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The Jordan River, looking towards the Orthodox Church of St. John The Baptist Humanity had its beginnings in Africa, which means that in order for there to be people in the bits of the world that are not Africa, at some stage they had to pass through the narrow corridor we now call the Middle East. Unsurprisingly there are artefacts from every epoch of human history buried beneath Jordanian soil. We saw some of them this morning. There is a hill above Amman called the Citadel of Amman which has been inhabited for at least 10,000 years. There are very visible Roman and Ottoman ruins there, lots of archaeological diggings and the Jordanian Archaeological Museum. As far as exhibition space and facilities go, the JAM might best be described as basic, but it houses some amazing bits of kit. There are some Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance; real ones, not copies. There is the oldest statue ever discovered; and again, the actual statue is sitting there, not a copy of something out the back in a...

It's about 45 minutes as the Boeing flies from Beirut to Amman, but a bit further than that in terms of culture and politics. Jordan has no oil, so unlike other gulf countries the citizenry can't go importing folk from other lands to sneer at and make do all the work. Unlike Lebanon, Jordan has also enjoyed a long period of peaceful, benificent and generally level headed government.Just like Pepsodent you can feel the difference. Everything is brighter, whiter and cleaner. Whiter, certainly. The place is built on limestone. It shows in the soil and it is quarried for the buildings. All the houses, most of the shops and some of the public buildings are glistening white, straight edged and regular. There are 2 million people in Amman and the little white cubes stretch off to the horizon in every direction. The cars are newer and shinier than Beirut, and the traffic behaves itself. Not that it used to. Jordan was once reknowned for the most reckless traffic in the Middle East, but...

In the older parts of town, ie most of it, you will see sights to quake the knees of even the most hardened New Zealand building inspector. Wires are draped everywhere. They run from lamposts in great thick braids, descending to head height or lower in places. They are attached, roughly, to the sides of buildings where they run off to flats and houses and workshops. Electricity, telephone and data cabling are randomly clumped into great rats nests which are nailed or taped to walls. Look closely and there is a logic to it all: the circuits are properly albeit untidily constructed; wiring seems appropriate to the load it needs to bear. Everything is properly insulated, although the methods are "ingenious. " They tell their own story. From 1975 until 1990 this place tore itself apart. Groups of Christians and Muslims fought each other in alliances which shifted and changed with the month. Through it all was the rattle of kalashnikovs and the crump, crump, crump of rocket prope...

We've had enough of long taxi trips for the meantime, so this morning we walked downtown. It's no big deal. The CBD is maybe 2 or 3 km away and the walk through narrow streets past tiny shops was intriguing. As we neared downtown, the evidence of the destruction of the civil war became more apparent in the buildings, until we arrived at the area near the docks which had been the frontline between opposing factions, and where all the buildings were gone. In their place a new Downtown Beirut is nearing completion. The buildings are of brown sandstone, and about 3 or 4 storeys high. They are seaparated by wide tiled walkways dotted here and there with refined, understated statuary. All has been designed to evoke the Beirut that was once called the Paris of the Middle East; not a copy but a 21st Century evocation of what once was. It's working. Winding through the stores selling big name European goods we arrive at the waterfront, where the enormous glass towers of hotels rise ...

Last night Bridget, Clemency and I walked through the old, strangely leafy, bustling, wonderful Ashrafiyeh district to a restaurant recommended to Bridget by a Lebanese friend. We found Abdal Wahab after a 15 minute walk and once the staff got their head around the idea that we didn't want to eat meat (You are vegetarian? Try this one it only has lamb....) were served what was, up to this point, the most delicious vegetarian meal of my life, no doubt about it, by a country mile. Just before 7 Bridget's phone rang. It was Scott from Doha airport. There had been a mix up in his bookings for the flight he had to board NOW and he desperately needed some information or he would be walking from Doha. The info was a mile away, and it was panic time. The waiters asked what was wrong, and in seconds, without question, gave us username and password to the restaurant's in house network so Bridget could access the net on her phone and get the info to Scott. Now think about this for a m...

It was a 3 hour flight from Dubai to Beirut on a Fly Dubai 737, the contemporary equivalent, I guess of the common transport of earlier decades: the Bedford truck with people on the roof and the chickens. The seats were dirt cheap, but check in luggage was charged at an exhorbitant rate, so folks piled on board with the allowed maximum in hand luggage: one cabin bag and a laptop. You wouldn't believe the size of a cabin bag these days. And it's amazing what you can fit in a laptop bag if it's sufficiently large and you don't clutter it up with unnecessary extras like laptops. And it's surprising how every member of a family of 6 still needs the requisite two bags. The seats were filled with bearded men, and women in burkas, and tiny children, and Lebanese women looking energetic and colourful, and Lebanese men with dark eyes and moustaches and giggling, skylarking young people. Once the plane was airborne people left their seats to go and do a bit of socialising, b...

I’m not really a business class sort of person. The thought of paying the price of a pretty reasonable second hand car for a couple of glasses of champagne, a meal or two and the rental on a chair for 12 hours sticks in my craw a bit. But here we were, for reasons I won’t bore you with, taking the right hand gangplank and heading uphill to the top story of the world’s largest airliner. And here we were being shown to our seats, and by seats I mean cubicles, by an astonishingly pretty young woman in that particularly elegant uniform worn by Emirates cabin staff. There was a sort of bedside cabinet thing containing a minibar, yes really, and spaces to stash your stuff. There was a TV screen not much smaller than the one we have at home, and if the effort of reaching across to work it was too much, two, yes two different remote controls to fiddle with. There was an armchair with lots of Homer Simpson seat goes up seat goes down doohickery going on. If you got bored with more TV channels ...