Today started bright and early. Or early, at least… it wasn’t actually bright yet. The Muezzin at the mosque which was so very close to our Amman hotel woke me around 4:20am with the announcement of today’s prayer times, which did me little good, not speaking Arabic or being Muslim. Ah well, it is a haunting and interesting sound to wake to, and I geeked out a bit once it was clear that I was done with sleep. Note: if you’re reading this on Facebook and not getting all the pretty pictures, you may want to hop over to the full blog entry on Tangentry.
Anna managed to sleep until 6 or so, and then we were packing and getting on the road, hoping to get out of the city before traffic became dense and stressful, since I’d be doing my first real bit of driving in Jordan. That went more or less according to plan, though with a fair bit of trial and error and some back tracking.
We did eventually get out of Amman and on to the Desert Highway for the approximately 230km drive to Petra. Any guidebook to Jordan will tell you that there are essentially two ways to traverse the country north to south: the Desert Highway, which is fast but incredibly boring, and the King’s Highway, which is pretty and interesting but incredibly slow. We opted for the Desert Highway today, because the plan is to go back up to the Dead Sea and Madaba tomorrow via the King’s Highway. And yeah, the Desert Highway is really, truly incredibly boring. We did, however, eventually make it to Petra.
The thing about Petra is that it is really fairly big. And spectacular. The landscape alone is pretty amazing, and then the various relics of the people who lived there…. wow. And we’re not talking shards-of-pottery relics, either. We’re talking about huge buildings carved out of the stone face. It’s hard to tell from the thumbnails here (click through for larger versions), but most of our pictures of Petra include other tourists. They’re just dwarfed by the amazing facades and the sheer scale of the place.
When we had first emerged from a narrow canyon and were looking at the Treasury, the first really remarkable building, Anna aptly said that it was butterfly-inducing. The scale and the unreality of the whole thing is just really hard to communicate by typing.
There’s really more amazing stuff in Petra than I can realistically write about. Every time we turned around or looked in a new direction, there was some awesome edifice or cliff face full of houses to be seen. For more info and pictures, check out Wikipedia. For our tour, we hiked about six miles round trip, and there was plenty of stuff we didn’t see. It’s easy to see why they sell one, two, and three day tickets to Petra – I could easily go back and wander around a second day. Maybe even a third. There’s a lot to see, and the more you take in, the more clear it is that this wasn’t some brief anomaly; this is a city that was lived in by thousands of people over a period of several hundred years. Why they didn’t just carve stone to make blocks like everyone else, I have no idea. But it’s amazing and breathtaking that they didn’t.
We stopped for lunch on he patio of the Basin Restaurant (“operated by Crown Plaza”), which was perfectly decent, albeit fairly expensive and with considerably more flies than we would have liked. Still, we weren’t about to go inside the air conditioned building; where else are you going to eat lunch on a patio looking at nearly 2000 year old buildings carved out of solid rock?
After lunch, we wrapped up the day with a fairly steep and arduous climb to the Monastery (800 steps, the guidebook says… but it took about 45 minutes). The Monastery is the surreal stone building made famous in the third Indiana Jones film. Yes, that place really exists. And it’s far more stunning in person. It’s just unbelievable that people lived here and built this stuff.
From the Monastery, I did a quick jaunt up the last 200 meters of the hill at the end of the trail and got to a remarkable outcropping that overlooks pretty much the entire world. Seriously. If my eyes were better, I think I would have seen the back of my own head in the distance. The only slight downside was that my outcropping, which featured one of the ubiquitous vendors’ stalls, also overlooked three or four other vista points, each well signed (in English) as having the best view (and, probably not coincidentally, competing vendors’ stalls).
By this point, it was about 3:15pm, and it was time to head back. We made pretty good time – it was only a little more than an hour to cover the 3 miles or so back to our rental car. We were exhausted, but the prospect of air conditioning and cold water kept us moving right along despite the fairly relentless sun. Well, ok, it relented briefly in some narrow canyons, but it always unrelented too soon.
Once we were back to the car, we headed down the King’s Highway to Aqaba. The 100km trip took well over two hours, and yes, the King’s Highway is both prettier and slower than the Desert Highway.
The entrance to Aqaba, while not quite as dramatic as Lawrence of Arabia’s camels-guns-and-war entrance in the eponymous film, was still pretty dramatic. The highway cuts through some impressive rock formations that seem to defy geology. And they’re damned big, too. The town only opens up about 10km from the sea, and it was really a sight to behold. In fact, we beheld it at least twice, since it took some looping around to find out hotel.
But find the hotel we did, and then we got out for a walk around town and a bite to eat. You know what’s funny? Aqaba is hot. Like, 96 degrees at 7:30pm hot. And humid, what with being on the water and all. We were a bit taken aback to have hiked for several hours in midday sun, including some decent climbs, only to be knocked flat by a dinnertime stroll in a coastal down.
Tomorrow we’re hoping to get in some snorkeling in the morning, and then we’ll head back north. The plan is to hop in the Dead Sea, and then to spend the night in Madaba before flying over to Sharm El-Shiekh to begin the Sinai trek on Friday.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
WTF!!! No wonder I haven’t heard from you in ages! What an amazing trip! LOVE the pictures.
We must be on the same wavelength though because I’ve been busy planning a big trip also. I’m leaving Aug 28 for Moscow, then taking the Trans-Siberian Railway half-way across to Lake Baikal and Ulan-Ude, then dropping down into Mongolia where I’ll be trekking with some nomads, and then on to Beijing and the Great Wall. It’s about a month in total, so not quite as long as your trip, but exciting nonetheless.
I only had to get typhoid, Hep A&B and an MMR booster; I can’t even imagine what you had to get! Ouch! I’ll be leaving just a couple days after you return so not sure we’ll have a chance to get together until after I get back, but we need to! I won’t be geeking out nearly as much as you – I’m not taking any electronic devices! I’ll just log on from random internet cafes and send short updates. Pictures will have to wait until I return, unfortunately.
I’ll be glued to your updates for the rest of your trip though!!
Amazing and beautiful!
Hugs to you, Anna and Lars.