Jordan: The Ancient City of Petra

Petra is what everybody wants to see in Jordan because it was in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. However, what most people don't realize is that Petra is an enormous site with a lot more to see than just the facade of the building from Indiana Jones. We made the mistake of trying to see the whole site in one day - we really had no idea how big it was or how much we would want to see there. And don't forget the lack of shade throughout Petra - you're in the hot sun all day. If all you want to see is the building from Indiana Jones, called the Treasury, then you can start up at the visitor's center and walk ~1.5 miles downhill through the Siq (the narrow canyon that's 3 meters wide in some spots) before arriving at the Treasury. Then you walk back out and you're done and it's a perfectly reasonable half-day adventure. Note that, due to some idiots putting graffiti on the walls of the Treasury, you are no longer allowed to go inside of it.

Petra is comprised of "lower" and "upper" parts. The lower part, which includes the Treasury, we covered in a 2-hour guided tour - the tour leaves you at the end of the site and you have to walk all the way back out though (all uphill) which would take another hour. So, in 3 hours with a guide, you could cover all of lower Petra.

Upper Petra is comprised of 3 sites that are not connected to each other and that you have to hike up to separately in order to see - The Monastery, the Royal Tombs, and the place of high sacrifice. To see the Monastery you have to climb over 700 stairs - plus almost 200 more if you want to get to the viewpoint that looks out over the Monastery and gives you a nice view of other parts of Jordan as well. This takes 2 hours round trip if you don't stop for too long. It's definitely worth the trip to see the Monastery so if you go leave time to do it.

The High Place of Sacrifice, where animal sacrifices were supposedly carried out, is up another ~800 steps (I just took that number off the internet, so it may not be exact). We did not go up there so I don't have much to say about it. Our driver told us to see the Monastery first and then, if we had energy left, to see one of the other high sites.

The Royal Tombs are visible in their entirety from many areas of lower Petra, and also from the top of the high place of sacrifice. To get closer to them, you will climb another few flights of stairs and then you can walk alongside all the tombs to see them up close.

Additionally, there is a "Petra at Night" tour that starts at 8:30pm, walks you down through the Siq, and ends at the Treasury with the open area in front of the Treasury lit by candles and lanterns. Then, you turn around and walk back out. This tour only occurs a few days of the week so plan your trip accordingly if you want to do it. We had booked it but ended up being too exhausted to go back into Petra that night after being in there the entire day.

And, bonus, over 60% of Petra is still underground! So, as they continue to excavate more, there will be more to see there.

Finally, below are the pictures from our day in Petra. What we did was start out with a 2-hour drive from Wadi Rum. Then we had a 2-hour guided tour down through the Siq, past the Treasury, and down to the very bottom of the site which is another mile or two downhill. I highly recommend having a private guided tour for the lower part of Petra; we learned a lot. Then we had a quick lunch at a restaurant (really the only restaurant there) before hiking up to the Monastery and the viewpoint above it. Then, we walked back out of the site because we didn't have the energy to see the Royal Tombs or High Place. You have to leave energy to get out of Petra because it's all uphill on the way out and it's a solid 3 miles of walking to get out from the bottom of the site back to the visitor's center.

Walking through the Siq on our way in. In the picture of me standing under a bent tree, I am leaning on one of the two water channels, there is one on each side of the Siq, that ran down into the ancient city of Petra. They were built into the walls so that rain water would make it into the city. The one I'm leaning on was covered, and so the bent tree grew around it.



Finally the Siq opens up to reveal the Treasury - hard to get a good picture of that moment when it first appears.



In the first picture below you can see a lot of loose rocks on the ground behind us - those were left there from a flash flood 3 weeks before we visited. Our Petra guide showed us a video of the flood and the water comes down the mountain alongside the treasury and flows right through the site. Most of the site was filled with loose rocks, which were annoying to walk on. They decided not to clean them all up because they're worried another flood will come through and make a mess again. Anytime there is a danger of flash flooding, they close the entire site for as long as the danger persists.



A kitty resting in the sun at a tourist kiosk right in front of the Treasury.



The patterns in the rocks in some places are really beautiful:



The Monastery, first from the viewpoint we climbed up to, and second up close with Martin standing in front of it for scale:



Me taking pictures at the viewpoint over the Monastery. We didn't take many pictures up there, unfortunately, but there was a little hut with an older man in it. He lives all the way up there, by himself, and climbs down twice a week to get more supplies for himself. His children visit him up there once a year. He had gorgeous views in all directions; not a bad way to live life.



