Day 23 - Petra

(Dad and I in Petra)

Petra, Petra Petra…Petra was…cool. I’ll be honest, there is definitely a “once you’ve seen one giant temple facade cut into the rock, you’ve seen them all” effect at Petra. The things are cool, and the canyon that you walk through to get there is cool, but a lot of them look pretty much the same. What’s impressive about the place is its sheer size. Petra is really, really big. There were a couple of times when we thought that w had seen everything and then we walked around a corner, or looked over a hill and saw that the city stretched out a lot farther than we thought it did.

(part of the entrance canyon)

(The treasury, in indiana jones, this is where the holy grail was. It might still be there, we weren't allowed inside.)

Most of the facades have been worn down by erosion, so they weren’t as impressive as they used to be, but the stone that they were cut into was pretty incredible looking. It was layered in a way that made it look like cool wood grain. (or marble, but I don't think it was marble)

(The inside of one of the biggest royal tombs. You can see how cool the rock is here.)

If you are into hikes Petra is a cool place to go, it looks like there were a bunch of different places that you could hike around and see different stuff. We went up to see the monastery, which is at the far western end of the city. We had to climb 800 steps to get up there, but if there is anything that the last three weeks has prepared me for, it is hiking up stairs.

(The monastery, look close and you can see a person standing right at the base of the doorway.)

The monastery was cool, it looked a lot like the treasury, but you could go inside of it. (you couldn’t get inside of the treasury) These facades are so big and impressive but the insides are pretty small. I think that most of the facades were tombs, I guess that you don’t need to a very big inside if all it is going to be is a tomb. It was a little weird to be at a city like that and see all the places where they buried people, but not be able to see where the people themselves actually lived. There is only one standing building that is left in Petra, it is part of what may have been the main temple there, no houses or any other buildings are left.

Petra was all that we did today, it took us three and a half hours to get down there and three and a half to get back, and I’m pretty wiped out. We had good weather today, which was nice, Petra would have been awful yesterday in the rain, and tomorrow it’s supposed to snow down there.

Tomorrow I head back to the US (although it will be a long, long trip) and dad heads back to Bahrain. I’ll try to post one more time from the airport in Israel, assuming that I have my computer. (you never know with el-al)

So until then, thanks for reading.