Petra, Jordan - April 23rd

Yesterday we took the long drive (two hours this time, and no Carl) to Petra from the port of Aqaba in Jordan.  At one point, on a clear day, you can see four countries.  Yesterday we mostly saw Israel on the other bank of the Red Sea.

There is an ancient Petra and a new Petra and our destination was the former.  It is a former city from at least two thousand years ago and the route to the principal surviving building, The Treasury, was long and winding and full of gorgeous sites of the cavern around us.  Frankly, the photos do not do it justice. 

The rock faces, with all the changing colors, looked sometimes like striated wood.  I do have a photo or two of the Temple but I enjoyed the scenery almost more than the history. 

The trek is all downhill until, of course, you have to come back and it is a pretty tiring trip back up.  All told it is about three miles long. Hilary and Ricardo were very sweet and stuck to me to make sure I didn’t trip or expire.  There were carriages or horses available to rent, but the ride on those looked rather risky in itself. There will be a photo of one of them, but no one we know was in that particular carriage. The poor horses have to pull a cart with three people (some of generous size) over many areas of the stones from the original time. 

Ed Note: Apologies - could not rotate.  Will keep trying.

It was hard for me to walk on them because they are so uneven. Fortunately, they are only in a few of the areas of the trail. I considered it a badge of honor to have made it all the way down and back.  By the time we reached the hotel for lunch, my face must have been as red as the proverbial beet.  I was offered a fan which I used vociferously (or can you only say that about some other type of activity?) and gratefully.  A couple of Diet Pepsi drinks, a lovely lunch and then a nap on the way back and all was well.

Our guide on this trip was himself born a Bedouin.  Of course, he is still a Bedouin but he has left the life style.  He returns to the camp two months a year to help his family with the chores of the tribe but his mother considers him “lost”.  He was able to tell us a great deal about their life and about the newer customs as well.  Jordan now sends mobile classrooms into the desert to teach the children.  The teachers are paid almost four times the normal salary to compensate for time spent where there is no electricity or any of the other accoutrements of modern living.  Then when they leave, usually the parents of each student give them a sizeable cash gift (instead of goats or camels because they know they cannot be kept in the city) and so there is almost a lottery for teachers who WANT to teach the Bedouin children, at least for a while. Our guide felt that the entire Bedouin society will  die out now because of the exposure the children are now receiving through these teachers and lessons to the modern world.  “How’re you going to keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paris?”

I never realized that deserts could have big rock mountains as well as stretches of sand.  My geography preparation was poor.
Today, Carl and Hilary have gone snorkeling.  Ricardo and I are enjoying doing nothing. Tomorrow we are transiting the Suez Canal.  Pirate time seems to be over.

Love and kisses to all,

ME