Hellooo! How are you? Welcome to Jordan!

I'm just about to leave Amman, capital of Jordan, where I've spent the last five nights. It's been quite an experience.

Just about the first thing you notice about Jordan is the legendary warmth of the people. As you mind your own business in the street, particularly back streets, local people will greet you warmly with something like "Hellooo! How are you? Welcome to Jordan!" and shake you by the hand. My personal best so far has been three such greetings in about one minute. I'm afraid that when I was in India a year ago, where such greetings were equally commonplace, I soon learnt to be at best extremely guarded, if not borderline dismissive, of them as they were usually (albeit not always) just a preface to an attempt to extract money from me. Here, that isn't usually the case - people just seem genuinely grateful that you are visiting their country (Amman isn't a major stop on the world tourist trail I guess) and they just want to say hello and find out something about you. They sometimes also ask where you are from - two of the more memorable responses I received to my answer were "Liverpool?" (Jordanians are apparently crazy for Champions League football), and, much less comfortably, "Tony Blair!" (how do you respond to that?).

Theft, violence and serious scamming is clearly rare here and there is generally nothing to be paranoid about, which is why for example I've managed to relax when a few times (including on arrival at the airport) I've ended up in the back of what have clearly not been official taxis but just enterprising locals wanting to make a few dinars.

Amman is not a conventionally beautiful city by any means. There is an impressive Roman theatre and remains also of a Roman citadel; however other than that sights are few and public open space seems to be virtually non-existent. Nonetheless I have found the urban landscape here fascinating. It's a city of 2.5 million people, yet I'm told that in 1946 the population was around 2,000. 65% of the Jordanian population is Palestinian, and nearly 10% are Iraqi Kurds - and the city and the country have been defined by influx after influx of refugees, for obvious reasons. The city is built on a large number of steep hills which means that (a) straight roads are virtually non-existent, but (b) you can see immense urban sprawl, mainly of greyish boxy buildings, in all directions. I hope that when I manage to upload some photos I will have managed to capture some flavour of this.

Beautiful? No. Remarkable? Yes.

There is a real buzz around the city, especially the Downtown area, always people around and plenty of traffic (crossing the road here requires full attention and a little bravery). People-watching is particularly interesting, especially the women who vary in their styles of dress from totally Western-esque, through elegant and colourful headscarves, through to a smattering of full burqas. Supermarkets and malls appear to be the preserve of the suburban rich, with long stretches of very small shops and souqs (markets) being the order of the day in Downtown. The city is clearly rough round the edges, but I've felt comfortable and everything seems to work - no sense of chaos. What is missing in terms of macro beauty is more than made up for, for me at least over a stay of a few days, by observing these many little details.

The countryside around Amman is simply stunning. Steep hills are typically all around (with the steepest roads I've ever seen), but the scenery varies quickly, almost literally as you turn a bend, from quite lush and tree-covered to sandy and semi-desert. The setting of Jerash, the very well preserved Roman city which made an easy day trip from Amman yesterday, was quite incredible. To this was added a touch of surreality when in one of the well-preserved theatres I heard a local band in full Bedouin dress play, er, the Scottish bagpipes...

Jerash

Just what you expect to see...?!?

I've also been to the Dead Sea, the lowest point on Earth, some 422m below sea level. This also has a truly stunning setting which looks mountainous, although the tops of the apparent 'mountains' are probably no higher than sea level. The Dead Sea is of course actually a lake which is famed for the extreme saltiness of the water and thus extreme buoyancy, meaning that humans can float in it. I took full advantage of this - great fun and incredibly relaxing, and there will be a photo of me reading a book while floating!

I've really taken to the food here also - I've enjoyed shwarma (made with kebab meat but served more like a thin roll, and with distinctive seasoning), kebabs and delicious grilled meat. All very cheap as well, sometimes as cheap as £1.50 for a meal. Jordanians have a sweet tooth too, as do I, so I've partaken of an interesting dessert called kunafa that appears to be made of fried cream cheese topped with caramel, syrup and a hint of apple - seriously unhealthy but different and very tasty and moreish.

