Petra by Day ... And Night!!!

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This morning we awoke early and climbed aboard the bus and made the grueling five or six minute drive to the ancient city of Petra, which was once home to the thriving Nabatean populace. Although you may not be aware of it, you are at least somewhat familiar with Petra. Petra was featured in the third Indiana Jones movie (the one with Sean Connery).

We walked in through the main gate and hopped on a bunch of waiting horses to make the 1ish km journey to the start of the canyon. Every horse comes with a person to lead the "rider" down the path. Coincidentally, my (Mike's) horse was the only one to not have a matching human - it's a good thing I rode horses when I was a kid!  (As it turns out, riding a horse is kind of like riding a bike - you never forget!) The catch is that the people that went with the other horses just assumed I didn't know how to ride, so when I stopped to snap a photo of Elysia the other people would yell at my horse and whip it (thinking it was misbehaving). They persisted until I scared them off with some assorted mixture of yelling in very broken Arabic and my normal sub-par English! I really felt bad for the horse though, because it got a licking for doing exactly what I asked it to do.

(As an aside, I generally have very mixed feelings about riding the horses, camels and donkeys that are available in Egypt and Jordan. By our standard, these are poor countries, and from what I can see there is no standard for animal rights. Most all of the horses and donkeys are what we would consider malnourished (not sure how to tell with camels but I expect it's the same). It is rare that you see one (horse or donkey) whose hips and ribs aren't pronounced. (The horses at Petra were actually in great shape - especially when you compare them to the others on the streets pulling carts, etc.). So it is a bit of a conundrum: ride the horse and support an industry that mistreats its animals, or don't ride the horses and then the owners are left with less money to feed the animals... What would you do?)

Once we got to the start of the canyon, we dismounted our horses and began walking towards the infamous treasury. We made a few stops along the way though. Because of the desert nature of the area and the many high sandstone hills with their twisty-turny gorges, the area surrounding Petra is very susceptible to flash flooding. To combat this serious problem, the ancient Nabateans built dams in many of the gorges where the water would flow into their city (Petra). They were also very clever about water collection. They carved a trough at the base of the canyon on the left hand side (when walking towards the treasury) for the entire 1.2 km length of the gorge. All of the rain water that fell on the mountains would run down and collect in this trough. The trough eventually leads to an underground water cistern where it would be stored for later use. (We saw something similar in Wadi Rum and the cistern remains full of water to this day!). On the right hand side of the canyon, a similar trough is carved, but this one is lined with clay pipes. The ancient Nabateans used this to transport drinking water into the city; the rain water they collected wasn't used for drinking.

Also along the way to the treasury we saw many temples where the Nabateans would pray to their gods. There was on place that was used for marriage and two people from our group almost got tricked into getting married by our guide (actually maybe you should look into that Dave and Lakia - see if it is binding in the USA - Haha!).  

As we reached the end of the canyon everyone lined up for the famous photo with the treasury appearing at the end of the canyon like a light at the end of a tunnel-of course it is nearly impossible to get this shot without a few tourists being in the way!

As soon as we emerged from the canyon we could tell exactly how awe inspiring the treasury is. Carved out of sandstone, the treasury is something like 40 metres high and actually never contained any treasure. It was mistakenly named the treasury by those that first rediscovered Petra and the Bedouins that were living there. The discoverers (French I think) began unloading rifle rounds into the top of the treasury; for what ever reason they thought doing so would yield treasure... Sounds like they mistook it for a Piñata!

We lined up for a quick group photo and then continued on into Petra - there was still much to explore!

The ancient Nabateans buried there dead in mountain side, carving tombs into the sandstone. As was common in these times, the richer the dead, the more elaborate the carvings. So you ended up with many holes in the mountain side, some that weren't even marked and others that were very elaborate with carvings so big you could drive a mine haul truck through them!

On the same end of the site as the treasury, we climbed up a couple of hundred steps into some large rooms that were carved out of the mountain side for royalty. These were also tombs, or used to be before they were "discovered" by archaeologists. Now they are big empty (and very impressive) rooms that overlook the entire ancient city of Petra.

From there we proceeded along a small trail that would eventually take us to the other side of the site, after passing by some church remains and a bridge. One of the churches was in excellent condition; originally built of stone, much of the floor was covered with very old stone mosaics which outlined a few scenes. Behind the church was an area where people were baptized.

After crossing a small bridge made from rebar, we stopped in a small museum which was filled with little odds and sods from Petra. We then began the task of climbing the 891 stairs to the top of the mountain. It was weird, because you could hire a donkey to carry you to the top - and surprise, surprise, many fat lazy people did. Seemed like madness because the stairs, being carved from sandstone were very worn and in areas were almost washed out completely. The grade was also very steep - not something I would want to do on a cloven Hoover animal!  And think of the poor donkey!  For the most part, the owners would let the donkeys run back down the path to the base on their own, so the people on the lath had to be very careful to stay out of the donkeys way or risk being run over!

At the 700 or so step mark the path opens up into a large plateau. On one side, the mountain continues up in a shear cliff - it is from this cliff that an enormous structure had been carved by the same folks that carved the treasury. This structure, called the monastery, was larger than the treasury and somehow the fact that it was on the top of the mountain made it more impressive. After a brief stop at a cafe to have a cold drink and take in the sight of the monastery, we continued our climb to the top of the mountain and enjoyed the view. It was now getting on to 2:00pm in the afternoon so we needed to begin the hike back to the bus - we made it back to the bus at 4:30pm (the place where we had caught the horses in the morning). It took 2.5 hours to make it back through the site. This tells you how big Petra actually is!

In the evening we enjoyed a decent buffet of traditional food at the hotel, before a few of us hopped back on the bus to Petra to enjoy Petra by Night.   Our guide didn't join us on the bus - it was a guide from another group. We were glad this other guide joined us because he proved to be quite entertaining. He described Petra by night to us - basically the canyon is lit with candles for its entire length and the area around the treasury is also lit with a bunch of candles in rows. The way the guide described it though, we thought for sure we were going to get robbed!  In his raspy lispy voice he told us about a dozen times, "Watch your things!" as if someone was going to sneak off with your camera while it was still hanging from your neck!  This became a bit of a catch phrase for the rest of the tour.

A couple of hundred people came out to Petra by night, so we decided to hang back and walk down the canyon last so we could take our time and enjoy the view without a large army of tourists walking along with us. Turns out this is definitely the way to do it, although we lingered a little bit too long because the traditional music had already begun by the time we made it to the treasury. All of the visitors were sitting down on mats placed on the sand and were sipping tea while listening to the music. Apparently we had missed the tea. The music was nice, but then the speech began. It was supposed to be about the history of Petra, but it ended up being about some guy named Peter being woken up in the morning by his mother: Petra... It was dumb, dumb, dumb. So I layer down on my matt and gazed up at the stars until the speech was over and it was announced that we had "free time". That's when I saw the scorpion walking towards Moira. I warned her, then realized I was laying on the ground and would be wise to get myself up off the ground pronto. We tried to take a photo of it, but with the poor lighting, the best photo we got looked somewhat like one of the UFO photos you see from conspiracy theorists!

After that little bit of excitement, we began the 2.5 km ish walk back to the bus and made our way to the hotel, tired and in need of some serious sleep!

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