I am feeling slightly misty-eyed.

There's a new dawn over transport options in the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba and it's enough to make veteran overlanders of the Nuweiba to Aqaba route choke on their shisha.

Having to suffer the infamously tardy schedule of the two public ferries that ply the waters between Egypt and Jordan is now a thing of the past; relegated to the back drawer of backpacker history. Yes folks, there's a new rival ferry working this route, offering all kinds of wonderful which I can only gasp in awe at.

Speedy immigration formalities!

No longer will travellers have to navigate the crazed disorder of the Nuweiba immigration building. Known (nearly) affectionately as the Bangkok Hilton* among those of us who journeyed this route at least once a month; the immigration facilities at Nuweiba are the nearest bovine experience a human can have. Imagine being trapped inside what is best described as a vast herding shed and then being crushed within a mad stampede, when the ferry is called, and you get the picture.

This no longer needs to be your last memory of Egypt though. Passengers on the new ferry bypass this chaos completely. Instead they are whisked down to the end of the port, to that rather strange glass pyramid structure (I always wondered what they'd end up using that useless building for), and complete immigration facilities there.

No more queues for miles. No more wooden-slat benches which are always missing their middle-slat. No more crowds squatting on the dirt encrusted floor. No more flies. No more sudden, mad, panicked rush to the gate. I once saw a child get trampled in the crush and while trying to help the mother get her off the floor was belted by a policeman's baton on my back as he tried to control the crowd. Sadly he was more upset about having hit me than about the child getting knocked over.

A definite departure time!

The public 'fast ferry' leaves at 3pm. Supposedly. In reality it leaves at 5.30pm if you're lucky but as luck has never been my strongpoint when travelling for me it usually leaves at 7.30pm, or 9.30pm and once, in a mammoth immigration shed marathon ordeal it left at 12.30am. For a long time I proudly held the record among my friends of 'Longest Wait In The Nuweiba Immigration Shed, Ever!' But then I was beaten by a friend who was left waiting till 4am at the port and then made the huge mistake of deciding to take the 'slow ferry' which was then leaving, only to see the 'fast ferry' merrily overtake her boat at 6am while she was left with another two hours of sailing time in front of her.

The new ferry is guaranteed to leave at 6.30am and takes about 1.5 hours to reach Jordan meaning travellers who don't want to stop in Aqaba (it's actually a very nice town and does deserve a night of your time) will actually be able to catch the morning public transport buses and minibuses to Wadi Rum, Petra and Amman. Why the guaranteed departure? Because this ferry also transports all the one-day Petra tour groups from Sharm el-Sheikh, Taba and Dahab.

At the moment, most independent travellers don't even realise they can take this ferry and believe it's reserved for tour group tourists only doing a one-day-return trip but I am assured by the nice people who operate this ferry service that independent travellers are very welcome to use their service as well.

And what's the price difference you ask?

A one-way ticket for the new 'Babil' ferry costs US$85. That's including the Egyptian departure tax of US$10.

Tickets for the public 'fast ferry' costs US$75 plus departure tax.

Yes, that's right. It's the same price.

I know which one I'll be choosing in the future.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________

How to get a ticket on the new 'Babil' ferry

In the future it's likely that plenty of the tour operators in Dahab will begin selling tickets for this ferry but right at the moment there is nowhere in Egypt for independent travellers to purchase one. Instead email the helpful staff at Meenagate, who operate this ferry service (info@meenagate.com), to make a pre-booking at least 48 hours in advance. You can then collect your ticket and pay on arrival at Nuweiba Port.

*NOTE (for non-Antipodean readers): Bangkok Hilton is the nickname of Thailand's notorious Bangkwang Jail which should give you a decent idea of the overall atmosphere of the Nuweiba immigration building

Jordan is a country that manages to get a lot right when it comes to their tourism promotion. Just take a look at their tourism board's website. User friendly and perfectly pretty it makes you want to jump on a plane to Amman straight away; which is the whole point. Thanks to a rather liberal scattering of ruins (which nod to the country's historic role as the 'sandy bit' every would-be emperor, trader and prophet had to walk across to get somewhere) and a surprisingly diverse topography Jordan has, for a tiny nation, managed to carve itself a niche in the tourism stakes that far exceeds its feather-weight size.

I've loved Jordan since I first stepped off the Nuweiba ferry in 2004. I like the genuinely helpful people; the fantastic ahwa; the magnificent night skies of Wadi Rum which never cease to make me feel so insignificant. I even, unlike many visitors, like that rascal of a capital Amman with its taxi drivers who'll happily speechify on everything from Jordan's economic woes to the taste of New Zealand lamb on any journey longer than between 1st and 2nd circle. Jordan really is a hard country for visitors not to like. But there is a fly in the ointment.

I led tours through the Middle East for over four years and out of all the countries I used to take groups through the one I knew I wasn't going to have to work quite so hard to get my passengers to love, was Jordan. But although the their experience overall would most often rate highly in passenger feedback there would nearly always be negative comments about the Jordanian tour guides we used.

A recent conversation on twitter about the standard of Jordanian guides has really got me thinking today about what is going on here. How can a country that gets so much right with their tourism promotion, get such an important component wrong?

