A Day In Petra - Part Two

January 9 (Friday)
After visiting the Treasury (which is the halfway point) we continued down the path past more of the beautiful buildings.

Then we stopped for lunch at a little cafeteria with terraced steps, which was nice because we could have a wonderful view while we ate. We had box lunches arranged for by our guide Mischel.

Next to where we ate lunch was an ampitheater built during the Roman occupation.

In some places, you could see the beautiful coloring of the rocks.





A little further down were more royal tombs, which you could hike up to and explore.

Down at the end of the trail through Petra was a more developed section of Roman road including a colonnade.

Daryl and some of the group members opted to go on an additional hike of about 90 minutes total to see a monastery. But I opted to stay around with a few others and explore these temple ruins. We found a side staircase inside and were able to crawl up and actually walk around on the top of the walls! That's one of the things that surprised me most about Petra, the free access given to tourists to walk around in and on everything.

Here's some pictures from Daryl's trip to the monastery.

From this trail you can see the village where all the Bedouins who work in Petra now live. Up until four years ago, they actually used to live inside. But the government tightened up control as a national park about four years ago and built this village for all the workers to move into.

Daryl loved this blanket because of the Peanuts characters - a little unexpected so far away!



Actually at the monastery.

We didn't leave the Petra site until almost 5:00pm. Then it was back to the hotel for a bit of a rest - here's what we found on our beds back in the room!

After the meeting we had dinner and then time for bed. But Daryl wasn't feeling well and so he skipped dinner. He didn't actually start to get sick until after we'd gone to bed and then he was up all night. Which was extremely unfortunate because the next morning was our earliest wake up call of the trip (5:00am) as we were to head out of Jordan and go into Israel.