This is Amman's World

The trip from Jerusalem to Amman should have been pretty straight forward, just crossing a bridge over the river Jordan and then arriving in the capital an hour or so later, but you know how things go. After taking a minibus to the Allenby-Bridge border we were told they couldn't issue visas for us there so we should go to the Sheikh Hussein bridge a few hours north. Our problem was that we had passed a checkpoint two minutes drive away, something the taxi-drivers knew, and thus they could charge us 50 shekels (roughly 100kr or 10£) for the short ride. Our luck changed for the better short after as the first car that passed turned out to be driven by a friendly Israeli named Roy, who had done some backpacking and felt sorry for us. Roy gave us a lift half the way up north, where we could catch a bus. After about an hours wait the bus arrived and we were on it for a while until the next checkpoint, where Israeli soldiers found us suspicious and decided to search our luggage and interrogate us in the pouring rain, after we were cleared of any possible crime we got back on our bus for a bit more. When we got off the bus we asked the driver how far the Jordan border was and he told us 5-10 minutes walk, this turned out to be 90 minutes (carrying about 1/3 of my bodyweight on my back) Finally we reached the control and had no problems on either side, then we got a 2 hour cab-ride to Amman and managed to find a bed and some food, 10 hours after setting off. The following morning we walked around the city, seeing the ancient citadel, markets and what was once the worlds tallest freestanding flagpole (today in 3rd place with a flag measuring 60x30m waving off of a 126.8m high pole.) Other than this there didn't seem to be all that much to see so we caught the earliest bus to Petra on Saturday morning.