The Dead Sea

For our last night in Jordan we decided to splurge and booked a room at the Movenpick Resort & Spa on the Dead Sea. We chose to upgrade a little which got us a charming room in the village (vs the hotel proper), free wifi, and, best of all, free spa access.

We stayed in the Nebo building

Stairs. Sigh

 Honestly I was too busy with the spa, which was awesome, the pools, and the beach to bother taking too many pictures of the hotel and grounds. You can check out the hotel website if you really care. All I can say, is that I hope the next family member of mine who decides on a destination wedding is a little more creative than the three people who got married at the exact same Mexican resort and chooses a place like this instead!

Hotel Spa

The spa was really fantastic. It even included one pool filled with Dead Sea water. Kind of an intro to floating!

One of the 5 or 6 pools

Unfortunately the day and a half we had here were both very hazy. The weather was plenty warm but there wasn't much of any sun. That did not stop us from enjoying the beach though!

Movenpick beach

Which thanks again to the drop in tourism was nice and empty so we had our pick of lounge chairs. It was kind of like Mexico during swine flu.

I was bummed to not have remembered to buy a waterproof case for my smaller camera because once you got in the water you could see that the rocks along the shoreline were deeply crusted in salt. It almost looked like there was a layer of snow and ice on them!

I was the only one on the beach in tie dye!

We made our way down the beach to the water which was really easier said than done. There's a ramp thing to help you get in the water or, you can do what we did, and pick your way veerrry carefully through the rocks. The sand doesn't go all the way to the water line and the rocks that are there are both very slippery and sharp.

Getting the full mud experience!

But once you successfully navigated the sharp rocks it was totally worth it to mud up!  We wouldn't have noticed the mud urn had some other tourists not pointed it out to us. The mud is really more clay than mud-which makes sense because clay is good for your skin whereas I can't imagine mud would have enough minerals in it to really do anything for you.

You're only supposed to stay in the water 20 minutes max each dip so we went in a couple times. Sarah's very informative guide book suggested not shaving several days before in case you nick yourself-because the water was stingy enough even without any cuts! And before I left a friend of mine told me to make sure and not get any in my mouth. Which is about as helpful as telling someone not to look down. Of course I got water in my mouth. Not deliberately, the mud on my face was really starting to sting and while trying to get it off I ended up with water in my mouth. It was totally nasty. Happily there's a life guard on the water and one of his duties is to hang on to fresh water to help people wash off their faces/mouths when this happens.

To top off the Dead Sea experience, Sarah grabbed a newspaper at breakfast. Why, you might ask, did we need a newspaper? To do this of course!

Yes, I have this picture

I really enjoyed the floating. After a while it seems so natural that you wonder if the water, which actually looks greasy because of all the salt, is actually doing anything special. Then you try this newspaper thing in a regular pool and utterly fail. Yes, the water really does make you float that much.

Would I go back to Jordan? Totally. Would I climb up to the monastery at Petra again? Absolutely not. Would I pay scandalous amounts of money to float in the Dead Sea some...you betcha!