Petra

I got to see a more than 2,000 year-old civilization in Jordan that is only 20% excavated, but what I saw literally took my breath away. Because I studied this “Rose City” for my last big paper before I graduated for my Archaeology class, I was amazed at what the early inhabitants did to sustain life. This city is impressively big and carved into red and pink sandstone with limited tools. They situated themselves as a trading center of this region and for surrounding civilizations during that time. And their water system!! Their water system is incredible, they were able to preserve enough water for 100,000 people in a desert environment each year while their peak inhabitants number was about 28,000 people. Starting from 600 BC to about AD 700, this place was thriving with life starting with the Nabateans to the Romans to the Byzantine Empire.

As I was walking through the Sig, a 1.2 kilometer narrow rock passageway separated by a major earthquake a long time ago, before I even knew that I was arriving closer to the famous Treasury monument, the tour guide was very sneaky. He told us to turn around before we exited The Siq and made the tour group stay on the right side to avoid accidental peeks of The Treasury which was not according to his plan.

We turned around facing the opposite direction away from where we were walking initially in the direction of The Treasury. Those of us who were gullible, me, turned around expecting to see something even more wonderful than what we have been seeing throughout The Sig. I snapped a picture of the high rocks hovering the passageway, it was nothing really extravagant, but then the tour guide told us to now scoot to the left, still facing away from the direction we were walking in. I was a bit confused, but I followed his directions anyway. This is the moment when I had to take a deep breath because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The tour guide told us to turn around and there it was. The sun was beaming hard that day and it was really hot, but since we were all inside the most narrow part of The Sig and near the end, we barely got the sunlight. It was just shadow around us, but when we turned around, it was an amazing contrast from dark to light. It was as if The Treasury was the light to our tunnel. 
Monastery

After seeing The Treasury, the next destination is walking to the Monastery which is a quite far walk, about 900 stair steps up the rock mountain. There are these donkey and camel men who hassled and bothered the tourists to take a ride in what they called it, “Ferrari with air conditioning! Taxi, very nice ride!” There was this bedouin man who had incredible eyes and really bad teeth who helped me take photos of me and The Treasury. From The Treasury to the start of the walk to the monastery, he kept asking me to ride his donkey up to the monastery and that I won’t regret it. Casanova was the donkey’s name and Dr. Love was the bedouin’s name. He said that he used to live within the houses of Petra before moving to a nearby village. He was very hospitable, convincing my roommate Katie to take a donkey with me too, offering her a cigarette, offering to help us take photos, and holding our water. I got on Casanova and was a little embarrassed because the rest of the group I was with was all staring either with envy or “omg, she’s going to break that donkey”.

Poor Dr. Love, he ran up most of the 900 steps to the Monastery with me. Sometimes he got too comfortable with me and told me that I was his wife for the day and he jumped on Casanova and took a joy ride with me on the back. By the time I wanted to stop and walk the rest of the way, he was huffin’ and puffin’, but he said, “mish mushkila” which means “no problem”, “anything for you” kind of thing. 

At the top of the Monastery, Katie (my roommate) and I on the highest part of the rocky mountain along with the rest of our friends and colleagues from our school enjoying the view of the incredible vast view with the sounds of bedouin songs playing live in the background.

I am really lucky to have seen such an amazing place, those Nabataeans were awesome and if I could go back in time, this is one of the time and place I would choose.

Happy Travels,

Dandelion Traveler

09 Jul This entry was published on July 9, 2012 at 7:12 am and is filed under Jordan, Travel. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.