Jordan

I am a little miffed as I type this.  I have made pretty clear throughout the various blog posts that I think a routine is all important as I proceed through my deployment, and my routine for Sunday has been ruined by Mother Nature this week.  As I type this thunder is echoing overhead and rain is pitter-pattering on the top of my tent (I am at work, not in my room).  It has been like this since about 4am, when the Giant Voice speaker system woke me up to let me know that there was a lightning warning.  Since then the rain and storms have been pretty much constant.  This is wrong on many levels.  First, I am in the desert and it is May.  It is supposed to be hot and dry, not cool and rainy.  Second, it is Sunday.  Right now I should be outside basking in that hot and dry weather as I write letters home and frame out this week's blog, counting down the minutes until I leave for a delicious, wonderful brunch.  Instead I woke up early as the Giant Voice (the one outside, not the one in my head) kept telling me about lightning and Patton decided to be particularly noisy during reveille at 0600, and then I started thinking about work.  I blame the liberals and their so-called "global warming".  Bah.

As Tracy and virtually every sailor in my company have reminded me, I really should not complain.  I was delinquent again in posting a blog entry last week; that is because I was trapped in Aqaba, Jordan for 8 wonderful days.  Part of our mission includes inspecting what we call multi-modal cargo, it gets transported via multiple channels, like a plane to a ship, or rail to a truck and it goes to other countries in the Middle East.  I have had sailors in Oman, UAE and Jordan pretty much since I arrived, although the Jordan work had recently dried up so we pulled everyone back from there.  However, the Army had some cargo they wanted shipped back two weeks ago and requested support.  We have to send two people for safety purposes and I nominated yours truly to go along with someone else from the company.  One way to save money when flying military folks around is to put them on the regular military flights that move around all over the world each day.  There is a flight that connects Kuwait to Amman, Jordan so it was a no-brainer to throw us on it.  Unfortunately it is only a weekly flight, so we were destined to spend at 7 days there, and that turned into 8 when the flight got delayed a day.  While there we had to pay for a hotel and got our daily per diem so I not sure anything was saved in the long run, but it is best not to think about that.

Anyway, we were able to fit a pretty aggressive sight-seeing campaign in and around the little bit of work we had to do.  Jordan is a really interesting country, cursed because it is without oil in a petroleum-rich Middle East, bordered by crazy neighbors (Iraq, Syria, Israel and Saudi Arabia) and a huge ally of the US, mostly because we give them buckets of money due to their strategic location.  There is obviously a big focus on the problems in Syria right now, northern Jordan has been overwhelmed by refugees and although many countries have promised Jordan aid, few have delivered.  This centrality theme goes back to ancient times, Jordan was a big transportation and trading hub and so has been settled for thousands of years.

Petra is the big-name attraction, you can read about it here.  Just getting there is pretty cool, we traveled on what is called the Desert Road; it runs along and up a ridge of sandstone mountains.  We then drove through the new city of Petra, built into the mountain, and finally arrived at the entrance to the old city of Petra.  To even get to the ruins you have to walk for a little less than a mile in an old wadi, or dry river bed, called the Siq.  It then opens up opposite the most famous part of Petra called the Treasury, carved right out of the rock.  The whole place is like that, all sorts of tombs and houses just carved out of the rock over a period of centuries.  It is pretty awesome.

The Treasury

View back up the Siq, approaching Petra

Me resting

View inside one of the tombs with a cool ceiling

The Urn Tomb

We also got the opportunity to see a place called Wadi Rum, snorkel in the Red Sea, and swim in the Dead Sea.  In addition we ate several nice local meals in Aqaba itself.  I feel fairly guilty that I was able to do all this while I was on deployment, particularly since most of the rest of the company was back in Kuwait working. 

Floating in the Dead Sea

Khazali Canyon at Wadi Run

multi-colored sands in Wadi Rum

While I was enjoying Jordan there was some chaos back in Kuwait.  Chief and the LTjg did a great job taking care of everything while I was gone, but budget cuts hit the Navy Customs mission and a fair number of sailors training at Ft Dix right now were told they would be demobilized and sent home.  That puts us in a bit of a bind since I was counting on those folks to replace me and others that will be returning to the US in June.  As with everything else we will make things work, but this last Navy rotation (everything gets turned over to the Army in the Fall) will have to work a little harder than we did.  It also meant that when I got back I had to catch up quickly and have been working through those issues, the work that piled up while I was gone and the daily things that pop up and need to be taken care of.