Hey this is Chris from Amateur Traveler and I am on the road today and so we're going to do a repeat episode of Amateur Traveler this week and this is going to be a repeat of episode

423 from three years ago from a trip I did a very special trip to Jordan. I'm heading out there and I'm ready to go looking real good in my passport photo

amateur traveler episode 423 today the amateur traveler talks about ancient ruins, Bedouin camps, and the

Nabatian city of Petra as we go to Jordan. I want to tell the story of my recent trip to Jordan and it's interesting as the one who's

actually being interviewed for change to know how to start that story.

So I want to start you not at the beginning of the story

but at a particularly memorable moment.

At one point in my trip, I was at the Fainan Echo Lodge and this is in the Dana Nature Preserve.

I had a special guide.

Most of the time I had been provided by the Jordan Tourism Board with a guide Walid as well as with a driver.

But when we had gotten to this lodge I had gone off with Mohammed who was a Bedouin.

He was actually from one of the local Bedouin families.

And we had hopped on mountain bikes. We had ridden down the dirt road and then up the next

wadi from where the echolodge was. We had ridden up a ways and

gotten off and walked up to the mountainside and we were sitting at one point

next to a village that was 10,000 years old, that there was part of an archaeological dig to uncover

this village.

Mohammed had brought flour and salt and made Bedouin bread and the same way that we described recently in the

episode we did on Western Sahara basically making a patty out of the

spread a flatbread and then bearing it in the coals of this fire that he started,

had put a pot of Bedouin tea on, and then pulled out his flute and started to play as we were in this

wind-swept valley on this warm day in an area that

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