JORDAN

Capital:
Amman is the capital and largest city of Jordan

Time:
Local time - UTC + 2 hours

National characteristics:

The month of Ramadan is a time when visitors should not eat, drink or smoke in public during the day so it's a tricky time to visit. Eid al-Fitr, the great celebration at the end of Ramadan, is a fun time to visit but it's best to bunker down for a few days because public transport is heavily booked and hotel rooms are sometimes hard to find, especially in Aqaba.

Geographic sketch:

Jordan is a Southwest Asian country, bordered by Syria to the north, Iraq to the northeast, Saudi Arabia to the east and south and Israel to the west. All these border lines add up to 1,619 km (1,006 mi). The Gulf of Aqaba and the Dead Sea also touch the country, and thus Jordan has a coastline of 26 km (16 mi).

Jordan consists of arid forest plateau in the east irrigated by oasis and seasonal water streams, with highland area in the west of arable land and Mediterranean evergreen forestry. The Great Rift Valley of the Jordan River separates Jordan, the west bank and Israel. The highest point in the country is Jabal Umm al Dami, it is 1,854 m (6,083 ft) above sea level, its top is also covered with snow, while the lowest is the Dead Sea ?420 m (?1,378 ft). Jordan is part of a region considered to be "the cradle of civilization", the Levant region of the Fertile Crescent.

Major cities include the capital Amman in the northwest, Irbid and Az Zarqa, both in the north. Madaba, Karak and Aqaba in the south.

Climate:

Average daytime maximum temperatures in Amman range from 12.6°C in January to 32.5°C in August.
Winter can be surprisingly cold. Snow in Amman is not unheard of (even Petra gets the occasional fall) and the deserts can be freezing, especially at night. Make sure you have plenty of warm clothes and a windproof and waterproof jacket. Aqaba is the one exception, with average daytime maximum temperatures of around 20°C in January, and is quite a hit with deep-frozen northern Europeans during winter.

In high summer (July and August) the weather in the humid Jordan Valley is extremely oppressive - it feels like you're trapped in an airless oven - with suffocating daytime highs well in excess of 36°C. It's also fiercely hot in the desert (including Wadi Rum), though this is a dry heat and thus easier to deal with. The tourist authorities usually plan festivals (such as the Jerash Festival) for the summer period. If you do visit in summer, come well prepared with a hat, sunscreen and protective clothing.

Population:

The population of Jordan (1997 estimate), is 4,322,255, yielding an average population density of 48 persons per sq km (125 per sq mi).The population of Jordan is almost entirely Arab. The only sizable racial minorities in the country are the Circassians and the Armenians; each group accounts for less than 1 percent of the population. Jordan is 72 percent urban; nomads and seminomads make up perhaps 5 percent of the population.

Language:
The national language of Jordan is Arabic. Most Jordanians speak English, especially in urban area such as Amman. French and German are the second and third most popular languages after English. You might encounter some Cauacasian and Armenian languages because of the vast number of Caucasian immigrants that arrived during the early 1900s.

Religion:
The population consists of 92 percent Sunni Muslims, 6 percent Christian (majority Greek Orthodox, but some Greek Catholics (Melkites) and Roman Catholics, Syrian Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, and Protestant denominations), and 2 percent other (several small Shia Muslim and Druze populations).

Currency:

The official currency in Jordan is the Jordanian dinar, which divides to 1000 fils, or 100 piasters. There are in the dinar paper groups 50, 20, 10, 5, 1 dinars. There are forms of metal of the currency of the value of 0.5, 0.25 dinars and 100, 50, 25, 10 and 5 fils. The dinar is generally firm against the dollar, worth about 1.41 dollars to the U.S. dollar.

Currency Exchange:

The currency is the Jordanian dinar (JD), divided into 1000 fils and 100 piastres (or qirsh). Coins come in denominations of ½ (no longer used), 1, 2½ (no longer used), 5, and 10 piastres and ¼, ½. Banknotes are found in 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50 dinar denominations. The currency rate is effectively fixed at 0.71 JD per US dollar (or 1.41 dollars per dinar), an unnaturally high rate that makes Jordan poorer value than it would otherwise be. Most upper scale restaurants and shops at shopping malls also accept US dollars.

