Jordan
For once, one of my trips to another country didn't start with obscenely early hours, for which I was very grateful. The 4-5 hour bus ride down to Eilat is much more tolerable when you're not cranky and ill-fed. It had been a rainy and increasingly cold week in Jerusalem as well, so I was happy to get away to the Jordanian desert for a while. Not like it's any warmer at night in the desert, but still.
I met up with my travel companions, Leora and her roommate Samantha, and in pretty much every respect, the journey from Jerusalem to Eilat, from Eilat across the border to Aqaba, and from Aqaba to Petra, was uneventful. Nothing like Egypt, where the whole "travel day" was a hassle. We were slightly disapponted because we were traveling at night, which meant first that taxis to Petra were more limited, and thus more money, and second that our pictures of us crossing the border, the Jordanian border guards who light-heartedly picked fights with each other while checking our passports, and the lighted signs bearing the picture of King Abdullah and/or the former King Hussein littered throughout the Aqaba crossing didn't turn out so well.
The hotel we stayed in in Wadi Mussa, the town near Petra itself, was the only major disappointment. In terms of cleanliness and availability of certain services, it was probably the worst I've stayed in. They did give us tea a lot, and drove us to Petra when we asked, but they also tried to charge us for breakfast and quoted high prices for a taxi to Wadi Rum, which we wanted to go to on Saturday before we left Jordan. Generally, they were not fun, trustworthy people running this hotel. And it was cold at night. But since we were only there for two nights and it was fairly cheap, we decided to suck it up.
Samantha wanted to leave for Petra at 6, since she's a photojournalist and wanted good light and few people for her pictures, so she got up at the crack of dawn, while Leora and I stayed in our beds until 8 or so, then got the hotel managers to give us a ride down to the mountain, which is only about a 5-minute car ride away. We got tickets, fended off the first group of approximately 10,000 Arab men on donkeys or horses who would try to sell us rides throughout the entire day, and started the winding path through Petra.
Petra's famous caves, tombs and rock structures were created by an ancient people called the Nabateans, some ancient Arab tribes who came from the Arabian peninsula and settled in Southern Jordan in the first century BCE. My little guidebook describes them as extremely advanced and powerful, having built a kingdom that included most of Arabia, parts of the Negev and Sinai, and stretched up to Damascus, which is impressive when you consider that the Roman Empire and the Hasmoneans were powerful forces in the region during these times. They were open to other cultures and religion, never really believed in nationalistic isolation, and incorporated lots of foreign architecture into their own. This is extremely obvious in Petra.
On the traditional road through, you almost immediately start noticing caves with entrances that look way to square to be natural dotted throughout the surrounding mountain-sides. Next comes a large square column just sitting off to the side of the path, with more rock caves around it, which are now starting to show decorations, steps, and such carved into the rock. Barely ten minutes into the walk, you see the first major rock carving, a double storied face of a tomb with four large obelisks on it's top. The top story is called the Obelisk Tomb, the bottom, the Bab as-Siq Triclinium, where the Nabateans celebrated feasts in honor of the dead. The obelisks show Egyptian architectural influence.
A little farther down you come to a large gorge, the entrance to main Petra, called As-Siq. The multi-colored rock walls just seem to rise up out of nowhere, and the opening is fairly narrow, with random carvings and caves appearing at every twist and turn, a water channel cut into the side, and even some places designed to hold plants. Finally, in a scene literally straight out of Indiana Jones, through the darkened walls of the end of As-Siq, you'll see the sunlit face of the Al-Khazneh treasury. The place is awesome. I can't even describe it, even pictures barely get across how huge and glowing it is. Why they call it a treasury when it was supposedly carved as a tomb for some king, I don't know, but my little book says it incorporates Hellenistic and Nabatean architectural styles. The Greek is definitely obvious, with the tall columns and Corinthian capitals. How they carved this thing straight into a rock wall is beyond me.
From there you can take some steep steps up to a High Place of Sacrifice, but we had already planned to take the long trail up to the Monastery, and we'd be there all day if we took all the random trails. We turned right instead, where the canyon leads directly to a place called the Street of Facades, with loads of intricate tombs on either side, and a huge theatre, carved into solid rock and able to seat 7000 people. Then a row of Royal Tombs situated high on the mountain face, so that you have to take several flights of stone stairs up to it. From the platform at the top, right in front of the Urn Tomb, you can see vast expanses of mountain and desert in front of you, bisected by a small colonnaded marble street that leads to the other side of Petra. It's really almost impossible to describe. I didn't have this much trouble even with Cairo and Giza, I really have to just post my pictures and try to fill in the blanks from there.