A few of my friends hinted at some surprise that I wanted to spend so much time away on my own. Rest assured that so far I'm feeling anything but lonely - I've been staying in a decent travellers' hostel where I've met plenty of people, including several that I've hooked up with for different activities. If you meet someone at breakfast who wants to do the same thing that day, you can just very naturally end up teaming up for the day - and the same happened when I got off the bus at Jerash with one other European guy. There seems to be a real sense of travellers' community here - perhaps because this region is somewhat off the most well-worn track - and that's included getting very helpful tips by word of mouth. There is still the occasional initiative test such as trying to locate the right bus in a large local bus station when there are few people around and everything is in Arabic, and slight uneasy moments like being gestured to get off said bus at the side of a dual carriageway in what looked suspiciously like the middle of nowhere (thankfully the bus station for my connection turned out to be just round the corner) - but it's all part of the experience and hopefully it'll put the odd delay on the Bakerloo Line into context once I'm home.

Another part of the experience for sure has been experiencing Amman's gay scene! It was not entirely part of my plans to go looking for anything gay in an Arab Middle East country, as I didn't expect it to be an entirely safe/comfortable or easy thing to do. However, I did decide to go for lunch one day at a well located and well regarded cafe which Lonely Planet had hinted was gay-friendly - and almost immediately found the male waiter saying to me, "You should come back in the evening - there will be cute boys, cute girls, whatever you like, everything is OK, you understand?" I did understand! He later told me also that he'd recently emigrated to Jordan from the West Bank partially because of "problems with his family" (again, I understood) and when I asked whether Jordan is more liberal, he said still "no one here talks about it". He said he'd be there as a punter later that night and I should come along. Happily I'd also located another longer-term gay traveller in my hostel who already knew the place, so I thought I would give it a go with him.

I'm seriously glad I did, because apart from being a remarkably bright and cool venue, it was fascinating and uplifting to see a certain understated confidence amongst the local guys there. There was no kissing to be seen and touching was brief, but everybody seemed relaxed and the guys I got talking to seemed confident in themselves, and bemoaning the absence of a gay club (there was apparently one for a while but it couldn't pay its way). They were also very funny and decidedly dirty-minded (let's just say that there isn't exactly a British reserve there and when they do touch you they're not at all choosy about where they touch...!). Although their English was in some cases limited, I guess some things are a universal language. :-) As well as being invited to a house party the next night, I even got asked out, incredibly directly, for lunch the next day by a different male waiter, which left me a little speechless just because it was so unexpected. (I accepted the invite to the house party which was another great experience, but unfortunately declining the lunch date because it didn't fit with my plans for the next day.) I also got the phone number of a guy which I decided not to use, partially because I wasn't sufficiently sure I believed his friends when they assured me that his repeated talk of charging JD100 (£100) for any liaison was all just a joke...

Er, on a slightly different note, anybody with any political awareness at all can't really miss the defining role that political tensions play in this region - not least in Jordan due to the demographics that I mentioned above. For example:

• Police checkpoints appear to be common on the Dead Sea Highway because it's close to the border with Israel.
• Maps of the region on walls here mark "Palestine", not Israel.
• At the gay bar on Friday night, one of the guys I'd been chatting to was keenly watching footage of Palestinian border demonstrations on YouTube.
  
• The whole of the city's main modern art gallery that I visited, Darat-al-Funun, was given over to displays concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - most notably a parody exhibition depicting the unilateral declaration of a Muslim state called "Ishmael" in the middle of Switzerland, with not-very-subtle parodies of Israeli citizenship laws and historical claims on the region of Palestine. Food for thought indeed.
• A young Jordanian guy I talked to at the party last night told me that his entire family heritage is in East Jerusalem, but he has only ever been able to visit once, and then nearly got shot by Israeli border guards for his trouble. He said (albeit in a positive and warm way) he was jealous that I am able to visit Israel freely on my travels, which is really quite touching and troubling as soon as you start to think about it.
  

I'm heading now for Jerusalem, for the start of a week in Israel and the West Bank, before returning to the south of Jordan.