Roman ruins of Jerash and Ajloun castle

We leave Amman today, and our car rental company drops off the car earlier than planned. Alexis gets the car and I go get us breakfast on the rooftop. 

In the early morning hours, traffic is easy and we are against the morning rush hour as we exit Amman to Jerash.

Driving in Jordan so far is not too difficult, but it’s certainly because we have been in worse places. If you are fresh from Europe and never had to drive the chaos of developing countries, you might be pretty stressed.

First, there are hardly any lanes on the road. Everyone drives as if they were alone, and overtake slower vehicle using the total width of the road. Then I think I can count on one hand the number of time I have seen a car use a signal during the entire day.  There are little signage about speed limits, leaving you wondering all the time. And to aggravate it all, huge speed bumps at regular intervals, where you are at a speed of 80/90 km per hour… To their merit, they don’t drive too fast, so overall issues can be anticipated.

The road is very sinuous, up and down hills and valleys. It feels like a continuous town until Jerash.

Our first visit is the antic city of Jerash, which was first a Greek city, but has a lot more Roman remains. I can’t recall if I even visited a Roman ancient city so big before. The only roman or Greek one I can recall leaving truly an impression was Delfi.

The city is 3,5 km long, and has a good thousand columns still erect along the main roman avenues. Because it’s on a hill, the perspective and overall view is quite impressive.

The massif Hadrian gate marks the South of the city and that’s where we all enter. It’s been renovated and look grandiose. Then we walk along the hippodrome, an old byzantine church and continue towards the second south gate, which marks the entrance to the walled city.

Immediately you spot the huge Zeus temple on the left and the forest of the columns of the oval plaza and main roads.

Lots of explanation boards are around, so you really get good information about everything you see. It’s in English, French and Arabic.

We start by exploring the Zeus temple complex – a good chunk is left, but the rest has been dismantled and reused for the more modern building that were erected on top, such as mosques and churches in the later occupation of Jerash.

We then go back to the oval plaza and start walking the Cardo, the main avenue, it’s a straight line, you can see the north gate straight ahead.

I like walking through these ancient town, everything was made to impress and the decorum, even today is still grandiose.

Along the main avenue, we stop at a byzantine church that is in an hexagonal shape, quite unique. They repurposed roman columns for the central nave.

Then we continue to a big staircase. We though it was the temple of Artemis first, but no, it’s called the cathedral and is a big church that has been built right next to the roman temple reusing most of its stones and columns. It’s on 2 levels and grand. On we continue on the avenue, pass the beautiful Nymphae ( the city fancy water tower ) and to a massive portico, followed by an extremely wide staircase. At the top, the temple of Artemis.

Of which, not much is left except 12 absolutely massive columns, that were probably way too big to be dismantled and repurposed. 

We continue further on the road until we cross the Wes/ East avenue leading to part of the site that have not been excavated yet. We marvel at the last city gate and a smaller theater before walk back. 

On the way, we stop at the archeological museum, but there is very little things to see inside and really not worth it. We also stop at the new information center, because the toilets are there. At the same time we check the inside, and they have some mosaics and statues as well as good architectural information about the site. 

It took us a good 2h30 to visit Jerash. The site is very big and the explanations everywhere are detailed and interesting. There wasn’t too much repeating content.

We exit the site by 12h30, and we have about 35min drive to reach Ajloun castle. We hope to find a restaurant along the road for lunch. We actually were not that lucky – and we end up in a bakery instead. We purchased some of those bread with meat or zatar. That made for a decent quick lunch. We still had some sweet pastries too.

You ca spot Ajloun fortress from far away. It’s on top of the tallest hill in the area, an absolutely perfect vantage point. 

Google maps makes us take some horribly narrow and steep little streets… as usual. But we end up there eventually.

Ajloun castle is a masterpiece of defense and one of the undefeated muslim one of the Ayyubin period ( our famous reference would be Saladin). It was built to defend the commercial roads ( and pilgrimage roads ) from the Crusaders and then, during the Mamluk period, from the Mongols.

The castle is still in a very state of conservation, and walking into these narrow passages under the heavy stone roof is intimidating. Many explanations are available to explain the various defense mechanism, ingenuous water systems as well as function of some of the rooms. At the very top, an incredible view. On a clear day, you can see Jerusalem apparently. We could make out the outline of the Jourdain river. There was some sort of haze.

This visit wasn’t so long, probably an hour. Some stands were selling hot mint tea, and we stopped to drink a (overpriced) cup. 

The last 1h20 to Umm Qais, where we will stay the night is following the same bigroad, with no real interesting things to see. Irbid is a dense and big city and sprawl a long while along the highway. Finally we have to take the smaller roads. And the last 10km are through nice olive groves and hillsides with farms. This was nice to look at.

Umm Qais seems a little out of the tourist path, most visitors would do Jerash and Ajloun as a day trip from Amman. There were very few hotels in the town and next to the archeological site. And they were extremely expensive ( but looked posh ). We ended up booking a very nice small AirBnB instead and our host is a charming man.

He has shared a few restaurants address around the village – we will eat there tonight.