After going for a walk to find an ATM in order to acquire some local currency we headed to the visitor centre at the entrance to Petra to get our tickets.  Since we have two days here we got the two day pass.

We walked through the gates up the gravel path.  It would be nice to imagine doing this with us being the only ones here but there is not even the luxury of that.  There are seriously a lot of people here.

The touts are not too bad they leave you alone as soon as you say no or in this case ‘la shukran’.  There are just a heap of them so it gets a little repetitive, selling everything from postcards to carriage rides.

We passed by the Djinn blocks and only noticed because we saw the Obelisk Tomb.  I guess that tells you how impressive they were.  Still we looked back at them anyway.

The Siq however is quite impressive.

The Siq

The Siq is about 1.2 km long.  Consisting of a single block that was torn apart by tectonic forces.  The Siq is only about 5m wide but in some points narrows to 2m however the sheer rock wall towers overhead about 200m high.

The colours in the rock walls Swirls, lines and waves of it as you walk through the Siq amazing reds, brown and black changing as the sun changes position.  Then as you wind your way through the Siq you glimpse the Treasury. 

You can not help but stop at that point before going forward to see the rest obscured by the end of the Siq.

The Treasury (Al-Khazneh)

The Treasury is amazing to see.  It doesn’t matter that you’ve undoubtedly seen it before in movies and pictures.  You do not get that let down that seems to come with so many ‘great monuments’ the ‘oh, well I’m glad I saw it but it looks just like it does in the post card effect.’

The Treasury’s massive red rock facade is awe inspiring and incredibly well preserved.  Carved into the rock wall it is 43m high and about 30m wide.

Even the other travellers milling around snapping photo’s, some paying to climb up on the back of a camel to have there photo taken in front of the Treasury couldn’t ruin that moment.

The Street of Facades

We kept walking this time down the street of Facades heading towards the Theatre and the city centre.  There are over 40 tombs and houses built into the rock by the Nabataeans.

You have to keep remembering to watch where you put your feet and not just gaze up and around at the walls.  Not just because you might trip over either since all the donkeys and horses have left little reminders of there presence on the path.  Two boys on donkey’s rode past us calling out as they went ‘you want taxi on the way back?’  It was funny at the time and made us laugh.

Theatre
The theatre quite literally stopped us in our tracks for a bit.  The theatre was built by the Nabataeans over 2000 years ago carved out of the stone enough of it remains today to make you wonder at the 1000’s of people it must of held in its day.

We continued walking through the ancient city, we were definitely getting plenty of exercise today!  The Royal Tombs were up and off to the right as we walked through and we took the time to explore a couple of them although I will say its more the outside of the Tombs that are breathtaking not the interior which are just empty and long since cleaned out.

You mostly have to use your imagination as you wander along Colonnaded Street since there really isn’t a lot left.  By the time we meandered through it we decided it was time to have a break for lunch and a drink.  It wasn’t that hard to find somewhere since little cafe’s had dotted the walk the entire way.  Some of them just offering drinks and souvenirs of course!  Others food as well.  We sat in the shade for a bit and saw the couple from the night before at the ferry station who stopped to talk for a bit.  Its amazing really given how many people are wandering through this place that we ran into them, or I guess that they ran into us!

So after the break we decided to go on the walk to the Monastery.

Monastery (Al-Deir)
The walk to the Monastery is well worth the 800 odd steps in various states of disintegration, some of them good, some not as we wound our way up the path to the Monastery with a steady stream of people going in both directions.  We paused every now and then when we came across some shade on the way up its not like we were in a race with anyone although you would think some were given the pace they tried to set.  That was kind of funny since some of those people were not as fit as they thought they were and we kept passing them, much to the annoyance of some of them I think.  Our pace was slow and steady taking about an hour to get to the end of that particular path.  Still it was worth it.  The Monastery quite took my breath away and it wasn’t just from the climb which if truth be told wasn’t that bad.

There was a drink stall up there which was proving to be a smart business decision by the owner even if he had to cart all his stock up here!  Like just about everyone else we stopped for a drink and stared up at the Monastery.  There was a kid running and jumping around the top of the temple.  Given it stands about 45m off the ground and he didn’t have ropes or any safety gear it caused more than a few people to mutter ‘idiot’ and other less complementary words.  It was obvious that he had done this before and was showing off, still it was a dangerous thing to do.

After a break it was time to head back down again and dad looked around and asked where the lift was.  Of course there was no lift we just had to go down the way we came up.  Once down it was time to head out so we retraced our steps out of Petra and back to our hotel.

After getting cleaned up we headed down to the bar to have a few drinks before dinner.  The hotel might have been a little bit more expensive than we’d planned but it certainly was comfortable!