Moss and waterfalls ...

... are not usually things that are associated with Jordan - more desert dunes and palm trees. But as I've said before, there are little oases of lushness, and we went to walk through one of my favourites last weekend, a canyon called Wadi Ibn Hammad. It'll soon be rainy season when narrow canyons like this one will be off-limits due to flash floods, so we've been making the most of these little chunks of heaven while we still can ...

Wadi Ibn Hammad is most famous for the hot springs at the entrance to the canyon, but to be honest I've never been in them - the Jordanians in their wisdom have built a lovely concrete building with baths hidden inside, and it all just looks a bit slimey for my liking ...

But this is no great shakes, because actually the best thing to do is march straight past the baths and head into the canyon itself, and you can still benefit from the hot water as it runs into the stream that you walk through as you meander down the canyon.




As you can see and hear, there is not just water in the stream - water comes out of the hills and the rocks all along the canyon, so that you are surrounded by babbling, dripping and splashing - so relaxing and refreshing after the barren windy desert! And because of the hot spring water and the calcium in the rocks, there are whole sections where the moss and roots of trees have been covered and solidified into a rocky writhing mass called travertine ... truely spectacular.

In fact, the whole thing is spectacular - carpets of ferns, moss and orchids hanging down around and above, the canyon itself getting narrower and taller until we began to feel truely dwarfed, and the different deposits in the rock creating vertical streaks of colour cutting across the horizontal and diagonal layers of the rosk itself ... a true little paradise ...