Video Vault: Rolling Down a Really Big Sand Dune

In Wadi Ram, Jordan. A first person view of an epic hill roll.

Hotel Comparison Videos: $7.50 in Jordan vs. $6.75 in Thailand

Recently I've stayed in two budget hotels. The first was the Sunrise Hotel in Amman, Jordan:

And the second was the place I've been staying in Bangkok, My House:

The Verdict:
The Sunrise Hotel in Amman was bigger and had two beds, but My House is much cleaner, has a [cold water] shower that works, and is in a much much MUCH nicer part of town than that Jordanian hole. Plus I didn't have to haggle for the Bangkok price, while the guy in Amman started the price at $22.50. After I walked out he chased me down the street and agreed to my price, then while registering asked me "Why so angry? Why you want to [punching motion] me?" He was a young guy, probably 16. Later he asked me how to get a girlfriend, and when I said "I don't know," he accused me of lying: "Don't say you don't know! You American, you have many girlfriends, I know! Tell me!"

What I've Been Doing for 42 Days

So, it's been a while since I posted here. To blame: having a really great time in places where internet access was a rare and fleeting treat. But now I'm in Bangkok, where they shower tourists in liquid cyberspace for pennies. So, let's catch up.
Went to Jordan! First stop, Wadi Ram, a valley that Jordan sees as it's answer to the Grand Canyon. Spectacular. No Grand Canyon, mind you, but spectacular. We made arrangements with a Bedouin who called himself Desert Wolf over the 'net to camp out in the middle of the desert. He drove us out and dropped us off...
The next day we went hiking. The whole place was sandstone, which was really grippy and made for some excellent bouldering/climbing. There were a few spots where I thought we'd gotten ourselves stuck, but we always found a way out. Expected to see Desert Wolf that night. We didn't have any kindling to start a fire so we looked around for paper...and I realized I had a copy of Fahrenheit 451 with me. Sweet sweet irony. Anyway, Desert Wolf never came. Not that night, and not the next morning when he knew we needed to leave.
So we started the long hike out. About an hour or so in, we flagged down a passing Jeep that gave us a ride to the nearby village.
Spent most of the day chilling at "Ali's Place." That's Ali there on the left. Lots of tea, some tasty food, hooka smoke. We had missed the morning bus to Petra, so we had some time to kill and expressed to Ali an interest in a Jeep tour, but the asking price of the official guides was too much. So he found some young relative to drive his truck for us at a reasonable price, and off we went.
The muffler fell off pretty early into the tour. Nice guy, though, that driver. About an hour into the trip we realized we had met the night before, when I had helped repair a Bedouin tent in the dark. (Maya actually suspected it was him immediately, but I resisted)
That night Ali saw us drawing and asked us to draw something in his guest book. We left a drawing I had done of Maya sitting at Ali's Place earlier in the day. In the morning we caught a bus to Petra.
Petra! You may recognize this particular structure from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Pssh. Back to Israel!
To a goat farm! With about 220 goats (we counted every day, but no one was actually sure what number we were aiming for), from which the farm produced...
Cheese!
It was a beautiful place, in the mountains of the Galilee, looking down at Nazareth through the valley.
It was run by Amnon (pictured here with live-in grandchildren Chumba and Ta'el)...
...and Dalia (pictured here with Maya).
I spent most of my time there making a stone pillar. I finished it once with a rounded top in an effort to be different from all the flat topped pillars around, but some people thought it looked too phallic (and maybe it did), so I had to circumcise it and refinish it. It's a sturdy pillar, with a hitching post for cows/horses.
There were a few Americans there, so we organized a Thanksgiving celebration and the locals indulged us, letting us butcher one of the turkeys they had on the farm. Cooked in sheep fat, it ended up tasting a lot like sheep. Green beans, mashed potaters, POMEGRANATE sauce, stuffing, pumpkin pie (not from a can, a first for me)... It was all there.

So I just arrived in Bangkok, and I'll be bumming around for a couple of days until the Kobayashi-Downs' get here and then it'll be a whirlwind of family fun. I'm looking forward to it, and I should be able to update this blog more regularly for a while. We'll see!

I leave you with... PUPPY CAGE MATCH!!!
As always, there are more adventures photographed at My Flickr Page.

This Is What a Memory Looks Like

In the Dead Sea again.

I leave Moshav Sedot Mikha tomorrow. I`ve had a good run, made a lot of things, re-energized my creative side. Going to spend a couple of nights in Tel Aviv with friends, then I`m off to Jordan, maybe sleep out in the desert with a Bedouin... Then to Egypt. THEN.... Thailand!