Petra: Day 2

It has been a rather tiring day! 

Last night we were all exhausted, but we pushed ourselves to stay up until at least 9 p.m. which was nice, until we woke up at 3 a.m. ready to go, gotta love jet lag. But it wasn't all that bad because we were planning on getting up around 5 a.m. anyway. 

So we got up early and headed out to Petra. Petra is about a 3 hour drive south from Amman, so we got there around 8 a.m. The early morning wasn't our favorite, but we ended up appreciating it because it was MUCH cooler in the morning! 

So basically Petra is an ancient city carved into the side of a mountain. It's absolutely stunning and incredibly enormous! It stretches on for miles! 

So to get there we had to walk about a mile or two on this rocky, sandy path. 

And then we came to this ENORMOUS trench, al-Siq, that we walked through for about a mile. 

This is the beginning of the trench. 

I mean just look how tiny those people are! 

The trench was actually pretty neat. The walls were HUGE, about 260 feet high! And it was really cool and breezy in there which is always nice when in the desert!

Once we were done with the trench, we came out into an area known as The Treasury. 

This part was in an Indiana Jones movie! 

After a look at The Treasury, we continued our walk for about another mile or so, and came to this open area where there were a few small restaurants and some souvenir type things. But there were also these immaculate tombs that you could climb up and look around in. From there we got GREAT views, and it only cost us about 200 stairs climbed.

This was the ceiling inside of the tomb, we think the black is soot from when they used to have fires inside there, but the red and white are just the natural stone. 

Next, we began our trek up to The Monastery. We started with about a half mile walk on a nice sandy and rocky path. And then the real fun started...the hike up the mountain to The Monastery. It included over 800 stairs and many flat slippery sections. 

That blue dot is an average sized woman!

But I will say that the hike was well worth it! It was beautiful and we all felt so accomplished! 

So once we got up there and rested, had a Gatorade, we started our trip back down. The trip down was much nicer than the trip up, if you can believe that!

Once we were down, we stopped at a little buffet restaurant they had there and ate some lunch. The food was good, but it just wasn't exactly what you wanted after a long hot hike. But the water was cold so that was all I really needed! 

We decided to take a camel back to The Treasury instead of walking the 2+ miles back. And although the camel man wouldn't come down on price as much as we wanted, it was well worth it! 

It was one of the strangest and funnest things I've ever done. 

First of all, Halley and I were terrified of our camels because as soon as we came near them they started grunting and growling, or whatever it is that camels do. But the camel man helped us get on, and I mean, AS SOON AS I was on that thing he was up! And that was one of the scariest parts, camels get up REALLY weird. 

So Halley, Hilary and I were kind of in a pack and mom ended up being a little behind us with another lady. I don't know if you can tell in the picture, but my camel is tethered to Halley's camel. So whatever her camel did, my camel did. So when the camel man would come up and slap Halley's camel to make it run, mine would run too! And let me tell you, those camel men got WAY TOO MUCH enjoyment about watching the white girls wig out on the galloping camels. 

After the camel ride we walked back through the trench and back up the path. I think we probably walked close to 7-10 miles total today! Needless to say, we are all pretty pooped! We had a somewhat eventful drive back into Amman, there was some unexpected traffic and a few moments where we thought we might run out of gas in the middle of the road. Tthat would have been interesting. But thankfully we made it to the gas station and didn't have to have angry commuters screaming at us in Arabic. Praise The Lord! 

So tonight we just ate dinner at the house, went to the 7-Eleven for some ice cream and hung out. But I have a feeling we're all pretty close to passing out. So I'll talk to y'all tomorrow!