing archeaoligical sites to visit , most unprotected and largely unrestored. 3 weeks of fascination and fun - happy new year !
Anyone thinking about visiting , drop me a message. I have some useful GPS tracks and contacts for hotels and guides which I gathered along the way.

I used the Wanderlust GPS mapping on my Garmin 60c to get around. used in conjunction with a road map we only went wrong once and got around fine. The Wanderlust mapping isn't 100% accurate as you may be used to but it's pretty damn good to navigate you through the country where road signs are often only in Arabic and are easily missed.