Petra

We hiked to some incredible places in Petra the last two days. Yesterday was the best for that, and we started the day at 6 in the morning and ended up at 5 pm, because there was so much to see and do. We have had extraordinary luck with the weather lately. Instead of being brutally hot, we've had clouds, which makes the stair-master experience soooooo much easier.

There is a site called The Monastery that is 800 some steps from the valley floor, and it was constant uphill trudging with unbelievable views along the way. I swear the Nabateans were half-goat, half-human. They have stairways carved from stone, two thousand years old, up and down all over the place here, and there are even some semi-ladders (hand-holds carved into the rock at alternate intervals) straight up some of the cliffs and ruins. We had some good maps for the out of the way trails, but in some cases the steps were eroded or missing or whatever, and we had to scramble around them. If we hadn't had the maps, the trails would have been impossible to find, but even with the maps, sometimes we had to search for some tucked-behind-a-ruin trail or simple, narrow staircase straight up the cliff, etc.

And then we topped that Monastery hike off with a hike to the High Place of Sacrifice where they had sacrificial altars on top of a mesa overlooking the ancient city. Truly spectacular and windy and a little creepy with the channels built into the altars for the blood from whatever was sacrificed to run out and down into collecting pools and such. Other great things have been a Byzantine-era chapel with blue granite columns from Egypt, some crazy Orthodox mosaics, depicting Oceanus and other pagan imagery which were decidedly unusual for a supposedly Christian-oriented church, stumbling down the main siq onto the Treasury building, and then climbing another crazy hidden stairway to look down on this site from above - seeing all the people look like ants, and the building is still monumentally huge.

The Nabateans could have taught the Anasazi a thing or two about desert architecture and stair building (yeah, well - the Nabateans had metal tools, plaster, and probably also slave-labor). Boy, their technology and desire to climb to higher heights was intense. Also, they had these ceramic-encased irrigation and water channels all over the canyons here, bringing water in from all over, no big huge ungainly aqueducts needed - they just carved the water channels right into the canyon walls, and then closed them up with ceramic pipes in many cases to keep the water from leaking out.

There is no shortage of tourist-people here too, like at Ephesus, but the big hikes - The Monastery, The High Place of Sacrifice, and the trail up above the Treasury - were relatively people-free, mostly because they were so intense. Even coming down from these heights was tough too, because of the amounts of steps, and often because the steps were just worn away partially or completely.

We're off to Wadi Rum tomorrow for more hiking and camping, and apparently some excellent camel-riding and four-wheeling. We're praying that there will still be some clouds, as winter is approaching (it apparently finally rained in Amman earlier this week for the first time in months), but we definitely don't want rain down there as it will turn the open sand of the wadi to mud. And then Aqaba after that for a capper of a little Red Sea action and relaxation before we head back.