JORDAN: THE ANCIENT CITY OF JERASH, "THE POMPEII OF THE EAST"

Jordan is not a very large country. I got perspective by superimposing it over my home state of Utah. Utah comprises 84,899 square miles to Jordan's 35,637, which means Utah is almost 2 1/2 times bigger than Jordan. Utah is surrounded by friendly neighbor states, but Jordan has Syria to the north, Iraq to the east, Saudi Arabia to the south, and the not-always-friendly Israel to the west. Wow! How does it survive?

Since returning home from our trip to Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, we have been asked many times if we felt safe, and our answer has always been yes. We felt safe even when we drove north from Amman to the ancient city of Jerash, located just 22 miles from the Syrian border. As I was looking for that distance on the internet, I ran across this website about travel safety in Jordan, which primarily focuses on their issues with Syria.

We were actually closer to Syria when we were traveling in Tel Dan National Park in the Golan Heights area.

In any case, Jerash may have been the place where we felt the most loved and wanted on this trip. Part of that was because of the teenage crowd there who treated us like celebrities. (More on them later.) In addition, it was clear that Jordanian merchants were anxious for tourists to come back. Of course, that was true everywhere we went.

The familiar shopping gauntlet. One preceded the entrance to just about every tourist venue we visited.

Jerash was inhabited as early as the Bronze Age (3200-1200 BC). In about the 4th century BC it became part of the Greco-Roman Empire and was later one of the cities of the Decapolis. It changed hands several times and was almost destroyed by earthquakes and war, but in 1806 a German archaeologist began excavation.

Its heyday was the second and third centuries AD, and many of the buildings date to that period. Jerash is called "the Pompeii of the East," not because it was destroyed by a volcano, but because of its excellent preservation.