It's a creekmore world » Jordan

Jordan is the best country for family travel in the Middle East (and a new Petra video)

David — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 15:38:02 +0000

Jordan is the jewel of the Middle East. The food is cheap, classic Levantine – the kind Americans think of when they want “Middle Eastern”. The country is a pleasant, safe place to do your travel to Jerusalem, Syria and Egypt.

It’s not a great budget destination yet because they are still building the tourist infrastructure. You are likely to stay in big western hotels, and hire drivers. But it’s not outrageously priced by any means. Most importantly, it offers a really wide variety of cultural and adventure activities, with some pretty fancy spots to relax too. With destinations like these, it would be easy to build a two-week itinerary that would keep a family enthralled.

Amazing hiking and camping in the Wadi Rum Desert

The oldest roman ruins in the Middle East at Jerash

Scuba or snorkel the Red Sea in Aqaba

The must-see archeological site at Petra

World class resorts on the unique Dead Sea

Centuries-old Bedouin communities to visit

If you need a base for family travel in the Middle East, Jordan is your spot. On our visit we spent a few days at the Jordan Valley/Dead Sea Marriott to relax, and a full day in Petra. I really wish we had allocated more time to Jordan.

Here’s a short video of our experience in Petra, which remains one of the most memorable experiences for our kids. The dramatic landscape, ancient city and the climb through the ruins left the kids exhausted.

The 2009 family trip to the Middle East

David — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:45:35 +0000

Our Middle East posts are done! We still have about 60 percent of the video to compile and edit — it’s beginning to look like that may never get done.

They look great! Thanks to Trish for photographing, editing and producing these.

Traveling with kids? Seek drama and keep moving

David — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 01:51:11 +0000

Some of the joys of travel are subtle. I spent a fair amount of time in Siberia, and despite the romantic image it produces in our minds, it was hardly exhilarating in reality. The enjoyment was distributed evenly across the experience and noticable only when I would look across the flat landscape to the horizon thinking, “Shit, this tundra goes on forever.”

Those are not the kinds of experiences you want when traveling with kids. Kids (ours are 6 and 9) can’t appreciate the endless tundra of Siberia. Well, they can, but only for a moment. To keep kids engaged and interested, we suggest you adopt the mantra we developed last summer in the Middle East: Seek drama and keep moving.

Once we got the hang of it, building a kid-friendly itinerary was easy in the Middle East. It’s packed with exciting, inspiring, visually-impressive sites. Petra’s cavernous pedestrian george, Jerusalem’s old wall and caves and of course, the pyramids and restored temples of Luxor, Egypt are all so accessible to the child’s imagination. In many places, the kids could climb and interact, which made it so much more real.

We did find, however, that guides were generally a mistake. Of the five or six guides we used at different points, only one could adapt the program for children. Out guide in Luxor, with whom we were stuck for two long days, was obviously so proud of his University-level knowledge of ancient Egypt. No prompting or signal to ‘keep moving’ got through his determination to say every word. It was even tough for the adults and really painful in 115 degree heat for the kids. In places where we had no guide, the family enjoyed the experience more.

Presentation matters a lot. We were surprised at how little they enjoyed the Egyptian museum in Cairo compared to the much smaller museum in Luxor. Cairo was cluttered and confusing, whereas Luxor was better curated. The girls spent twice as much time in Luxor as they did in the twenty-times-more-extensive Cairo museum.

You can’t spend much time in the same place. We would do mosques in under an hour — up to the minaret, once around, ‘Allah Akbar!’, and out again. As an adult, would I have spend more time admiring the architecture? Yes, I would, but I can’t. Happy family travel is about compromise. We know that, right?

In Morocco, we hit a bump. The girls got really restless driving over the High Atlas mountains for two days. It was gorgeous and remote. Lunching in a tiny backpacker hotel overlooking the mud-hut village was delightful to adults, but pretty boring for the kids. Car rides are especially deadly without frequent stops, a luxury our itinerary did not afford in Morocco. Children don’t get get tired until they get bored. (well, mostly anyway.)