You can, at any point throughout Petra, purchase a ride on a camel or a donkey so you don't have to walk so much. The donkeys will take you up to the Monastery or High Place. HOWEVER, our guide told us that sometimes the donkeys fall off of the cliffs so we stayed right away from riding them. But at the end of a long day it sure was tempting! Here are some of the donkeys and camels. You can also take a horse-drawn carriage through the Siq if you don't want to walk that.



Pictures of the Royal Tombs from various locations throughout the site. They really are quite impressive. Everything in Petra was.



The Royal Tombs, behind a collapsed pillar of the Great Temple (part of lower Petra that we wandered through).



Just some more tombs - these are just outside of the Siq on the way back up to the visitor's center. There are carvings in the rocks everywhere!



So, 10 miles later, we were done with Petra! Even if we had planned a second day there to see the High Place and Royal Tombs up close, it would have been another 10 miles of walking to see those sites, all the way back through the Siq and out again. Our driver said some tour companies have special tours where you can enter at the visitor's center and then exit Petra out the bottom without having to walk the 3 miles uphill back out ... if you do that, then it's possible to see everything in one day. But it's likely expensive to do.

Fun note, we stayed at the Petra Guest House for our one night in Petra, and it has a bar in it called the Cave Bar where we had a drink. This is the oldest bar in the world because it occupies a 2000-year-old Nabataean rock tomb. You can sit where the tombs used to be while you have a cocktail, and we did just that:

Jordan: Wadi Rum

We left Aqaba and drove about 45 minutes north to our camp in Wadi Rum, SunCity camp. This camp is really in the middle of the desert and it consists of maybe 20 "tents" that are really little wooden structures. The winds can really get going in the desert so I think if they were actual canvas tents they likely wouldn't last very long. In fact, the winds were very strong during the afternoon and evening that we were there, which made for an interesting ride in the open back of a pickup truck.

So, the main event in Wadi Rum was a guided tour of the desert in the previously mentioned pickup truck. This is followed by a nice dinner in the camp, where there is a really nice atmosphere with fires going and the waiters dancing and everybody enjoying themselves and the good food.

Here are a few pictures of the camp and the views surrounding it:



Below is Martin with our guide in Wadi Rum, Ali. Ali's English wasn't that spectacular but he was a fun guide. He let Martin drive the old Jeep and he took lots of pictures of the two of us.



The first place Ali took us to was the location where they filmed The Martian:



Then we went to a tent in the middle of the desert with an older Bedouin man inside who gave us tea and sang us a song using his one-stringed handmade guitar-like instrument called a Rababah. We bought some head wrappings from him; below you can see him wrapping Martin's head. Those scarves really saved us from the blowing sand during the rest of the tour!



We continued to drive around the desert and stop in scenic areas and take pictures:



Ali was a huge fan of jumping photos. Martin was pretty good at them, while I was not. The one I looked halfway decent in, Martin didn't jump fully. Ali also tried to get us to jump while facing each other and clap hands - you can see how well that went.



We eventually ended up climbing on top of some really large rocks to watch the sunset (after a Bedouin man with a group of camels passed by). It was windy with lots of blowing sand but watching the sunset in the desert was really neat and totally worth all the sand I got in my hair that day.



Here's a video of the sunset with the winds:

This video gives you a bit of a panoramic view:

After we returned to camp, it was just about time for dinner. They cooked the main course underground - chicken, lamb, potatoes, rice, and carrots. Here they are about to dig it all up from under the mound of sand:



And our overflowing plates (more hummus!!):



This one waiter was really talented at dancing with a platter of mugs of tea balanced on top of his head. He provided entertainment for quite awhile - I took a video of it but am not sure if it will work or not, so the first picture below is just a picture and the second is hopefully a video.

We awoke the next morning to some fresh, warm focaccia with herbs sprinkled on top of it for breakfast and it was perfect. Funny how it's the camp with the fewest frills and the lowest level of comfort that has the best food and atmosphere. Then we were off to our next destination. The camp owner wanted us to go on a camel ride in the early morning, which would have been neat because we've never ridden camels before, but we were on a schedule and had to leave early to get to Petra! So, maybe next time.

