Visiting Petra

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After a cold night at our first hotel, we checked out in the morning and moved to the El Gee hotel down the street. We then went out and bought food for lunch before heading down the steep road towards Petra, about 1 km away.

Tour groups had began arriving, but we quickly bought our tickets and headed down the path toward the Siq - the rock entrance to Petra. Alongside the path, horse drawn carts and horse back riders galloped along a parallel roadway.

In my mind, I pictured that we would walk though a rock chasm and quickly be facing Petra. In fact, this canyon seems to run on forever. Beginning relatively wide, the rock cliffs on either side quickly close in narrowing the pathway to a few meters in places. The texture of the red rock, which rises steeply up to impossible heights, is jagged but patterned with swirls so colourful, you wonder if they were painted. As the canyon closes in with twists and turns, sound is quickly hushed so that you are barely aware of the number of people working their way down the same route. Partway along, the path of the Siq begins to descend gradually and you can see ancient water channels along both walls ( I told Evy that this was for running hot and cold water). The stones on which were were walking were laid down in the first century.

At some places along the Siq, tombs were carved into the steep sides. After so long walking looking up at the amazing rock formations, you almost forget that this is all leading to an ancient city. I found my self astonished to round one corner and see the site of “The Chancellery” - a massive pillared building carved into the rock, suddenly facing me. If the ancient architects had planned for this to be an awe inspiring surprise, they succeeded.

In spite of having seen photographs of this scene, it was still truly impressive. After 1.5 km of canyon, it felt strange to suddenly be in such an relatively open place. A few camels and donkeys milled around amongst the tourists as we wandering into the light canyon. After taking in the chancellery, Evy and I had a Turkish coffee and watched the reactions of people as they entered the city.

From the Siq, one end of the canyon leads quickly to a steep set of stairs which lead up to the top of the cliffs, the other direction takes you further into the city. As we headed in, the canyon widened. An ancient amphitheater sits on one side of a large open area. It is amazing well preserved after so many centuries. Further in along the cliffside are a series of tomb. We climbed the stone steps and went into one of the larger ones. A women, impressed by the acoustics I guess, began to sing a beautiful hymn. She had a wonderful voice and the effect was spellbinding.

After the tomb, we heading down an ancient road, partially restored to a temple that was just discovered in the last 10 years. We had our lunch amongst the Roman era ruins before walking down the road to the pathway to the Monastery. By now we had been walking for some hours and it was quite hot. The monastery is an hour and a half hike out of the valley, so we opted not to go up and instead headed back to the Siq.

The road uphill to our hotel was particularly tiring at the end of such a long day, but we all decided that climbing Mount Sinai had been a far more physically challenging task.

We did school work in the afternoon and then inquired at our hotel about getting the bus to Aqaba in the morning. As it turns out, we could get a car for the four of us for just a bit more than the bus. We spoke to the car driver, and managed to instead have him take us to the boarder with Israel, so we could go overland back to Egypt.

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