A bit of a restless sleep last night but nevertheless we got our 6′0clock wake up call and got ready to go to Petra! We ate breakfast and was picked up in a huge tour bus. We were not sure what to expect – but until we picked up a dozen REALLY ANNOYING American tourists we actually thought the tour would be casual and nice! They were TEXT-BOOK classic clique fat American tourists who have awful senses of humour and really loud voices. Anyway.
So the tour really started at the Yitzhak Rabin border crossing into Jordan. If you don’t know who Yitzhak Rabin is you should. Read for 1 minute here. The border crossing over to Jordan was a bit tedious – first on the Israeli side you go with your passports and get stamped and wait around – then you walk through no mans land to the Jordan side. This bit takes awhile – our tour representative takes all passports and goes and does the formalities on our behalf and we waited for an hour or so. Theres a little souvenir shop there and it gives you the first taste of haggling Jordanian sales people hassling you to buy.
After the border crossing we get on a bus and drive for two hours through some of the most phenomenal landscape I have seen. The mountains either side of the main highway are towering and made from sandstone rock with many different minerals creating huge dark colored lines which slice through the hills. Then you continue and start going through the desert valley where you see camels and donkeys and the landscape looks apparently the most like the moon and mars than anywhere in the world. Then you turn and head north west toward Petra and start climbing through the high mountains where you see nomadic bedoin peoples living in tents that they move every few weeks and leave piles of rocks indicating where they have lived – with the amount of kilometers they moved to in rocks high and the top rock pointing in the direction they’ve gone.
Once we arrived in Petra we drove through the township to the entrance to the hidden city and proceeded with our tour down into the canyon. Then what we saw inside is hard enough to describe with photographs or words aloud let alone down in writing. Even if you see photo or video of the entire place you will not feel the experience of Petra – its incredible. We wandered around for about 3 hours talking with the young kids trying to sell us ‘ancient’ artifacts and souvenirs – claiming that just for us they will sell it half price.
After the end we walked back out and got on the bus and had lunch at a nearby hotel. After the two hour bus ride back followed by a coach tour of Aqabar (the city on the gulf next to Eilat) and we were back at the border on our less painful return into Israel. After mum and I shared a pizza we konked out in the hotel room.
(Click for big photo + caption)