I met up with my travel companions, Leora and her roommate Samantha, and in pretty much every respect, the journey from Jerusalem to Eilat, from Eilat across the border to Aqaba, and from Aqaba to Petra, was uneventful. Nothing like Egypt, where the whole "travel day" was a hassle. We were slightly disapponted because we were traveling at night, which meant first that taxis to Petra were more limited, and thus more money, and second that our pictures of us crossing the border, the Jordanian border guards who light-heartedly picked fights with each other while checking our passports, and the lighted signs bearing the picture of King Abdullah and/or the former King Hussein littered throughout the Aqaba crossing didn't turn out so well.
The hotel we stayed in in Wadi Mussa, the town near Petra itself, was the only major disappointment. In terms of cleanliness and availability of certain services, it was probably the worst I've stayed in. They did give us tea a lot, and drove us to Petra when we asked, but they also tried to charge us for breakfast and quoted high prices for a taxi to Wadi Rum, which we wanted to go to on Saturday before we left Jordan. Generally, they were not fun, trustworthy people running this hotel. And it was cold at night. But since we were only there for two nights and it was fairly cheap, we decided to suck it up.
Samantha wanted to leave for Petra at 6, since she's a photojournalist and wanted good light and few people for her pictures, so she got up at the crack of dawn, while Leora and I stayed in our beds until 8 or so, then got the hotel managers to give us a ride down to the mountain, which is only about a 5-minute car ride away. We got tickets, fended off the first group of approximately 10,000 Arab men on donkeys or horses who would try to sell us rides throughout the entire day, and started the winding path through Petra.
Petra's famous caves, tombs and rock structures were created by an ancient people called the Nabateans, some ancient Arab tribes who came from the Arabian peninsula and settled in Southern Jordan in the first century BCE. My little guidebook describes them as extremely advanced and powerful, having built a kingdom that included most of Arabia, parts of the Negev and Sinai, and stretched up to Damascus, which is impressive when you consider that the Roman Empire and the Hasmoneans were powerful forces in the region during these times. They were open to other cultures and religion, never really believed in nationalistic isolation, and incorporated lots of foreign architecture into their own. This is extremely obvious in Petra.
On the traditional road through, you almost immediately start noticing caves with entrances that look way to square to be natural dotted throughout the surrounding mountain-sides. Next comes a large square column just sitting off to the side of the path, with more rock caves around it, which are now starting to show decorations, steps, and such carved into the rock. Barely ten minutes into the walk, you see the first major rock carving, a double storied face of a tomb with four large obelisks on it's top. The top story is called the Obelisk Tomb, the bottom, the Bab as-Siq Triclinium, where the Nabateans celebrated feasts in honor of the dead. The obelisks show Egyptian architectural influence.
A little farther down you come to a large gorge, the entrance to main Petra, called As-Siq. The multi-colored rock walls just seem to rise up out of nowhere, and the opening is fairly narrow, with random carvings and caves appearing at every twist and turn, a water channel cut into the side, and even some places designed to hold plants. Finally, in a scene literally straight out of Indiana Jones, through the darkened walls of the end of As-Siq, you'll see the sunlit face of the Al-Khazneh treasury. The place is awesome. I can't even describe it, even pictures barely get across how huge and glowing it is. Why they call it a treasury when it was supposedly carved as a tomb for some king, I don't know, but my little book says it incorporates Hellenistic and Nabatean architectural styles. The Greek is definitely obvious, with the tall columns and Corinthian capitals. How they carved this thing straight into a rock wall is beyond me.
From there you can take some steep steps up to a High Place of Sacrifice, but we had already planned to take the long trail up to the Monastery, and we'd be there all day if we took all the random trails. We turned right instead, where the canyon leads directly to a place called the Street of Facades, with loads of intricate tombs on either side, and a huge theatre, carved into solid rock and able to seat 7000 people. Then a row of Royal Tombs situated high on the mountain face, so that you have to take several flights of stone stairs up to it. From the platform at the top, right in front of the Urn Tomb, you can see vast expanses of mountain and desert in front of you, bisected by a small colonnaded marble street that leads to the other side of Petra. It's really almost impossible to describe. I didn't have this much trouble even with Cairo and Giza, I really have to just post my pictures and try to fill in the blanks from there.
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