1) Got a machine gun pointed at me.
2) Survived 20 kilometers of walking on our visit to the ancient city of Petra.
3) Camped in freezing temperatures at a Bedouin-style camp in the middle of the desert.
4) Got into a snow ball fight near Petra.
5) Suffered from sore testicles after riding a camel.
6) Climbed up Mount Sinai at 3 am and bumped into 49 Malaysians at the top.
7) Spent a night on a felluca (an Egyptian sailboat). I slept sideways with one side of my face on the pillow, leaving the other side vulnerable to a sand fly siege. I woke up with red bumps all over the left side of my face and it stayed like that for a week.
Learned to tie an Arabian headscarf and wore it throughout Jordan.
9) Went snorkeling in Dahab and got swept away by a current —  to a different beach.
10) Swam in the Dead Sea. Some cool shit. As you walk in, your feet no longer touches the ground once the water gets to about nipple level.
11) Drove through a road that was being washed away by a flash flood caused by melting snow in the mountains.
12) Rode in a police convoy from Aswan to Luxor.
13) Helped an Egyptian man get dressed. A bit of a surreal occurence.
14) Visited the pyramids, a bunch of other tombs and a bunch of temples. Sophie spotted a carving on King Tut’s sarcophagus that looked just like me.
15) Aggravated my testicle injury riding on a donkey.
16) Ate a lot of interesting food from some very dodgy places. Half our group got hit pretty severe food poisoning. Sophie and I were lucky not to catch anything despite being the two most adventruous food experimenters on the tour. Il hamdul allah!
17) Got pretty good conversing in basic Arabic. Even learned the F-word. I made up my mind not to tell you wankers how to say it. Figured there are enough angry Muslims in the world.
18) Witnessed a donkey getting a hard-on. Very impressive stuff.
19) Did some last minute butt-saving. At 2am on Feb 14th, made a hieroglyphic Valentine’s Day card for Sophie out of tree bark.
20) Ate at a KFC operated solely by deaf people. Ordering was a load of fun, and a piece of cake.