Flowers and fortifications

I did something very refreshing this weekend - a bunch of us went up to Ajloun, which is only an hour's drive from Amman but feels a world away ... Well, it actually felt like the south of France to me, complete with olive groves, terracing, red earth and limestone outcrops scattered around the hills, which made me feel very relaxed and at home.

Best of all, the Ajloun area is humid and green (boy, do we miss that in Amman!), and we were lucky to see it carpetted with flowers - I think the countryside has become confused by the warmer-than-usual weather and thinks it is spring, which is not good news but looks fantastic.


The Ajloun Forest Reserve, one of several reserves run by the RSCN, was set up fairly recent and has great facilities, including a visitors' centre, chalets and 'posh' camping (below), paths so that walkers can appreciate the landscape while not tramping it all down, and occasional information posts including some with environmental education stuff. There's even a nature shop!


There is also an amazing variety of fauna and flora - we saw a multitude of different flowers and trees, wild boar tracks, lizards and a few birds. A lot of the things we saw I recognised from France, such as the tiny evergreen oak trees, but some things like this were a complete unknown (no handy little sign next to this I'm afraid, if anyone knows what it is do tell!)


And is if all that wasn't lovely enough, we got to visit one of Jordan's many many fantastic castles - this is one of the smaller ones, but it's location is great and the government has obviously being putting some effort into restoring it, with good lighting, a little museum inside.



There wasn't a lot in the way of signage around the castle, and there were a lot of empty rooms where we had to try and guess what they could have been used for. There was the odd attempt to bring things to life though, like the piles of catapults stones in windows (slightly odd since they obviously didn't go out of these windows, but it looks romantic and warlike!)

And I'll tell you what, standing on the parapets of a Mamluk castle, staring out at pretty much the same landscape that they would have been observing for signs of advancing enemies, and watching the sun starting to sink in the sky ... magic.