Salt (or As-Salt, or Al-Salt) is only 25 km from home, a perfect distance for a taxi ride in Jordan. It's a hilly town - so hilly it makes Amman look flat - and was once the most important settlement between the Eastern Desert and the Jordan Valley. It was used as an administrative centre by the Ottomans around the end of the 19th century, and still has many buildings from that time, in distinctive Ottoman style (if you know what you're looking for). The only way to explore most of the old town centre is on foot; no need to designate the alleyways as pedestrian zones as cars simply don't cope well with staircases.
As well as several mosques (including one built on top of an old fortress), there are a couple of old Christian churches in Salt. We were walking past the Dormition of the Virgin Mary Orthodox Church just as the church warden was unlocking it to show a local and her two overseas visitors around, and they very kindly invited us to join them. We were shown around the main part of the church and then taken up a very narrow spiral staircase onto the roof to admire the view.
There wasn't a "please save our church" box, or we'd have gladly donated some money as a thank you. Instead we clambered around Salt some more then had an astonishingly cheap lunch (the look of incomprehension on Mark's face when he saw the bill had me worried for a moment), and taxied home.
We are tougher travellers now, and have learnt to use the local buses. Well, one of them, which runs from downtown Amman along the main road near home and out to Wadi al Seer, a small town just to the west of Amman. So a couple of weekends ago we caught this bus, and then another from there (a local taxi driver generously showed us which bus we needed, which just goes to show that not all taxi drivers in Jordan are terrible people) out to Qasr Al Abd, a ruined palace built in approx 200 BC. It mostly fell down in an earthquake in 362, but parts of it have been restored just enough to give an idea of its scale and style.
After exploring the ruins we walked a couple of km to some burial caves by the side of the road. Next to the path that led up from the road to the caves was an old chap with a walking stick minding his goats, and a few boys who might have been his grandsons or might just have been local kids.
The smallest of the boys attempted to sell us a large bunch of spring onions as we walked past, perhaps not having really thought through what tourists might want to carry around on their walks. When we declined to buy the onions he and his brothers followed us to the top of the path and appared to be suggesting we could just give them money instead.
We weren't enthusiastic.
Then one of the boys tapped Mark quite vigorously on the back of the head so we decided it was time to leave, and set off down the path towards the road. When we were about halfway I felt something bounce off my shoulder: the lovely lads were expressing their disappointment by throwing pebbles at us. Some of the pebbles found their mark, though most missed, and then they moved on to bigger stones. The old chap noticed what was happening and told them to stop, but in such a gentle way that he clearly didn't expect them to take any notice and they were naturally happy to meet his expectations. Luckily none of those larger stones actually hit us, and we made it back to the village to catch our bus unharmed. (The next kids we met that day wanted to take selfies with us, funny-looking foreigners that we are - altogether more civilised!)
