After Matt’s inner sole debacle, we decided a few days off were in order to make sure his knee properly healed. We booked ourselves into an awesome guest house in Madaba and spent a really pleasant couple of days resting our legs and exploring the city.

The food in Jordan, once again, has blown us away. Starting with the mind-boggling breakfast at our guesthouse, and then followed by the sumptuous array of tasty and cheap street food (like falafel sandwiches and shwarma), and even some fantastic vegan food at a hip cafe/book store in the centre of town.

Madaba itself has a really relaxing progressive vibe. It has a larger christian population than other parts of Jordan, with everyone working and socialising side by side (as one person told us, “muslim, christian, it doesn’t matter – we are all arabs”). It also has a university, and so there were heaps of students walking around carrying textbooks and sitting in the cafes studying and chatting.

The city is famous for its mosaic floors, dating back to around the 6th century. The most impressive for us were at the Archelogical Park, where on a whim we took up an offer of a tour from the park’s superviser and were so glad we did. He spent 90 minutes walking us around the site, spraying water on the mosaics to bring out their colour, and showing us how to interpret all the pictographs. The mosaics are all made out of polished rocks, with the colours naturally occurring in rocks available around Jordan (some of which we’ve passed as we’ve walked), and the scale and detail were incredible!

We also had yet more welcoming and generous interactions with the locals. Rather than worrying about being ripped off as tourists, we keep being given things! For example, when we went to buy half a kilo of dates and went to pay the shopkeeper tried to give them to us for free (we insisted he take some money for them). We also keep getting extra desserts slipped into our packages after we’ve paid, and grocers throw in free chocolate bars when we are buying our groceries, wishing us well on our walk.

The only disappointing thing has been how few tourists are around. We were chatting to the guest house owner, and he was saying normally this time of year they are fully booked, but that they had a heap of cancellations come through when the war between Hamas and Israel broke out (even though Jordan is not involved in any way). So we have been sitting in largely empty restaurants and are sometimes the only guests in hotels and guesthouses. It’s a hard blow for tourism operators who would only have just been coming out of the drop in demand during COVID. It also seems a bit crazy – the weather here is so pleasant, and it feels a world away from what is happening on the other side of the dead sea.

The trail after Madaba crosses three large wadis. The biggest one, Wadi Mujib, is compared to the grand canyon, and the 1.5km vertical descent is considered the hardest and steepest on the trail. With Matt’s knee only just recovering, and me being a complete chicken with heights, we thought tackling that section may not be the smartest move, so instead took a taxi to Al-Karak, to continue the walk from there (we still have more than 350km ahead of us to reach Aqaba so it’s ok).

The taxi ride was slightly surreal. The driver was a larger than life character and keen on tunes, of all varieties. At one point, we were cruising down the desert highway, with Men at Work – Down Under blasting out the speakers and the taxi driver and Matt sitting in the front singing and high fiving.

We then spent a pleasantly cool day (max of 11 degrees!) exploring the town and it’s massive castle (it was so big we got lost a couple of times) and getting ready to start walking again tomorrow.