Petra

October 30, 2009--Friday
Today, we went to Petra in Jordan. We met in the lobby of the hotel at 7 am and met some others in the group. We have hung around with Roger and Dianne Roundy from Paradise, Utah.
The hotel gave us a boxed breakfast since we were to leave when the restaurant opened. In it was: yogurt, bread, an apple, a persimmon, a tomato, a cucumber, two types of cheese, olives, two slices of poppy seed cake, and a bottle of water. It seems some vegetables are standard fare for breakfast.

We boarded a shuttle bus and rode to the border crossing into Jordan, which was about five minutes away. We got there before 7:30 to beat the crowd--the gate opened at 8. We went through the Israeli passport control. The Israeli side had a man in a watchtower with a rifle.
In Jordan, we had our pack scanned and our passports taken to get stamped so we could proceed. That took about an hour. We were finally loaded onto our bus around 10:30. The whole time, we were burning up in the sun. I had on jeans and a dark blue short sleeve shirt. I was regretting that decision the whole time.

We drove near Aqaba, and our tour guide was giving us what seemed like a little propaganda about how Jordan only had this one narrow area for a port on the Red Sea, implying that Israel prevented them from having more. He said the government was investing $10 billion in construction in the town, which seemed pretty high to me. There were a lot of low apartment buildings being constructed. But no one was working today. We heard the government gave everyone a day off.

As we drove across Jordan, it looked like a wasteland, just dirt and hills and mountains. We saw a couple of tomato farms, but that was about it. We saw a lot of 18-wheelers, but very few cars. The tour guide said there are six million people in Jordan, and two million live in Amman, the capitol.

We stopped at a tourist trap about halfway in to go to the loo. It was near the top of the highest Jordanian mountains in the south, and the temperature was really cold, and the wind was blowing. We went from burning heat to freezing cold. The jeans felt good.

Back on the road, we drove down those mountain slopes as we neared Petra.. The town of Petra was really the only one we saw after we left the border; saw a gas station and a small compound or two of blocky homes made of cinderblock, but no towns. Petra is as big as it is because of tourism, thanks a lot to “Indiana Jones.”

After arriving, we walked past a few shops to get to the dirt road. One shop was Indiana Jones, one was Titanic, and so on. We walked down a long dusty road with the tour guide stopping every few minutes stopping to tell us about the funeral rooms carved out of the rock. This was before the slot canyon that is about a mile long going to Petra. We stopped along the way there, too, to see things. There was a small aqueduct carved into the base of the rock wall on one side that held a ceramic pipe that brought water to the town.

When we finally made it down the slot canyon, Petra was amazing. The Treasure House is fantastic, of course. It must be 40 or 50 yards high. We walked through the narrow canyon area and saw quite a few other carvings and funeral rooms, too. There is also an amphitheater carved into the side of the rock.

Marla rode a camel and so did Diane Roundy, friends we made. Roger Roundy and I walked back and took photos.

Marla said that while she was riding back to the Treasure House, a guy asked if she was an American, and she replied she was. He said that when he was in America, people called him a camel driver, but now she was a camel driver. She didn’t reply to him other than to say, “Okay,” but she should have said, “Let it go, Indiana.”

I asked her if he was Caucasian, and she said he was, so we don’t know what his problem was.
The guide told us that Petra has been put on the list of one of the Seven Man-made Wonders of the World. It became a trading capital because two caravan routes crossed nearby, and the caravans would hang out there for protection for robbers. Petra charged them a fee and became rich. It’s kingdom extended to Damascus at one time. It’s golden age was between 200 BC and 200 AD.

It eventually attracted the attention of the Romans who took over the area. They carved an arch across one point of the slot canyon entrance, which fell a few hundred years ago. At one time, the Romans paved the road in with stones. Some are still there. Most of the stones have been washed away.

The Roman influence can also be seen there in Corinthian columns carved in the walls of the burial tombs, which is one of the things Petra is famous for, in addition to the Treasure House (which is what the Bedouins who used to live there called it because they thought treasure was hidden in the top of carving).

Greek influence is also seen in some of the carvings.

It was magnificent.

It wasn’t hot at all in Petra; in fact, it was a little cool. The dust blew threw pretty regularly, as it does in the desert.

