The Rose City of Petra

Trip Start Apr 28, 2005

Trip End May 08, 2005

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Flag of Jordan Petra, Jordan
Monday, May 2, 2005

Petra - Day One

I always dreamed of visiting Petra and our trip was based around seeing this site. We got up at 5AM in the morning and made our way to the tourist office, here we waited for what seemed an age for the ticket man to turn up and sell us tickets. We wanted to get in before everyone else. We walked from the main entrance towards As-Siq, on the way we passed Obelisk Tombs and Bab as-siq Triclinium, which were square looking blocks and a small temple with pyramid looking towers. This took us 30mins. It took another 30mins to walk through As-Siq, 1.2km of a small gorge created by tectonic forces. At places the gap is 5m across and small cravings are in the rock as you wall through. Also are small chances with where use to move water from the entrance to the Treasury. In every turn we built up with excitement thinking this was the turn to the Treasury and finally we saw it

Looking down to the treasury

. This huge building trapped away in a confined space and the best thing was no other tourists and no locals trying to see cheap souvenirs. The Treasury was built in 100BC by the Nabataeans 43m high and 30m wide. From the treasury is the street of Facades, which leads away from a small area to a more open plan and a theatre on the left hand side. We stopped at the theatre for a long look over Petra opening out to us; here are around 3000 seats in 45 rows, which were extended by the Romans to 8500 seats. From here we walked down Colonnaded street to begin are assent to the Monastery. At the bottom of a gorge we were offer a donkey ride to the top of the mountain. We decide to walk. The climb took about an hour up a winding mountain path pass the Lion tomb in small gully. I thought the Monastery itself was more impressive than the Treasury, larger at 50m wide 45m high. We didn't take the walk up to the top of Monastery after reading in the guild book about tourists falling from the trek, in hindsight I would have made the climb after other treks we took. A short walk from the Monastery is the highest point in Petra which spectacular views across vast plains. We sat here at peace with ourselves viewing three eagles cycling in the morning sun. Back down from the view was a small café. Here we had a morning cup of tea and Pringles, while sitting and viewing the monastery. After taking a long rest we decided to leave the monastery and make the long trek back down towards Collonaded Street. It still wasn't even 9AM before we got back down to the main tourist area; the park was slowly building up of tourists and fat Americans taking donkey rides. We spent the next couple of hours exploring the Royal Tombs six huge tombs at one end of Collonaded Street. These tombs, enormous in size also should examples of the Iron laded rock within and an array of different red colours. From here we trekked up behind the tombs to a view over the Treasury, whole journey took about hour and half of walking. On our way up we meet to local Bedouin tending to there sheep, we followed them up the cliff to the top. We then made a short trek over to the view down to the treasury, After spending some time here, we meet up again with the Bedouin and had tea in one of there huts. By this time we were shattered eating only a chocolate bar and crisps all day we decided we deserved a good feed. It took us over an hour to get back to the resort and after some food we fell asleep about 4 in the afternoon. Later that night we went on the Petra by night tour. This cost about £25 each and was a waste of money. Yes the candles along the path was nice, but was no way a spiritual event the guides had made out, but a tourist trap. They should have let us go down the path one by one.