We were woken up at 7:30 and the police men told us that there will be some festival and if we want to go today we should leave the parkinglot before 8. It was good to leave early and our 1st stop was in the Debbeen national park. It was only 10 km from Jarash on the way to the dead sea. We drove through the park up the in the mountains and had our breakfast. It was a bit windy and cold. We had a very nice view of the whole area. It was quite green with many olive trees and small hills. We drove to Ajloun where we visited nice medieval castle and saw the Jordan valley. The road was quite hilly and my car was very slow going up. I though it is due to the poorer quality of the Syrian diesel. I have noticed before that my car runs usually better on vegetable oil than on diesel and I hope I can get hold of some oil soon. After crossing few more hills we started to descended o the Jordan valley. The climate got warmer and we saw many green houses. It look that this place is a vegetable paradise. We stopped and bought 10 kg of oranges - it costed only 3 SL (5 USD). We drove about 60 more km to the Dead sea.
It was getting late so we decided to see first the mount Nebo, the place where the Moses saw the promised land. I had to go from 400m below the sea level ( the lowest point on the Earth) to 800 m. The car was not too happy but we made it just 15 min before the church was closed. We payed 1 JD and a nice young man let us in and told us to hurry up to see it before it gets closed. We saw the nice mosaics and the remains of 3 churches build after the 600 AD. We drove a little bit down and watched the sunset behind the Dead see. There was a beautiful view of the Dead sea, Jordan valley and the Palestinian territories and on the horizon we could see light of Jerusalem. It was very nice place and we were happy to be there. After the sunset it the wind was getting more strong and we decided to go back to the parking lot next to the church. We met there Mohamed - the young guy who sold us the ticket and invited him and his friend for Czech tea to our home. He arranged with the tourist police that we can stay over night at the parking lot. When he find out that Agnieszka is from Poland he started almost to cry and he told us about his Polish girl - friend. He showed us more pictures of girls he met at Mt. Nebo. He spoke very good English and we were interested to find his story. He is 24 years old and he lives at the Mt. Nebo with his whole family - 7 sisters and 3 brothers. His grandfather came to Mt. Nebo in 1936 and was working on the first excavations of the site. He was muslim but the Franciscans offered him to live there and take care of the site. He also told us about the visit of the pope Jan Paul II in the year 2000. He met him and he was very sad when the pope died. He was still almost crying when talking about the popes visit in Mt. Nebo. Since we had only 15 min to see the site he offered us to come in the morning and see it again for free. He sad that he will be there after 10 am. We slept well protected by 3 police man patrolling the street near the parking lot.
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