The tour provided a late lunch at the Magic Petra Restaurant. There were lots of salads, rice, a broiled or baked chicken with spices, a battered fish chunks in a red sauce a curry chicken dish, and other entrees.

During dinner, I spoke with a young lady that was on our tour who was from Mexico City. She was Mexican, but she looked European. I had heard her say earlier that her grandparents are German. So I asked her if she spoke German, and she said, “No.: I complimented her on her English. Another woman in our tour asked her how it was that she was touring Israel. She replied that she had just graduated from high school and was taking six months off to tour Europe. She started in London, went to Paris, then on to Italy, Belgium, Germany, Spain, then back to London and now to Israel. She is Jewish, and she said she was now doing the two-month training in the Israeli army. I know all the young men and women have to do army training, but

I guess they will train anyone Jewish to defend the homeland.

When we got back to the hotel last night, I had a layer of Petra dust covering my shoes. I took a picture of them to commemorate the day.

Marla and I began observing the Sabbath at sundown.


October 31, 2009--Saturday, Halloween
We slept in this morning. After breakfast, we took a walk by the shops along the Gulf of Aqaba (Red Sea). This is a tourist town, so they have all the tourist shops. They had a slingshot ride where someone straps in inside a round cage of steel bars and gets flung up and down about eight or ten stories high. Wanted to see someone do that, but no one did until we were about three blocks away. I saw the round ball cage go up and then snap back down.

They don’t have Halloween here.

On the TV, there was a French channel, German, Russian, Spanish (soap operas), Nickelodeon, CNN/BBC, sports channel (with American and European basketball), American movie channels, Hallmark channel, and Israeli channel. No religion. I saw a guy in the lobby wearing a t-shirt with CCCP on it and heard some ladies speaking Russian. It was an international resort.
We just rested and packed after that. Marla got out a map, and I opened to the maps in the Bible. Eilat is at the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba that leads into the Red Sea. The shows the traditional route Moses led the Children of Israel along out of Egypt and across the Sinai. It leads to Eilat. They then headed north, I think when they wandered 40 years in the wilderness because they circled back to Eilat. Then they went north on the east side of the Dead Sea and across the north end of it to the west into modern day Israel. So we were in the area of the Exodus.

At 3 pm, we checked out, and a shuttle bus picked us up to take us to the bus terminal. We thought it would be in town, but it is about two hours away across the and then walked out the gate to the no man’s land between Israel and Jordan around ten. Sat and waited a lot. desert. We have passed at least eight groves of date palms that look like a forest, hundreds of palms, in the first half an hour of the trip. I have to keep updating the number because we keep passing more.
Marla spotted an ostrich farm, and she pointed out writing made out of rocks on the sides of hills. It isn’t all graffiti, if any of it is: one had a heart and a couple of names, she said (I saw P heart K); she saw one by a road leading to a house (perhaps the family’s name); she saw one in the outline of a large tree. The are all over the hills. No one seems to care; they leave them there. I want to get out and do M heart M on a hillside.

The mountains to the east in Jordan look like the Rocky Mountains of the Wasatch Front, maybe a little lower.

The roads here have lines down the middle. In Jordan, they did not. They had divided highways, two lanes wide, but no lines for the big trucks and buses.

We passed a compound with a wooden fence that looked like a restaurant or rest area, but at the north end it had a guard tower with an armed soldier. We just passed a huge number of hothouse, in the half-moon, Quonset-hut shape. I tractor was pulling a cart filled with boxes of some kind of vegetables, and there was a flower garden, too. Marla thinks the compound we passed was an oasis that provided the water for it. But it had a sign outside that said, “Take it away” in English. It had names in Arabic and Hebrew, too.

Yesterday and today, it amazes me how people used to cross these deserts on foot and camel back. You would need a great desire or need to go on this long of a journey. Most of southern Israel is desert today. Of course, almost all of Israel was desert before the modern day. Most of the cities are in central Israel.

We are in Jerusalem now, about 2:40 pm EST after a four-hour ride in the shuttle bus. Gas stations are rare in the desert. We passed one that had a camel tied up under a street light and his rider was dancing around in front of him, holding the long cane he used to direct his mount. I wished I could have taken a picture and a video of that. I also wished I could have taken a photo of the Camel Crossing sign and the red triangle sign with just an exclamation mark inside.

Tomorrow morning early, we go to Masada and then Galilee. We will be gone two days.