An experience with one particular guide in Jordan highlights the case. A few  years ago, while driving from Petra to Madaba along the King's Highway, our guide whipped out the microphone and proceeded to spend the next three hours (with his back to us, staring out the front windscreen) spouting a commentary that went something like this.

" Here are some tomato fields. We grow many tomatoes in Jordan. Here are some more tomato fields. Here are some olive trees. We have many olive trees in Jordan. On your right you'll see more olive trees. If you look to your left you'll see more tomato fields. Here is a taxi passing us. We have lots of taxis in Jordan..."

(To get the full experience of what this monologue was actually like you have to imagine that it is delivered in a completely flat monotone with every statement coming about two minutes after the last and being non-stop for three hours.)

Now I know how funny this sounds (my re-enactment of this scenario is particularly popular at tour leader reunions) but how would you feel, seriously, if you'd paid good money to have professional guides on your trip and this is what you end up with. Cue unhappy tourists and complaints.

So was this a one-off? Am I making a big song and dance about one lazy guide?

I really wish that was the case but it isn't; far from it. In Wadi Rum a tour guide went on a tangent about TE Lawrence's homosexual tendencies and how he was burning in hell (cringe-worthy at the best of times but especially when two of your passengers happen to be a lovely gay couple).  In Petra I overheard a guide telling my group that the Treasury was most definitely not built by the Nabataeans. On a Jerash tour a guide decided to not include the Temple of Artemis as he was hungry and wanted to go to the restaurant to have his free lunch. And although I have never had to sit through another 'tour bus monologue' quite as bad as the one above (or for such a long time) this lazy, front-of-the-bus  guiding is considered good practice among most Jordanian guides. As one of my group once commented to me after a particularly boring one hour speech pointing out every feature outside our windows, "we're tourists, not blind people."

But it goes beyond just standout bad experiences (although I have plenty more tales I could tell). It gets right down to the fundamentals of good guiding. As a whole, Jordanian guides seem poorly trained in much of their history. The majority are able to fill in the basics behind each sight but little else and the information that is delivered usually comes in a dry, monotone package making it difficult for many to understand (let alone get excited about) what they're seeing. There seems to be no awareness of crowd control - of being able to herd your group to a quiet spot, of making eye contact, of waiting to begin your talk until everyone in the group has arrived. Much more shocking though is that even though the tour groups I led were always small (12 people or under) and the guide would be assigned to my group for five full days I cannot remember one instance where a guide ever learnt all the group's names.

So why is this? Some in the aforementioned twitter conversation wondered if this lackadaisical approach was due to a dearth of incentives for guides but the truth is Jordan actually pays their guides extremely well. The ones I worked with earned around 80 JD per day. That's much more than my Australian-based travel company employer paid me per day even after four years of tour leading (and I was on the highest tour leader rate they gave). It's also a huge amount more than guides in Egypt and Syria make and even a little more than many guides in Turkey take home (and all three of these countries produce guides that put the Jordanians to shame).

On top of the daily rate Jordanian guides earn there are the tips (and woe betide the group that doesn't tip a Jordanian guide enough. I've experienced three incidents at the end of a particularly badly guided tour when my group hasn't tipped well and the guide has thrown the money on the ground in front of us) AND then there are the commissions. Now I'm not going to get into the commission factor in this post as it's a more complicated issue than most believe but let's just say compared to the majority of take-home salaries in Jordan, the guides don't do too bad at all.

What may be a major part of the cause is the lack of a proper guiding qualification. Both Egypt and Turkey have rigorous degrees which would-be guides have to get through before they earn their official guide status. The Turkish guiding degree is particularly tough and it shows in the overall quality of knowledge, presentation of information and professionalism guides have in that country. On the other hand to become a guide in Jordan (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong) all you have to do is take a three month course. On top of this I have heard numerous stories from guides in Jordan about rich kids bribing their way to the guide-badge rather than actually even taking the course which is a separate problem altogether.

The main issue seems to be that if, as a nation, you're not going to invest in your guides and treat this as a professional career with a proper qualification to go with it you're never going to end up with great guides. If you make a guiding licence a paint-by-numbers option which anyone who wants to cash in on the tourist buck can breeze in and get even good guides will be extremely few and far between.

Being a good guide is not easy and not everyone can do it. It takes boundless amounts of enthusiasm for your subject, incredible knowledge of history, geography and  culture (to name just a few), endless patience, a decent understanding of group dynamics and the ability to answer the same question 50 times without rolling your eyes. A great guide (those rare species that anyone going into guiding should aspire to) won't just impart facts. They'll weave stories, cater information to individual tourist's interests and infuse such enthusiasm for their subject that you'll end up loving it too. Not every tour guide (in any country) will be great but that's the level a country should aspire to when training their guides.

At the moment when friends of friends and acquaintances email me seeking advice about travelling in Jordan and ask if they should use a guide my answer is always no. I look forward to the day when my answer will be yes.

Go play at being Lawrence among the sands or Indy outwitting the Nazis.

Jordan's top two sights for movie-buffs:
Chasing Celluloid Dreams in Jordan