Transport:
Transportation in Bali was always cheap by any standard. The metered radio taxis start with a flag fall of 5,000 Rupiah (plus 4,500 Rupiah per kilometer), and most trips cost Rupiah 20,000 to 90,000. Most reliable and polite are the drivers of the blue taxis, and you should avoid most other taxis as they often refuse to use their meter and over-charge foreigners.

If you brought an International Driver's License, you can rent motor bikes from Rupiah 55,000 to Rupiah 85,000 per day, and five to ten year old self-drive cars (Jimmy or Toyota "Kijang") cost from 250,000 Rupiah to 400,000 Rupiah per day.

Shops:
Every town has a souk (market) selling everything from clothes, pots and pans, meat and live chickens, to gold and silver jewelry. As with most countries in the region, the gold is usually 18kt or above and although the current price of gold is high, there is still no charge added for the craftsmanship of items like bangles, chains and earrings.

In more tourist-oriented towns, there is a wide selection of handicrafts. The chief of these is probably mosaic. Continuing a tradition dating back thousands of

years, new mosaic schools (especially around Madaba and Mt Nebo)
train young people to work with the colorful, locally hewn stone. The art of kilm-making (no-knap carpets or woven rugs) is practiced by several women's co-operatives (notably in Mukawir) using hand-carded wool and natural dyes.

Another distinctive local craft is ostrich-egg painting: the paint is applied with needle pricks and designs can take weeks to complete. In and around Petra and Wadi Mousa, shops specialize in beads: although many items are imported from Egypt or Turkey (and even India), many co-operatives import lapiz lazuli (semi-precious blue stone), malachite (semi-precious green stone), yellow amber or red coral to make into a variety the necklaces and bracelets using local silverwork.

Other hand-crafted items include sand jars, filled with layers of multi-colored sand, light-weight, hand-blown glass and embroidered clothing. Bottled Holy Water from the river Jordan can also be purchased. Shops particularly in Bethany-Beyond-the-Jordan sell an assortment of rosaries and icons made of olive wood. For the health conscious, skin-care products made of Dead Sea mud have become big business in all tourist-oriented shopping areas.

Food:
Jordanian cuisine is quite similar to fare served elsewhere in the region. The daily staple being khobez, a large, flat bread sold in bakeries across the country for a few hundred fils. Delicious when freshly baked.

For breakfast, the traditional breakfast is usually fried eggs, labaneh, cheese, zaatar and olive oil along with bread and a cup of tea. Falafel and hummus are eaten on the weekends. This is the most popular breakfast. Manousheh and pastries come in as the second most popular breakfast item. All of the hotels offer American breakfast.

The national dish of Jordan is the mansaf, prepared with jameed, a sun-dried yogurt. Grumpygourmet.com describes the mansaf as "an enormous platter layered with crepe-like traditional "shraak" bread, mounds of glistening rice and chunks of lamb that have been cooked in a unique sauce made from reconstituted jameed and spices, sprinkled with golden pine nuts." In actuality more people use fried almonds instead of pine nuts because of the cheaper price tag. While mansaf is the national dish, most people in urban areas eat it on special occasions and not every day. Other popular dishes include Maklouba, stuffed vegetables, freekeh.

Transportation:
Public transport is cheap - less than 500 fils per hour of travel in a public bus or minibus, and about JD1 per hour in a more comfortable, long-distance private bus.

Tips:
Tips of 10% are generally expected in better restaurants. Elsewhere, rounding up the bill to the nearest 250 fils or with loose change is appreciated by underpaid staff, including taxi drivers. Hotels and restaurants in the midrange and, especially, top-end categories generally add on an automatic 10% service charge.

Credit Cards:

Most major credit cards are accepted at top-end hotels and restaurants, travel agencies, larger souvenir shops and bookshops. However, always be sure to ask if any commission is being added on top of your purchase price. This can sometimes be as much as 5%; if so, it may be better to get a cash advance and pay with the paper stuff.
It is possible to survive in Jordan almost entirely on cash advances, and ATMs abound in all but the smaller towns. This is certainly the easiest way to travel if you remember your PIN.
Visa is the most widely accepted card for cash advances and using ATMs, followed by MasterCard. Other cards, such as Cirrus and Plus, are also accepted by many ATMs (eg Jordan National Bank and HSBC).

Urgent numbers:
First Aid and Ambulance 199
Police 191
Hotel Complaints 461-3103