Jordan day 4 - Petra

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We woke up at 6am to a cool morning, which turned into a 28C dusty day with a light wind.  On our way to breakfast we took some photos of the view from the hotel.  This is the Valley of Moses, and Petra is down there to the right (out of view), but we didn’t know that when we took the photos.

We had an early start getting to Petra at 8 am to beat the crowds (including the cruise boats that bus people in from Aqaba 2 hours away) and to get to the main attraction the “Treasury” building façade carved into the red rock, just as the sun comes on it.  The town of Petra is quite extensive and in total we walked about 8 kilometres.  It is downhill going in, and quite a slope coming up the same route, and by 1 pm it was quite warm, but it was better than starting at that time and battling the crowds. 

The first part of the walk is through a valley for about 800 metres, and then you get to the main canyon that snakes its way through the rocks for another 1.2 kms,

 

 - it reminded Julie of the Bungle Bungles with the deep canyons and the smooth round rocks.  This brings you to the Treasury facade that suddenly appears at the end of the canyon – just like in the Indiana Jones movie.

 

This is massively spectacular, and it took 13 years (in the first century AD) to carve it out of the red sandstone. 

 

They were tombs, but only a few skeletons have ever been found.  They are constantly restoring the “buildings” and they have found aqueducts, paving, and carvings in the rock, and buried rooms that they did not know were there previously.  After this tomb area you continue through another canyon that opens into a valley where the city once stood.  There is a theatre carved in the rock wall along this valley.

There are many smaller tombs along both sides of the valley, and in this part the rocks are multi coloured, especially on the roof of the caves.

We continued about half way down the valley to a Byzantine church that had once been a royal burial chamber, cut into the rocks high on the side of the valley.  It was really beautiful and we were able to go inside where our singer on the tour showed up the extraordinary acoustics.

Then it was about 1 hour 15 mins back the way we came to the bus.  We had lunch at an apparently genuine Jordanian restaurant, but it was nothing remarkable.  Then it was a 2 hour drive to Aqaba on the Red Sea.  We left the mountains and finally found some flatter desert with sand, but it wasn’t like the sand dunes we expected from watching Lawrence of Arabia. 

Then we crossed the border from Jordan to Israel, with not too much waiting.  Most of the tour group were insistent on not getting Israel stamps in their passport, apparently because Islamist countries might keep them out or be nasty to them or something, but we didn’t worry about that.  We then drove the short distance to the tourist town of Eilat which is also on the Red Sea.  This is the view from the beach across to Aqaba with the resorts on the left.

Our hotel is right on the beach promenade with lots of stalls selling cheap trinkets, and there are planes taking off and landing over us as the airport is just behind the hotel strip.  It is a very touristy town as it is a duty free town. Nice dinner in a restaurant on the beachfront with just the two of us.