The self proclaimed world’s smallest hotel is this small VW jalopy that Mohammad Abu Ali opened up to guests in 2011 after he retired. His sole purpose is to put his village on the tourist map! He was getting quite a few of them too as we saw! The picture also shows the President of the country visiting the hotel!

You can read up more about this here.

Instead of taking pictures and moving on, we decided to sit down and chat with Abu Ai. Pretty soon, Basel, who often takes care of him came by and joined us.

Abu Ali started chatting with us while making some Bedouin tea for us.

“Hindia?”, he asked with a typical H added by many folks in this part of the world.

Then he went in looking for something and coming out, he gifted me a 2000 year old coin from India that the gypsies had brought. It has a picture of a soldier with a horse on one side and a king on the other. They are very faint – but if you wash it, you can see it.

“How did you get it?”, I asked

Basel translated it in Arabic for me.

Immediately, this septuagenarian started moving his hand around pointing to the ground and started making a “Brrrrr… beep beep” noise.

“Ah, a metal detector!”

Turns out, he goes around the mountains with his metal detector looking for old artifacts.

We had a fabulous time. It is meetings like this that makes trips to foreign countries so enjoyable and educational. Get to truly know the local people and interact with them and understand how they live their lives.

Evidently, he enjoyed our conversation too. As we took leave, he asked us to wait, went inside his house and gave me another coin. Again 2000 years old – but from Jordan area – around the time of Nabatean people!!