But we rescued win from the jaws of fail! Our destination on those long rides was the the drama highlight of our trip: an overnight camp-out in the Sahara Desert. Overall, the Middle East was pretty easy to arrange for kids. As we build our kid-friendly travel plan for Mexico and Italy we’ll post our drama-filled, fast-moving itinerary. Maybe you can suggest great stuff to see!

Video: Jordan Valley Pool and Dead Sea

David — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:47:35 +0000

Here is a video from our first few days at the resort in Jordan. The original blog is here.

Israel to Jordan to Egypt: Days 9-10

David — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:04:17 +0000

These are transition days from Jerusalem to Amman, on to Cairo and finally Luxor. They weren’t particularly eventful.

We again crossed the bridge after saying goodbye the the American Colony, which is the kind of hotel you remember forever. Expensive at $540 per night, yes, but very memorable.

It’s a summer Thursday so it’s extra busy ahead of shabbat and Palestinians on summer vacation. The car line to get into the Israeli border complex is 90 minutes. Once inside, we forego the VIP service going back to Jordan on the advice of our driver. He claims the Jordanians don’t care as much so there aren’t lengthy lines. He’s totally right. An hour later we are in Jordan heading to Amman.

Amman contains a third of Jordan’s 6M inhabitants. What I saw was clean and very Western, but not very charming. We checked into the Sheraton but were already late to a business lunch, so we dashed off in another minivan for restaurant Centro. It was a very American menu, which was fortunate because Emma and Lily had declared (the night before) that they were boycotting french fries for a week. At Centro, Lily had spaghetti bolognese and Emma a pizza (no basil!).

The room at the Sheraton was not great. It was a tiny, smoking room with a busted AC. There was just a king bed and tiny single cot. Lily ended up between us by midnight. We’ve had a difficult time with sleeping arrangements at some hotels as a family of four. Most have a 3-person max policy but they enforce it erratically. Doubles are hard to find. We often get away with 4 by lying about Lily’s age.

The pool at the Amman Sheraton seemed to be a country club for locals and there were lots of bikini’s, bug-eye sunglasses and high-heels (usually in tandem). We ate a decent buffet dinner and went early to bed even before the US finished their day, which is midnight our time). The long days are taking their toll.

Friday, day 9 we go slowly to Egypt. It’s only 3 hours of flight time from Amman to Luxor but it chews up a full day with all the international hassle, an airport terminal change in Cairo and overly cautious travel agents that book really long connections. Trish and I thumb e-mail all day roaming from mobile provider to mobile provider. We have no mishaps besides Lily having trouble with ear pressure and arrive in Luxor around 8:30pm.

Our resort is called Sonesta St. George. I had tried for the historical Sofitel Winter Palace but they wouldn’t allow 4 in a room, no exceptions. I wanted to be downtown so the next best option, I was told by the agent, is one my guidebook calls ‘kitschy’ – a risky predicate for a hotel.

Don’t get me wrong, at $120 per night for a mini-suite on the 6th floor overlooking the Nile, it’s not a bad deal. The staff are genuinely nice. But the inside looks like the white-trash cousin of the Las Vegas ‘Luxor’ hotel. It’s got Pharaoh motifs stapled to a plywood wall in one section. They have a mini mall in the lobby with 24-hour souvenir shops hawking trinkets. Our room had a musty smell when it didn’t smell like burning cheese. We ate in the courtyard, and the kebab was ghastly.

Trisha found a creepy cobwebbed ‘ballroom’ below the pool area. There was a Druse folk dancing group on the outdoor stage with no one watching. (They were cool.) Later it turned into a ‘disco’ but no one danced. In fact, I realized there were almost no guests! I begin to think that the few people I did see were trapped there like an Egyptian Hotel California. Yikes.

Trisha was against moving, and told me to calm down. But she changed her mind when she found out internet access was doled out in 30 min time cards for $8 apiece. I had already found it difficult to find a good hotel in Luxor, so I knew it wouldn’t be easy. Since I’m posting this late, I’ll let you know that it turned out great for us. But it took some effort to make happen. I slept fitfully.

[Photos by Trisha Creekmore]