From Amman to Madaba
Madaba is a small town in central Jordan located very close to the famous biblical sites of Mount Nebo and Bethany-beyond-the-Jordan. It was from the top of the former site, Mount Nebo, that the Hebrew prophet Moses is said to have first seen Jericho and Jerusalem. The later site, Bethany, is described in the Bible as the place where Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist. The Jordan river and Dead Sea are also right nearby and easy it was easy to see all four important sites in a single day.
Mosiac at an archaeological exhibit at Mount Nebo, Jordan
Getting from Amman to Madaba was pretty straight forward. From our Amman hotel we asked a taxi to take us to the bus station for buses going to Madaba. The station was a couple of miles outside the main congested area of Amman but not all that far; the fare was about 2JD. Once dropped off at the station it wasn’t exactly clear what to do next. There was lots of activity, food stands, shops and people, but no clear ticket desk or central office, so we merged in with the general flow of people and rode the crowd. After a few minutes I looked around and realized the crowd momentum has dissipated and there really was no obvious next step, but right at that moment Jennifer looked up and saw a sign in Arabic reading Madaba (مادبا). Hadha mumtaz!
The sign was on an awning that covered the loading/unloading area for buses. We checked the buses for clues. One was really struggling-looking with windows so dirty you could hardly see the people inside, however, in small Arabic letters near the front headlights there read the destination, Madaba. Fortunately in an adjacent parking space there was a cleaner, more modern, similarly labeled bus, about 80% full and about to pull out. I made eye contact with the driver, who nodded back, and we ran to jump on. We paid the driver the fare (about 1.5 JD for the two of us) and away we went. Evidently there is no central ticket office. Figures.
The ride to Madaba is 30 km on paper but took over an hour, half of which was fighting through horrible Amman traffic, and I got a little carsick on the ride, I think from trying to write in my notebook while the frequent stops to pick up or drop off people lurched us passengers back and forth. I was really surprised by how quickly a bus traveling 60 mph could come to a stop, pick up a person waiting on the highway shoulder, and accelerate back to speed. We had evidently boarded a kind of local or regional bus, as typically the dedicated tourist buses don’t make stops between their start and end points. Oh well; who knows if there was any other option? As usual, guidebooks left out helpful details — more material for our forthcoming book Everything Lonely Planet Tells You is Wrong. No matter, we made it to Madaba all intact, then got a taxi from the bus depot to the Mariam Hotel, where we checked in a requested a driver for the day to take us to Mount Nebo, Bethany, and the Dead Sea.
