Dead Sea and Petra

I need to learn more words! I don't know enough to describe this place! Walking down the narrow siq which was 80m high on each side and coming out in front of a 30m Treasury at 7am as the sun was coming up was an unbelievable experience. Pictures of Petra are pretty impressive but seeing it in real life is so amazing. It's so hard to imagine how people could construct something like that so long ago and that they would do it on such an impressive large scale! There were points where I wished it was possible to go back to the days of Petra, if even for 5 minutes and see exactly what it was like, the buzz of everyday life and the customs of the people.

After the amazing entrance into Petra we walked up the mountain to the 'High Place' which was a sacrificial alter and had amazing views around the Wadi. The journey down the other side took us past numerous tombs all decorated in the carved rock and back out into the main streets of Petra. It was great to get off the main route because we hardly saw any other people and were able to enjoy it at our own place and let our imaginations run wild :)

We met a really friendly American guy who is living in Syria as we were recovering from the 6 hour walk in the sun. He was studying Arabic and able to surprise the Jordanian people by talking to them in Arabic. He joined us on the way up to the Monastery ... over 900 steps up a steep hill but worth every second of the walk up as it was as impressive as the Treasury and was over 40m high. People standing in front of it looked like ants!

After 12 hours of walking we made it back into the town. Beth came up with an out of the blue comment as we were walking back after a couple of minutes of silence "wow I haven't peed all day and we have drunk over 3 litres of water" which was true - so hot but it's a very dry heat so you dry off very quickly! Julian (and me!) was a bit shocked! We then collapsed at a local restaurant for felafels and hummus ... yum :) and then were invited to have tea with a local who had studied in America (you come and drink tea with me dude, yeah). The people here are always so friendly and welcoming and always offering to sit down for a drink of tea and a chat :)

Yesterday we travelled down from Amman to Petra with a driver via the Dead Sea. It was incredible swimming in the sea because you literally did not need to move and muscle and you floated. You could easily read a book and only move to turn the pages. It was very strange as you sat a long way out of the water and the hardest thing to do was to put your legs down under the water! Although that had to be done occasionally to get some relief in the deeper, colder water :) The driver was very helpful and informative and answered all our questions on Jordan customs and the sites we were seeing.

There were heaps of shepherds looking after herds, it's such a different way of life. I wonder what they think about all day while they are out in the sun, they are not exposed to the rest of the world in the way that we are and live very simple lives. They also have a number of different customs as there are Jordanian people, Palestinian people and Egyptian people as well as a number of other nationalities all living in Jordan. The main thing that they agree on is that 'he is not a good/honest person because he is Egyptian' :) There was a lot of check points around the Dead Sea as it is so close to Israel. The guards all had big machine guns and a couple of them asked for our passports, although the driver said that they don't usually check tourist passports and that they just wanted to look at our photos! But the number of check points was impressive and they are not allowed any type of boat on the Dead Sea (except a few coastal resort ones for tourists) because of the link between the two countries.

We also stopped at a number of places on the way down yesterday. Jordan is a pretty small country and very easy to get around. The castle of Karak between the Dead Sea and Petra was impressive as most of it was built into the rock with the walls and a number of rooms built up on top of the hill. It was one of the early crusader castles and is still in pretty good condition. We also saw Mt Nebo, the Dana Wadi and Matebuda which were all very interesting and full of Middle Eastern history. Although as our driver put it "for an engineer and doctor who are well studied you two do not know much about the Middle Eastern history" which was probably fair enough since we only know all the common history and what we read in the guide book! We were very fortunate to have such a passionate driver who was willing to fill in the rest of the gaps :)