Kerak and the King’s Highway
I left the Dana nature reserve early in the morning and didn’t realize what a troublesome day it was going to be. I wanted the head North towards Madaba by using the King’s Highway. The King’s Highway is supposedly the nicest road in Jordan. It goes through numerous valleys up and down, up and down, which forces cars to go so slowly that it really can’t be called a highway anymore. The sights are amazing, but after the numerous other gorgeous places I had seen in Jordan, the King’s Highway didn’t stand out that much.
What made the trip to Madaba so tedious was that all these valleys are quite challenging for an old car. The brother of Rasmi, Ali, agreed to drive me up to Madaba for a small fee. Ziad and Machmud (another brother of Rasmi) joined us for the trip. We would stop on the way, so that I can see Kerak and then use the King’s Highway. The plan was to arrive at Madaba in the early afternoon. Unfortunately, this didn’t quite happen… First we started 1.5 hours late, because Ali wasn’t able to start the car. Once we started and approximately 1 hour before we got to Kerak, the car overheated and we stood by the side of the road pouring cold water over certain parts of the engine. It turns out the the fan of the car was broken. So given that it was 45 degrees celsius outside, an additional broken fan did not help. But eventually we were able to restart and made it to Kerak.
In Kerak, I visited a Crusader Castle. What was interesting about this castle was all its underground galleries. You could take one tunnel somewhere in the castle and come up at a completely different location somewhere else. The castle was built in 1142 and all that remains are some walls, the underground galleries and 1-2 statues. The city of Kerak itself is a very ugly city. It was full of dust and you could barely distinguish the facades of the building because of the dust. But what was funny about this city is the attraction park at the entrance of it. Apparently this park only opens in the evening, it made me very curious to see who would go to this park that really didn’t seem to fit in this city.
After Kerak, we kept driving and soon got to an enormous valley. The valley looked gorgeous, but I didn’t quite realize how much time it would take us to cross it. On one side, we had the car that wasn’t working well, but on the other side I was with locals that insisted to visit every single of their friends in this valley. So we would stop every 200m for tea/coke/food. There is no doubt that all these people were incredibly friendly, one even offered me some necklace, but after the 4th stop I got visibly annoyed by having yet another meal and listening to another conversation that I couldn’t understand. Ali noticed how annoyed I was, but even when he tried not to stop at one of his friend’s places on the side of the road, they ran on the street to stop him. We had no choice and it took us 5 hours to cross the valley. Getting to Madaba in the early afternoon was completely impossible at this point.
Once we made it to the other side of the valley the car overheated again and started loosing water. We had to stop every few kilometers to put some more water in it and it was unclear whether we would make it to Madaba at all. In the end, we emptied 2 little tea stalls’ water reserves. I finally got to Madaba by 6pm only to find out that the hotel that I wanted to stay at was booked out. Ali and the others were nice about it, they ran across town and called friends to help me until I found a hotel that I liked. Somehow they also found someone to fix the car and were ready to head all the way back to Dana…
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