After we had been sufficiently entranced by the Treasury (for the time being!), we couldn’t resist a short camel ride onwards. The Bedouins had a point — when else will you have the chance to ride through Petra on camelback? Although a little overpriced for the duration, the ride was still very enjoyable.
Plus, you don't need a driver's license for these things!
The next stop was the Monastery, a less ornate but even larger version of the Treasury that sits atop a steep 900 step ascent. We opted to take donkeys for this leg of the journey, which reportedly takes up to an hour when the afternoon sun is in full force.
Alongside one of our hardy guides.
This was a good choice because we got to speak with our Bedouin guides a little bit, both about the sites we were passing and just about life in Jordan. As one would expect, these guys are in incredible shape. They told us that when the tourist season is in full force, they will hustle their tourist-laden donkeys up the steps in just 15 minutes, and then run back in even less time to catch the next batch of waiting customers. Reportedly, they can walk farther in one day than their mules can!
Qasr al-Bint, the Daughter Palace
After the donkeys bore us to the top, we grabbed some tea with our guides and relaxed in the shade a bit, before checking out the Monastery site. There was almost not enough land from which to observe the site from afar! But “Impressive” does not do the Monastery justice at all.
- The scale for this is just absurd.
After this point, we turned around and began the descent on foot, but this time we were free to stop at attractions on the way.
The Amphitheater.
A few hours and several liters of bottled water later, we had finally conquered Petra and checked out of the hostel. After a bit of haggling, we secured a taxi to our next stop: Amman (about 3 hours away).
It was refreshing to finally find an Arab city that was not a tourist trap, as you can move about freely without having to deflect invitations into people’s shops and whatnot. However, the other important consequence is that English is not nearly as common as we were used to! To make things even more interesting, seemingly nobody in Amman knew where the hostel we had reserved was located. This was the perfect chance for me to throw some Arabic phrases around, which definitely helped us communicate our situation and ultimately find the hostel, tucked away on some downtown side street.
View from our room's balcony.
We got dinner and walked around the city a bit. Amman does not offer a lot of night life, but we stumbled upon a DVD vendor that had lots of (probably illegal) new releases to choose from. The shopkeeper was delighted when I asked for movies in Arabic with English subtitles (to learn from), and gave me a “special discount” on films containing Egyptian, Jordanian and Palestinian dialects. These should be a helpful tool in learning the language.
The next day we rented a cab from the hostel to take us to a few neighboring sites, including a church in Madaba that hosts the world’s oldest map (shown below, in ceramic floor tiling).
Circa 6th century A.D.
The Sams at Mount Nebo, where the Promised Land is said to have been revealed to Moses.
The last main attraction we would visit in Jordan was Wadi Mujib, a freshwater canyon located very close to the Dead Sea.
Although we'd spent the entire weekend looking at rocks, it was still fascinating to observe the canyon's formations.
It was interesting that no helmets were required, because we had to ascend mini-waterfall junctions that were perilously slippery and offered only a rope to pull oneself up. In the States, there would surely have been a trained guide at every step of the way!
When we finally got to the head of the canyon, it was very refreshing to stand under the waterfall.
And this nearly marks the end of my adventures in Jordan. I say “nearly” because crossing back into Israel via the King Hussein crossing (near Jerusalem, but Israelis are not permitted to cross) turned out to be an odyssey itself. The level of security there put American airports to shame, but most of it appeared largely redundant. That is, we would wait in line for 15 minutes to present our passport, finally get waived onward (after questions like “What is your grandfather’s name?”) just to repeat the process at another checkpoint LESS THAN 10 FEET AWAY!
The boarding process for the bus that takes you across the bridge was also unsettling, because it required us to surrender our passports to the desk and then board the bus, and to just trust that it would be returned to us before pulling out! But the fun wasn’t over: we had just finished waiting in line and were about to cross the bridge when the bus suddenly turned around and took us back to the Jordanian checkpoint. Everyone was confused and already slightly irritated. It turned out that a woman sitting right behind me had been seen taking a cell phone picture of the crossing from her window! She was pulled off the bus and questioned for nearly 20 minutes before she was allowed to come back on and we could take off. The most ridiculous aspect of this whole event, she later told us, was that the Israeli security officers had been to proud to ask for her cell phone password to view the photo (even after she offered it to them!), effectively telling her “We’ve got this.” However, they returned five minutes later to grudgingly ask for it, apparently unable to crack into her phone with military technology!
And so we FINALLY made it back to Jerusalem, from where it was two more bus rides back to campus. You can easily spend several days in Petra alone, so I feel pretty good about the number of sites we managed to cram into just two nights in Jordan. I highly recommend the country to anyone interested!