Jordan (2010)

Wadi Rum (وادي رم‎) super panorama

Taas — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 10:12:00 GMT

An experiment with stitching together 16 pictures to make one panorama. The image is ten times as wide as it is high; the original was 22 853 pixels wide. Cool, but how do you properly show images this wide on internet?

Downloading can be slow, picture is 2300 x 230 pixels.

Faux IR

Taas — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 11:07:00 GMT

Two images from Jordan - Petra & Wadi Rum - converted to faux IR.

Faux infra red, one of those manipulations in Photoshop to give your black and white image that pompous look.... It's basically opening the green and red colour channels, closing the blue, followed by black & white conversion. Works best on images where primary colours dominate. Bleaching red sand, turning a blue sky into an angry black and lush green foliage into an eerie white.

One more video from Jordan

Taas — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:37:00 GMT

Found one more video in the collection. A local cup of tea - brewed on a small wood fire - in the narrow high siq of Little Petra. Jordanians seem to have a minor preference for tea, over the traditional coffee that most Arabs drink (all the time). Another legacy from the British Mandate?

Tea time!

Back home

Taas — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 07:50:00 GMT

At home, with a collection of pictures as physical evidence . . . Right-click picture to see largest available size (e.g. panorama's).
All the video's are here.

Flying home . . .

Taas — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 06:41:00 GMT

Dead Sea (البَحْر المَيّت‎)

Taas — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:16:00 GMT

The Dead Sea (al-Bahr El-Mayyit in Arabic), the lowest point on earth and it shows. With rain pooring since yesterday, it is becoming the drain of the world. Masses of water flowing down the mountains pick up mud and - as it turns out - parts of our road . . . The dirt flowing into the Dead Sea creates a beautiful effect on the water surface; a sharp line between the deep blue water - we anticipated - and the muddy rain water. The line slowly moves to the middle of the Dead Sea where it meets with the Israeli mud.

Anyway, no bath for us today . . . And I wouldn't be surprised if the lower salinity of the rain water precludes the floating experience that the Dead Sea is so famous for.



	Dead Sea during rain

Some background info on the world's lowest and saltiest lake:
The Dead Sea is in fact a lake with one main tributary - the river Jordan - and no effluent. The 67 kilometres by 18 km lake has its extreme salinity to thank for its name. Where the world's oceans contain 4 - 5% salt, the Dead Sea contains eight times that; no way that this amount of salt will sustain life.

The Dead Sea area has become a real health treatment spa for several reasons. The mineral content of the water, low content of pollens or other allergens in the air, reduced ultraviolet radiation and the slightly higher atmospheric pressure, each have their claimed specific health effects. As such, it must be one of the world's first first spa resorts. It is mentioned in relation to the biblical Herod the Great (74 - 4 BC), the Jewish Roman king. Just a thought, but Herod the Hooligan probably is a much better name for somebody who murdered many his own family, numerous jewish rabbis and ordered the killing of all boys under two years of age in the Bethlehem area, around the time of Jezus' birth (though contradicting sources prevented historians from really confirming the Massacre of the Innocents).

Indolence

Taas — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 06:39:00 GMT

This student-style word perfectly describes our activity here in Aqaba. This place breaths 'double shot gin and tonic' from 11 to 11. And if you're still not convinced you're excessively spoilt, visit the contractors camp just across the road, where conditions are .... ehm ... let's use the word "sobering" ....



	Radisson SAS Tala Bay Resort

Wadi Rum (وادي رم‎)

Taas — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:40:00 GMT

Jordan's largest wadi with its combination of red sandstone and gray granite rock, is probably best known by Westerners for the 1962 movie "Lawrence of Arabia". It never had the ambition to become a metropole and today several Bedouin tribes inhabit Rum village and wadi. In the village you'll find some hundred concrete houses and goat-hair tents, one school, a few shops, and the Police desert patrol office.

A really cool and almost 360° panorama from Wadi Rum

While you will find Arab tourists almost everywhere in Jordan, you don't find many in Wadi Rum. In compensation, it attracts all kinds of Western tourists in numbers. Most of them day trippers, who are driven in open four-wheel-drives along the sights, to end the day with an amazing sunset. You can do this in 4 hours easily, as all sites are close to Rum village. Rum also attracts backpackers, some of them spending months in the area to get a taste of Bedouin life. The tourists to this once isolated area, have clearly improved the financial position of the local Bedouin. Four-wheel-drive vehicles, mobile phones and computers all fuel their adventure businesses. As one of the few, our guide had upgraded his home from plain concrete to outright modern Arab.



	Rock formation in Wadi Rum

Because we were lucky. In Bait Ali Camp, we met Dominic and Lucy. Together with them, we hired Khalid as our guide and were able to take our own Landcruiser into the desert. And for almost the double charge we skipped all the usual sites and got the treat of driving straight south to the Saudi border. We actually crossed it, but stayed well away from "the Ditch". The ditch prevents illegal border crossing in those places where the rock formations and mountains don't (i.e. the sandy bits) and is very visible on Google earth.

Red and grey colours in Wadi Rum

Phosphate train

Taas — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 06:41:00 GMT

Close to Wadi Rum we go off road and cross a narrow-gauge railway. Not far off, there's a long freight train stuck in a sand dune. A crew of 4 is digging away to clear the sand off the tracks. When we drive up to take some pictures, the driver and his engineer invite us on the engine for tea. These gentlemen are hauling 30 wagonloads of phosphate from the mines near Ma'an to the JPMC processing plant in in Aqaba harbour. At a maximum speed of 35 km/h, another 7 hours to go from Wadi Rum.

Top: the diggers finishing their job, while we're drinking tea and watching from the cab
Middle: driver and engineer in their cab
Bottom: engineer posing while the train is waiting at the sand covered tracks

But first the crew has to clear the tracks. And while it seems easy enough for the engine to push small sand dunes away, the engineer explains that 'the risk is in the front wheels. If the sand is higher than the wheel's flange height, the engine's first bogie can derail. His grin when he says "If that happens, we're late" implies an understatement....



	Phosphate train leaving Wadi Rum after digging it free.

Some background info on Jordan's largest industry:
This train is operated by the state owned "Aqaba Railway Company" ; a company that operates approx. 295 km of tracks in Jordan. While ARC officially has the authority to "manage operate and maintain Railway tracks for the purpose of carrying both people and cargo" its prime mission is to connect the phosphate mines with the processing plant in the free zone of Aqaba. For a beautiful high resolution satelite image of the phosphate mines click here!
Phosphate and potash mining is Jordan’s leading industry and the country ranks in the world's top three. Both commodities are used to make fertilizer. Jordan's Phosphate Mines Company is the sole - again state owned - operator of the mines. In addition the company produces phosphoric acid, diammonium phosphate, sulphuric acid and aluminum fluoride in the Aqaba free zone.

One last image from Wadi Musa (وادي موسى)

Taas — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:46:00 GMT

Wadi Musa, the village close to the Petra archeological site. This is the road leading from the village to Petra.