The long 4 hour trip was broken up by comfort stops at small tourist outlets where our fellow passengers used the bathroom facilities, bought a cool drink or an icecream and enjoyed haggling for trinkets, clothing or pieces of artwork to take home as mementos of their visit to the Dead Sea and Aqaba.
Don't you just love the name of these respite stop off points! 'The Desert Bazaar' and 'Pillars of Jerusalem' to name just two of the four we visited. Within these oases of the desert one could buy anything from a needle to high class furniture, gold and silver, precious stone jewellery and food and drink to satisfy the hungriest and thirstiest oversees and 'local' travellers.
Continuing on our coach trip we once again watched the brown, yellow grassed, dry landscape pass by. Occasionally the scene was interspersed with a tiny desert hamlet of homes and or lowstrung bedouin tents, a lone shepherd trekking across the parched hillsides with his herd of black and white sheep but the parched landscape continued displaying it dry barren desert colours up to the foothills which would take us up and over the mountains that led down to the southern part of the Dead Sea.
As we zig-zagged up and over the mountain pass we looked back at the vast barren Arabian Desert valley we had travelled through. There were some green oasis patches but the vista was mainly brown, desert hills and valleys for as far as we could see.
We could also see the road we'd travelled winding through the desert landscape like a thin ribbon and ahead of us lay the Dead Sea, surrounded by desert lands as well.
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