Aqaba - Eilat

The following morning we set off to cross the border into Israel. We heard it took about an hour to take a taxi to the border, walk across, go through the checkpoints, then take another taxi to the bus station in Eilat. There was a 10am bus in Eilat we wanted to catch so we set off for the border around 8:30. We were lucky that there weren’t any lines! We exited Jordan quickly and thought we’d get into Israel in a timely fashion as well. We were wrong.

It took a little while for the Israeli guards to take out and inspect each individual item in our backpacks. We thought that would be the most time consuming process until we got to passport control, where our passports were taken from us.TJ and I were interviewed separately and then we were put in a holding room. We watched other Americans breeze through the checkpoint but we were told to sit and wait for up to 3 hours while we were investigated and then someone would let us know if we could enter Israel. I couldn’t imagine that they would reject us and send us back to Jordan, but I guess it was possible. When we asked why we were being detained we were told it was random. We are inclined to believe it is because we’d been in Lebanon and Syria – two countries that are hated by Israel.

We played Nintendo and caught up on magazines before our passports were returned and we received permission to enter. We cruised Eilat then boarded a bus to Jerusalem.