Israel or jordan

[L0uby1]

Has,anyone been to one or both? I'm fascinated by this part of the world.

My DD stayed with a host family in Wadi Rum in a tent. She really enjoyed talking to them. And their children. This was through Exodus.

If you have two weeks you can easily do both, it's relatively easy to cross the border between the two. Both are excellent for a holiday so I'd go to wherever you wanted to see more (Israel seemed to have stricter covid rules when we were travelling at Christmas - had a vaccine within last 6 monhts, waiting at the airport for a negative test.. but that may have changed since). Food is great in both, easy to drive around, lots of sights.

We flew with BA into Amman and hired a driver with Jordan Select Tours. He was great - lovely AC car, fridge in the back for the kid's snacks and drinks and because he was Jordanian he took us to some great local restaurants and off the beaten track sights.

If you like history current and past, Israel is amazing. Probably depends what you want, I like this style of holiday so Jerusalem is endlessly fascinating, and you can arrange trips to the East Bank to see how things are in Bethlehem, and Ramallah. Great intersection of all faiths (sometimes as we know v contentious) but so international. Tel Aviv is a vibrant modern city but I found it very hard to negotiate transport wise not having any Hebrew. I travelled alone and it was fine. Not cheap though in terms of accomdation.

Been to Jordan and was meant to be travelling on to Israel and Palestine but Hamas and the IDF started lobbing missiles at each other (simplified version obvs) which put paid to that part of the trip.

We hired a car and drove from Amman to the Dead Sea then on to Petra. I think we then went back up to Jerash with some interesting stops en route and finally back to Amman.

We didn’t have a gps and our phone sat nav didn’t work either. The car rental company gave us a single A3 map of the whole country. Surprisingly, it was fine. They mustn’t have a lot of roads

Dead Sea and Petra were wonderful, the rest was a bit of a mish m

… mash, but that was because it was unplanned and last minute. I remember visiting some amazing ruins and a crusader castle.

Great food!