Jordan: Aqaba

We just returned from an 11-day trip to Jordan; we started in Aqaba and worked our way north through the country with the help of a tour company and local driver (I wouldn't recommend visiting Jordan without a driver - driving yourself in Amman is a sure way to die). Aside from the crazy drivers, I highly recommend visiting Jordan - you've never met friendlier people than the Jordanians and there is so much history there.

Anyway, we're starting in Aqaba. We stayed at the Kempinski hotel for 3 nights, which was a nice 5-star resort that we chose in order to have a few days of relaxation and pampering before we started touring around. The breakfast buffet was extensive, the resort itself was quiet and not too crowded, and the staff were very friendly and helpful. This was our favorite hotel that we stayed at on our trip.

One of the neat things about Aqaba is that it's nestled between Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Egypt. The view to the west of the hotel is of Eliat, Israel, and when we left by boat to go snorkeling the view to the west quickly turned into Egypt. These countries are mere kilometers away when you're in Aqaba.

Here's the hotel itself:



And a few views of the beach and pools. I didn't get a full shot of the pools because the view from our room didn't fully face the pools but they were really nice. Note the abandoned hotel next door to ours in the second picture. Since the Syrian war began 5 years ago, tourism in Jordan has dropped by more than 70%. So there were several abandoned hotels in each area we visited, and most tourist sites were nearly abandoned. It's too bad because Jordan itself is very safe but most people don't want to take the risk of visiting a country so close to Syria.



These cute little boats took people from one hotel to another, as each hotel had its own dock in the Red Sea. They played really loud Arabic music, which was fun. Some even had disco lights.



There were always a few cargo ships in view in the Red Sea. The main source of income for Jordan is phosphate mining, and they load up these cargo ships with phosphates not far from our hotel. Also, the first picture below shows Eliat, Israel on the hillside. You could practically touch it. It was actually hard to see it a lot of the time because the winds come from the west and bring in tons of sand which made the air really hazy.



After spending a full day relaxing, we went on a snorkeling trip on our second day in Aqaba. Snorkeling and diving are what you do in Aqaba - there isn't really much else. There are many areas to snorkel there but the best one is the Japanese Garden, where we went. We could only get there by taking a boat trip with about 30 other people, and the boat had a glass bottom so we spent a lot of time looking through that instead of being in the water, but it was still worthwhile. We saw a pod of maybe 10-12 dolphins on our way out to the reef, which we attempted to photograph:



Fun fact, the Red Sea is FILLED with jellyfish. Thankfully they don't sting, but it took some getting used to when we first jumped into the water and had to swim through a bunch of them. The second picture below is through the bottom of our boat.



After we snorkeled we were dropped off at the Berenice Beach Club for a few hours, which is a day resort located out by the reefs for snorkelers and divers to hang out, eat lunch or have a beer, and swim at. We were fed an excellent bbq lunch here with a buffet of various salads to go with it. Sorry I didn't take a picture but every buffet we went to had hummus and pita bread, salads with cucumbers and yogurt or tomatoes, and more hummus. We ate so much hummus and it was so good. Below are a few pictures of the pool and beach at Berenice. I actually don't recommend staying here for very long because Jordanians love to blast music at full volume at their pools and beaches. It's hard to relax; it's really way beyond a reasonable volume level. While this didn't happen at the Kempinski, it happened at Berenice and one of our later hotels.



Some scenic pictures from our boat ride back to our hotel. Martin really loved the flag below - it's really huge.



We also ate the best dinners in Aqaba. We ate at two restaurants - Ali Baba and Floka. We had seafood at both places and everything was delicious. At Ali Baba I had something called Sayadiyah, which is a white fish like monkfish on top of a bed of cinnamon-flavored rice with some browned onions in it. Pictures below are from our dinner at Floka, where I had a Beryani with fish in it (the fish is hiding in the rice) that had the most colorful rice. We also ate some yummy baba ghanoush there, which is in front of my rice.



After dinner we would wander around in downtown Aqaba a bit. There's a lot of shopping there but most of it is touristy and/or cheap. There are a few higher-end stores but not many. It's most interesting just to wander around and be surrounded by locals out shopping in the evenings when it's cooler. Daytime highs in Aqaba are regularly over 100 degrees F. There were always tons of people out and about in the evenings, watching soccer games at cafes or shopping and the city is extremely safe. I never felt unsafe wandering around anywhere in Jordan at night.

On our final morning in Aqaba, we lounged on the beach (of course) and Martin went for a little swim.