Blog 8… July 12, 2010

Ok, this might top everything that has come before. I am sitting and typing while still trying to catch my breath from having walked from the main tombs of Petra up through a wadi where we will be camping tonight. I took a picture of the Grand Tombs below, with my laptop in the foreground and I shall try again, to get some pictures up.
I slept surprisingly well in our tent last night. The strenuous hike beforehand probably had a lot to do with that. I got up and sat and worked on yesterday’s blog. As I was typing, out of the middle of nowhere, a young man on a donkey with a boom box blaring Arabic music. Breakfast was moved into the shade. The tents got really hot when the sun got to them. Then it was time to break camp and take a remarkable hike.
It started out normally enough, and then on a really well made path that pretty much headed up. Our plan was to arrive at the “Monastery” of Petra before the main body of tourists arrived. While they would have to climb a series of 800 steps to get to the “Monastery”, we would come at it from behind. Our plan worked well, we hiked through amazing country and on the side of a pretty darn high cliff. The only fault I could find with the plan was that we arrived at the monastery from above. Therefore; we climbed more than 800 steps, I think I’m right on this…
It is difficult to describe Petra. Think the scale of Mt. Rushmore, the colors (and heat) of Sedona, Arizona, and the artistry of Versailles. The buildings are carved into the face of the cliffs and are breathtaking. One surprise was that they do not extend into the cliffs as far as I’d thought. They are really, for the most part, incredibly impressive facades. I’d imagined whole networks of tunnels that people lived in. In fact, the Nabateans, who built this city on rock and….sand, it turns out, lived between the cliffs on the sand.
After resting for awhile and exploring the immediate vicinity, we headed down the 800 steps seeing some mighty tired looking tourists from all over the world. (Ok, they were looking at a mighty tired, unshowered, tourist themselves.) We ate a pretty decent lunch in a cafeteria whose inside temperature had to a balmy ninety degrees and then chilled out for three hours to let the worst of the heat go by. As we sat and talked, we watched the activity around the area. We were in the kind of base camp area for Petra which is pretty spread out. People were pretty eager to offer us, for a price, a donkey ride to the next stop, or perhaps for the more adventurous, a camel. One boy’s donkey seemed to get away from him. He seemed to remind it who was boss with a rock the size of a head of lettuce on the backside. A disconcerting difference between an experience with a historical location here and in the U.S. is that Bedouins are selling mostly jewelry and interesting rocks seemingly every 100 yards along the canyon walls. It was generally, a pretty soft sell, but it was alarming to see this, because of the conditions in which they were doing it. It was unbearably hot.
For the evening hike we walked over to a different cliff face on the other side of the valley. About a half mile walking and entered what are believed to be the richest tombs of the Nabateans. One tomb we stood in had then been used by the Romans as a court, the Christians as a church and finally as ahome for a number of Bedouin families. From there we had about an hour hike up another wadi to our current location. Sitting high above Petra.
We’ve just finished our dinner now. I’m back sitting in my spot over the valley, but I can hear the conversations of my fellow travelers from the dinner nook where we ate a fire grilled meal, chicken, potatoes and tomatoes.

Dad/Lane/Mr. Hakel