Petra!!!!!

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June 9th
We woke up at 6:30 this morning and were ready to set out for Petra at 7. We crossed the border very easily, although it definitely took more time than I am used to! Lol. I guess this is one of three open border crossings in Israel, and we are going to a second tomorrow!I was certainly more than a little wary of handing over my passport to a very nice man named Osama with just a reassurance that I would get it back if I waited by the Cafe/gift shop for half an hour or so. But I got it back, we all did, and we got on a little bus, drove into Accaba, changed to a bigger bus, drove around Accaba for a while looking at the sites and hearing about the new developments going up everywhere, and then started the two hour drive to Petra! We drove through some crazy mountainous country, some of the valleys were used in the filming of Lawrence of Arabia. Towards the second half of the trip the hillsides appeared to be terraces and cleared of rock, but nothing was growing, and I can’t see how anything could, really, it is sooooo dry and rocky here. Lots of Bedouin camps on the side of the road, and herds of what our guide calls “walking sish-kebabs” (goats) stopped our bus a couple of times. On the way we heard lots of interesting facts. Something about Alexander the Great and the founding of Petra as a city on the Spice route in 500 BCE. Jordan is 90% Muslim, 10% Christian. It has more then 1/3 of its population in schools, and the huge majority of university students are women. We stopped once at a very nice store, and I thought about getting something there, but it was more than a little overpriced, so I held off. Oh my Lord, Petra is incredible. Unimaginable. I could go through the entire thesaurus and not do it justice. We got off the bus and walked into a mini bazaar with Jordanian music BLARING, which was wicked! And then through the gate into the mass of Arabs that are trying to sell you a horse ride to the beginning of the city, which actually looked like fun, so I planned on saving for a ride up. There were some beautiful Arab ponies. And Arabs, to be fair! Lol. The canyon started fairly narrow, and as Ruth and I walked down (we skipped the guide part) we kept seeing nifty little things, like little squares cut into the rock, and then obvious arches that were like shrines. And then the water system started, which totally enthralled me, since it followed the curviness of the canyon, which is so different from most ancient structures that I’ve seen. Instead of carving the rock into straight lines, it just melted into the rock. Absolutely amazing. I took tons of photos. The canyon got narrower and taller, and when we heard gasps and screams we stepped up the pace and came round a turn to see the Church in the Rock at the opening of the canyon. It was seriously mind-blowing. I nearly had tears in my eyes, and I’m not really sure why. We spent a ton of time just staring at it from different angles, and going inside, or almost inside. I killed my camera battery there. Which is really unfortunate, because when we tore ourselves away from the church and continued on, the next corner revealed a huge 3000 seat theater, houses/rooms on both sides of the cliff walls, another two temples, and even further, beyond what we could do with out time limits, more temples, and what looked like a natural tower of awesomeness. My word, it was... well indescribable. And there are 22 miles of this kind of thing! I could spend months there. I nearly got run over by a camel because I was so busy gawking at the walls. Ruth and I both were given rocks by an adorable Bedouin boy, who we then gave a couple shekels and took a picture with. We weren’t positive about what time we were supposed to be back, so we hurried a bit on the return trip, by which I mean Ruth left me in her dust 😊 She can really hike! I rode a pretty little grey mare up, who I chose b/c she was adorable, but I should have thought more about the guide, since he decided that at 23 I was the perfect age to marry him and have 10 children, so I told him that I had a cowboy husband. Quite amusing. Turns out we weren’t late, we were early, so we hung out and watched a really gorgeous guy dance to the tunes they were blaring with his buddies. A wonderful day! We were fed a feast at a nearby hotel and then slept almost all the way back to the border. I woke up about half an hour before we stopped adn talked with our guide for a while. He showed us a video of he cute 5 yr old daughter climbing onto the head of a camel and sliding down the neck as it raised its head so that she could crawl around on it’s hump. Really adorable. Yep. That we pretty much it!! We are all wiped out by the heat, so we’re in bed. Tomorrow snorkeling, then we leave for Sinai at 10 in the evening, so that we can climb it in the dark and watch the sun rise from the top. I am really excited, but apparently it is 3x the length of Masada, so that should be a GREAT time.

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