Tag: Jordan

The King’s Highway: On the March

On the run up to the trip, I’d had a busy few days at work, and then, two days beforehand I was struck down with a cold. The weather outside was appalling with gusting 50 mile an hour winds, so I retreated to the kitchen, and boxed up my bike in there. Luckily I’d ended up with an enormous bike box from Decathlon, but was it too big? Its length was 195 cm and the length for an oversized bag was meant to be a maximum of 190 cm…


Arriving at the airport in plenty time, I was relieved to see that at 21.2 kg, my box was comfortably under the 23 kg weight restriction, and that seemed good enough for the check in staff. Getting to the oversized baggage point, however, I was momentarily alarmed when asked to match up my 195 cm bike box alongside a 3D template of a 160 cm one. ‘Oh it’s ok, it’ll still go’ I was assured, ‘you just need to take it over to that room at the far end of the hall as it’s too big to go through our scanners’. Whilst I watched another member of staff opening up the box and carefully searching through all of the contents, it did make me think about all the other bike boxes that I’d brought to this airport that would have been too big to go through their scanners…


The two flights went smoothly enough, the final stretch into Amman circumventing Israel by heading further west over Egypt, and then approaching from the South. Rushing around the airport after landing, at midnight, I procured some Jordanian Dinars and a new SIM card before meeting up with the driver of the van who was hopefully going to squeeze a very large bike box in the back. As the driver didn’t speak English, the manager of the hotel had also come along in a car, to meet me off the plane.


Once back at the hotel he pushed me to pay for the return leg as well – as van drivers were difficult to procure – then proceeded to charge me an eye-watering fee given the prices that should have been involved. In my depleted state, I paid what he asked, but I had been totally ripped off. And, as I lay in bed that night, there was no way I could make the numbers add up to what I’d been charged, even if I paid for the ‘van and car’ combination both ways!


Looking at it pragmatically, if I placed a value – to me – of being able to get my bike to and from the airport in the middle of the night, and storing my bike box for a week while I was away, as well as somewhere to stay at the beginning and end of the trip, maybe the manager had achieved that figure. That’s the way I’ll look at it anyway, as long as the van arrives to take me back to the airport next week…

Jordan 2023: The King’s Highway

Up In The Air

At the culmination of my lap of Iceland in the summer, I was asked ‘what’s next’? I quickly responded that somewhere warmer might be nice, like a winter escape to Jordan… And it might be nice, I’ll find out very soon!

Usually, when I’m planning a cycling trip, it develops gradually into a vague outline and a smattering of half-formed ideas, then I book the flights, and quickly those half-formed ideas become a plan. On this occasion, after several months of agonising over which flights to book, a sudden price drop forced my hand, and only then did I think to check out the news flash about the Gaza strip which had just flashed across my phone screen.

From that moment, an air of uncertainty hung over my planning: firstly when British Airways extended the duration of the flights in and out of Jordan, presumably deeming it prudent to take steps to avoid flying directly over a war zone; and secondly when they cancelled my homewards flight, offering up the possibility to postpone my trip until a time when the region appeared slightly less volatile. On considering my alternatives, I quickly realised that I would almost certainly end up claiming a refund on the flights to Jordan, then immediately replace them with cheap flights to Egypt, a country also bordering Israel and the Palestine Territories, but in which I had done no research at all. So, Jordan it was…


Jordan was somewhere that had appealed for many years, my interest piqued by photos of the red sandstone tombs of Petra glowing in the slowly-setting desert sun.
In recent years, the country had positioned itself as a safe haven for adventure in the middle of a turbulent region, so, when I first learned about the Jordan Trail, a mixed terrain mountain biking and trekking route running 400 miles down the middle of the country, I took notice. In calculating my remaining annual leave for the year, it was clear that I didn’t have enough days left to undertake the full thing, but surely I could find something to entertain myself?


In reading about the Jordan Trail route, there was regular mention of a road, ‘The King’s Highway’, an old communication path down the spine of the country, starting in Damascus, Syria, and finishing up at Aqaba on the Red Sea. Regarded as being one of the oldest roads in the world, it was documented in the bible and dotted with Roman ruins and Crusader Castles along its length.


The 250 mile stretch from the Jordanian capital, Amman, to Aqaba appeared to have some of the most impressive landscape features, bisected by the towering gorge of Wadi Mujib, tiptoeing around the edge of the Dana Biosphere Reserve, before descending to the spectacular desert landscapes of Wadi Rum on its final approach to the sea.


Oh, and in case I forgot to mention, it passes Petra along the way..