Petra Palace Hotel Wadi Musa

... are now starting to get a sense of the enormity and vastness of the site which we were unaware. The main path turns along a colonnaded street constructed by the Romans, which was once lined with shops. At the end of the colonnaded street is the imposing and free-standing Qasr al-Bint, the main temple of the Nabataean capital. There are a lot more sites in Petra that we do not see (the Monastery and High Place of Sacrifice) but we are ...

... my current house and only 2 minutes away from the house I'd lived in in Des Peres, a suburb of St. Louis. And we were hanging out in Petra, Jordan. <br><br>I walked the rest of the way back and reconnected with the driver, who had used his time away from me to get a haircut. He was pretty proud of it, so I complemented him with "naiymen" (an Arabic word meaning something like "looking good, man." We set off for the Dead Sea, which will be the subject of my next entry.

We woke up at 4:30am on sunday morning to make our way to Petra. Got picked up at 5am, made our way to the ferry in Taba, Egypt and took a quick ferry ride over to Jordan, only 35 minutes! We hopped on a nice air conditioned bus and made our way to Petra. A really cool thing about Jordan and driving by the red sea, is that we could sea 4 countries at one time!<br>Egypt, Israel, jordan, and Saudi Arabia all side by ...

... that is carved into the pink sandstone mountains. I feel like a tiny ant in a wonderful vast sprawling alien world, treading through the passages carved into stone as camels and horse riders thunder past me. So many preconceptions are being broken already on the trip. The middle eastern people are friendly, warm and curious about visitors, I feel perfectly safe there. The 35 year daughter and her mum tell us of their trip ...

... another couple but the hotel was doing a dinner there for 20 Americans on tour so we had to wait till 10pm to go up there. Clean we wandered down the hill for food and had a quick cafe meal of hummus and shawarma and felafel with pita breads. My beer was non alcoholic (I was in a Muslim country after all) and was awful. However the cafe was a scene of a big fight between some young men and it erupted 3 times while we were there which gave us some entertainment as crowds ...

... any blogs yet because 1) Not all public computers allow it and 2) that would imply I can decide which pics are my best pics. I frankly have no idea how many pics I have taken so far, but I know it is at a lower rate than my europe trip in 2007. The best parts of Petra are the Treasury, the Siq and the colors of the Sannstone rocks, formed by wind, water, erosion...The place is touristy, however after handling Egypt for 10 days, Petra touts and vendors ...