Old Īla Site

We booked a food tour of Aqaba through Guru Walks🚶‍♀️. Our guide was Mohammed and the meeting place was outside McDonald's! There were four others on the tour - a German couple, an Austrian guy, and a Canadian man.

The tour began with a visit to the market where the locals shop. We visited a bakery which brought back memories of my time in Israel working as the supervisor of the pitta bread line! This was on a much smaller scale, of course! We tasted bread and baklava.

Our next stop was the shop next door - a typical local grocery store where we tried delicious cheeses, zataar, and olives 🫒 . We particularly liked a tangy, salty goats cheese formed into balls and preserved in extra virgin olive 🫒 oil. It was amazing!!

From there, we stopped at a Friday night market promoting traditional goods and music from Wadi Rum. I have to say the music 🎶 was terrible! It was too loud and completely out of tune!! The thin Bedouin bread we tried was excellent, though!

We then went to a falafel stall for the ubiquitous falafel sandwich. Our last stop was for a traditional coconut 🥥 pastry dessert baked in condensed milk! Not really to either of our taste - and we had to wear a rubber glove to eat it!! 😂

It wasn't the best food tour we'd ever done, but we enjoyed it. Mohammed was tired after travelling to Amman and back before meeting up with us. There were lots of times when we were just waiting for the next thing to happen. I definitely think there was room for improvement! The tour was run on a 'pay what you think it's worth' basis so we paid 20 JOD (about £25) for the two of us.Read more