14/05/07
After being blown away by Petra, we took off toward the Dead Sea. We stopped off to check out Kerak Castle along the way, which pretty much had the effect of "um, yeah, whatever" after having come from Petra (hell, the castle was only a millennium old of Pete's sake!!!).
One interesting fact was they way they designed the castle walls, having them slope out like the pic below to stop invaders from easily putting ladders or pushing up ramps to the castle wall:
There's pretty much bugger all to see above ground, all of the interesting stuff is underground, in a maze of tunnels. Here's Tan's and Grant wandering around below:
Inside one of the underground rooms (I think that's Dayle in the pic):
Once we were over wandering around, we started mucking around with some silhouettes, Here's our attempt at YMCA (with Grant making an 'l' for some reason in the middle of it!):
Tans and Dayle doing cartwheels:
And Tania floating in mid air:
We finally got to the Dead sea (which is over 400 meters below sea level) and was not disappointed! The Dead sea kicks ass. You walk out to about thigh deep and sit down, all the time thinking "hmm, this isn't too different to normal sea water" and then all of a sudden your feet flick out from under you and you're basically sitting on top of the water! It's a really surreal feeling and everyone goes through exactly the same process, feeling apprehensive and then giggling like a school kid one your feel flick out and you start bobbing around on top:
Here's Meels and Tania:
Grant mastering lying sideways in the water, which is actually bloody hard to do!
Meels, Dayle, Grant, Tans and I doing our superman pose:
And trying the sideways pose (looks like Teena managed to make it in this pic too!). It appears I might have got a splash of water in my eyes or was trying to avoid doing so. I also tried tasting a tiny, TINY bit of the water at one stage. Summery of that experience is, "don't do it":
Travel talk set us up at a great hotel for the rest of the day. We spent the afternoon acting like big kids sliding down the water slide and splashing around in the pool:
Then it was back to Egypt and Cairo! We checked out some of the local markets along the way. Tania and Grant found us something for dinner (mmm, goat):
On our last day we met back up with Remon in Cairo for a city tour. Everybody loves Remon by the way, fantastic tour guide. In fact, even God himself seemed to shine down upon him while we were checking out some church:
