Petra, Jordan - Day 87 - Boots on the Loose

Took the bus across the Sanai Penninsula to a port town called Nuweiba (for the ferry to Aquaba, Jordan). Pretty desolate place – took about 6 hours to cross and MAN was it cold (although Petra turned out to be no warmer). You take a somewhat lengthy tunnel under the Suez Canal as you come onto Sanai; after the tunnel you hang a right and drive parallel with the canal for quite a ways, but quite off in the distance. So basically what you see is a whole bunch of massive ocean freighters sitting in a line in the middle of the desert. Quite strange.

Ferry itself was great (although expensive… $59US for about a 1 hour journey); process of loading, unloading and getting our visa was insanely ridiculous (had to wait in port for about 2 hours to get visa – customs guy would come out with 5 random passports every 15 minutes; Jen’s was one of the last of course!) Split a cab to Petra with a guy named Pedro from Brazil (about 100km north of Aqaba).

Jordan is very well-developed compared to anywhere we’ve been so far (I suppose except Italy). Highway between Aqaba and Amman (the capital) is better than the roads at home; cars are all nice, people dress like in the West, and most things cost similar to home. We were never planning on coming to Jordan but so many people told us to not miss Petra, and since we had a week to wait for Alissa to arrive in Cairo it just seemed right! Thought it was neat seeing Israel from the boat, the Saudi border is only 20km from Aqaba, and Jordan borders Iraq; if you weren’t there with us you’d think we were crazy being in such a place, but everything felt like another normal day. Surprisingly the cabbie told us Jordan doesn’t have oil; they must be pretty good friends with Saudi to live so well.

Treated ourselves to the Al-Anbat hotel; 22JD/night and it has a turkish bathouse in it! (that’s about 30USD a night… and they actually call a dollar a “JD”… sweet…) The town you stay in is called Wadi Mousa and the entrance to Petra is right there (Wadi Mousa has 68 hotels in it…); it was so cold and snowy, Petra was closed for a few days a week earlier… the pool at the hotel was actually frozen. I think I just lost my pen because a local borrowed it for his customs card and it now seems to be going around the boat 🙂

Petra truly is a place to not be missed! Walk about 1/2km passed all the people wanting to give you a ride on their donkeys; you then walk a good km or so down a canyon that shrinks down to only a couple metres in spots. The canyon spits you out at a gigantic building facade (probably around 10 stories tall) that is literally carved out of the mountain side (it’s filmed at the end of Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade); building was The Treasury in the ancient town.

For the first day at Petra we walked to the farthest point which takes maybe 1.5 hours from the Treasury; it’s up at the top of a mountain and looks similar to the Treasury but a bit larger (the Monastary). While sitting there in awe enjoying a tea, some crazy local dude was climbing around the top jumping across big gaps, shimmying around the columns. Nuts. Between the Treasury and Monastary is a countless number of buildings carved out of most rock faces you can see. Try to imagine someone carving (2000 years ago) the Vancouver Art Gallery out of the Chief up in Squamish. Insane. To add to the beauty of it all, the rock it was carved out of looks incredible… so many different colours flowing into each other, like being on the inside of a gigantic marble. This was particularly noticeable on the interior roofs of many of the rooms.

First day costs 21JD which is a lot, but a second day is only 5JD more. We went a second day thinking we’d climb to the higher up sacraficial spot and sit and read for a good part of the day, but once we got there we saw there was at least a whole other half to Petra on the backside of the mountain (that very few people go to). So we ended up walking all through that area for most of the day. I kept thinking about how if a single one of the buildings was found in a different country, it would be celebrated as a national monument, and here sat hundreds of them (or thousands) in 1 spot. There’s actually a text message number posted everywhere that you can use to vote for Petra as one of the new 7 Wonders.

We’re now sitting on the ferry to head back to Egypt; Oh… just got my pen back!! So far it was much better getting to this point, but we’re now 2hr 45mins late leaving so we’ll see how it goes. By the time it were all said and done going from Cairo to Petra it took close to 18hrs; every 15 minutes I thought about how it better be worth the trouble but I’m now sure glad we put in the effort!