Jordan
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Guest Contribution: Visit to the Holy Land – Day 6
Mount of Olives/Church of the Ascension/River Jordan/Dead Sea At the crack of dawn we were up at the hotel that we were put up, not due to any time constraints as it was in the previous days but because we wanted to explore a bit of the Palestinian side, and with Shyni’s friend and coworker mentioning that she was from Ramallah we had limited time to step out and try to get the feel of the city. As any traveller can attest, to step into just one neighborhood in any city especially in a foreign country is not really a taste of what daily living is, it was a cool…
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Guest Contribution: Visit to the Holy Land – Day 3
Amman to Israel Again, an early start to our day after breakfast. Once settled in the bus, morning prayers songs were sung – our bus took us from Jordan to Israel and we started going through what would become routine on our travel security checkpoints, this one was at the Jordanian border into Israel. A TSA type of scan of all our luggage and our papers were scrutinized, with some questions thrown in to ensure that we were all part of the group. At this point we changed buses and guides, Talal the experienced guide was replaced by a younger man by the name of Shehadi a Palestinian who would…
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Guest Contribution: Visit to the Holy Land – Day 2
Amman, Jordan Our day started out early, we had been forewarned by Bindu that this will be the trend for most of the days, the idea being to keep to the itinerary with some of the places that we need to visit being far apart. After breakfast, which was opened by 6 or 6:30 am at the hotel restaurant, again, the menu would be repeated throughout the trip, with slight variations. There would be a choice of eggs, bread, fruit, maybe even some meat such as chicken or beef in the form of sandwich slices or sausages, of course never any pork. We were in a Muslim country and later…
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Guest Contribution: Visit to the Holy Land – Day 1
Introduction by Rana: In 2013, we went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and I included several posts on our trip. Since then I have told quite a few people – mostly Indian Christians – that it was one of the more fulfilling trips that we have undertaken. My brother, Peter (Eapen Joseph Panicker) went with his wife, Shiny, and several others and used the same tour operator that we did – Royal Omania Tours in Kochi. He kept a journal of his trip to the Holy Land and he recently shared it with family and friends. He did a far better job than I did in recording the…
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Our visit to the Holy Land – Crossing into Israel from Jordan
We stayed one night at the Amman Airport Hotel and left the next morning by bus for Israel driving through downtown Amman just in order that we get a glimpse of the capital since the previous day we were on the outskirts of Amman while visiting Madaba and Mount Nebo. We had wanted to visit Petra – which is not part of the itinerary of this tour but we were willing to pay the extra amount involved just so that we could see it given that we were within three hours of Petra while in Amman. Unfortunately there were logistical issues in doing so and therefore it will have to…
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Our visit to the Holy Land – Amman, Jordan
We flew from Cochin to Amman, Jordan. There was nothing remarkable or striking about Amman. It is essentially desert – probably akin to areas like Los Angeles and Las Vegas many decades ago before development occurred and sources of water were either found or redirected to those cities. Jordan is primarily Muslim but Christians live peacefully with Muslims and there is no tension between the groups – they socialize, work together and are respectful of the respective traditions and beliefs of the other group. Jordan also has a tradition of receiving refugees from other parts of the Middle East at times of upheaval in those regions. In the 70s’ there…
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Our visit to the Holy Land – Introduction & Overview
It has been months since I updated this blog so our visit to the Holy Land seems a good reason to restart the blog. We returned earlier this morning from our tour and I will try and capture the salient parts both in terms of our visit to the religious sites as well as other thoughts and observations. There is too much to cover in one single posting so I will break it out over multiple postings. A visit to the Holy Land is something that I have wanted to do for the best part of a decade. For one reason or another it never came to fruition until this…