Facing My World – Travel Blog - My thoughts, reflections and experiences of my life around the world.

With few exceptions, border crossings are always complicated especially in the countries we’ve been visiting. They ask you a lot of questions, you always hear bad experiences, but you never think bad things will ever happen to you. But I’ll tell you something: they do! To be honest I wasn’t expecting to have problems crossing the border at King Hussein Bridge / Allenby Terminal, from Jordan to Israel. But I need to admit we would face some difficulties for many reasons.

We didn’t want to get our passports stamped from both sides of the border because we could have problems going to other Arabic countries. At the Jordanian side everything went well. They stamped a piece of paper instead of the our passport without asking (otherwise it would be an evidence that we’ve been to Israel). After that, things changed.

I wont detail that much what happened that day because Leah did an excellent job on her blog. Basically I got stuck there for 8 hours without any reasonable motive and without any information. As I said in the last post, we’re traveling with two friends, one from England and the other from Bulgaria. Leah and them got the visa, even after asking for not getting their passport stamped. The same person was going to stamp my passport, the last one, but she decided to send me to the “waiting area”.

There I went. After waiting for hours someone came to “interview” me and ask a few simple questions. In fact the person was friendly and said many times “sorry.. this is just a normal procedure and soon you will be fine”. This interview was different than the others I heard from people I met that day. Other travelers got their bags opened, pictures in cameras analyzed by the officials, some asked to take their clothes off and others had a very, very bad conversation.

The afternoon was almost gone and more people came and more people left. Most of them passed through but a few others weren’t as lucky. I started to get concerned especially when I tried to get more information but got only one answer: please wait. Leah was really nervous at the time and our hope started to fade away and started to think about how to get back to Jordan. It would be completely disappointing. Israel & The Palestine Territories were one of the places I wanted to go the most.

Suddenly, one of the officials started to stare at me a a little bit intrigued. He eventually got closer and asked where I was from. I answered the question, he talked to someone on the radio and he came with my passport. My question is: what happened there? Why did I wait for freaking 7, 8 hours? I don’t know. I’ve got a feeling that they forgot about my passport because of the way everything happened at the last minute, but I’ll never be sure of that. Moving on…

After one day lost, in very “good” humor and an “incredible” trip beginning, we took a bus to Jerusalem and finally things started to work out. This story continues soon.