(That was as close as we got to camels. Nasty things, camels.)
After two days walking around Petra, with a bad-weather day in between where we visited the ruined castle at Shobak ...
... it was time to head home to Amman.
For the trip from Amman to Aqaba we'd taken the JETT VIP bus, a very nearly luxurious bus with leather seats and breakfast on board. I hadn't booked a return bus from Petra, as we weren't quite sure which day we'd be going back, and that (surprisingly) turned out to be a mistake.
Although Petra is Jordan's number one tourist destination, with a million visitors a year, and JETT is the number one tourist bus company in Jordan, there is exactly one JETT bus a day from Petra to Amman. (There are "public" buses - smaller buses that leave when they're full rather than running to a timetable - but it appears tourists are really expected to take package tours or hire rental cars with drivers.) There's no JETT ticket office in Petra; instead travellers are advised to phone to reserve seats and be at the bus station half an hour before the bus goes.
The day before we were planning to leave, I'd managed to persuade the chap on the desk at our hotel to phone the JETT number for me, and listened while he had a conversation that certainly seemed to involve booking two people with versions of our names onto a bus to Amman. So we headed to the JETT stop after our semi-marathon day walking around Petra with reasonable hopes of getting onto the bus. When the ticket-seller arrived he couldn't find our names on his handwritten reservation list, and told us the hotel must have phoned the wrong JETT office. He then bolted onto the bus without offering to add our names to the list, telling us to wait outside until he knew whether there was room for us. We weren't too worried - his list looked short, and there were only a few other people waitig to board the bus. As departure time got closer, though, more and more people turned up. Lots of them had actual tickets, presumably purchased in Amman before the trip down, and it was entirely reasonable that they should be allowed onto the bus. Other people, mostly locals, were arriving without tickets though, and many of them were pushing their way onto the bus to talk to the ticket guy then coming back to stand outside with the rest of us hopefuls. Every few minutes the ticket guy would come to the door and call out a name or two from his reservation list, which mysteriously seemed to have more and more names on it as the minutes went by. In the end there was room for exactly one passenger whose name wasn't on his list ... and the bus pulled away leaving six somewhat disgruntled foreign tourists behind. No other bus at all till the next day - and since the ticket seller had left on the bus there was no guarantee the next day wouldn't turn out exactly the same.
We were rescued by a pair of enterprising taxi drivers (quelle surprise). As a group we weren't in a very good negotiating position, as the taxi drivers were well aware we'd been ditched by the bus and the public buses for the day were also finished. But they actually seemed like decent chaps, and offered a price that seemed not entirely unreasonable for the 234-km drive to Amman, especially given that they would then have to turn around and drive back to Petra without being allowed to pick up passengers in Amman because it wasn't their patch. (And to put it in a home context, it would probably cost more to get a taxi to The Base and back home again in Hamilton than Mark and I paid for our share ...).
We divvied the passengers and luggage between the two cars and headed off in mini convoy. Our driver drove like a man who'd left dinner cooking on the stove at home, reaching 130 km/hr on good stretches of road, but was mercifully unchatty and quite good at staying in his lane. The only thing we missed out on (other than having a bit more cash left at the end of the trip) was the satisfaction of overtaking the bus.
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