Mr. Hakel Gets Petra-fried

Blog 9 July 13, 2010

Hi all, it is 3:15pm our time and we are basically done for the day. Thank goodness. We think it was topping 105 degrees again today. It made for an exceedingly hot hike. I just took my first shower in three days and that felt pretty exquisite. The hotel we are staying in, is quite nice. It is the first time we’ve had a bed any larger than a generous cot. The shower was wonderful…I keep going back to that, don’t I? But there is one drawback. Construction of homes in Jordan is a one story at a time process. That also appears to be the case with at least one hotel. Yippee. At the moment, immediately over my head runs a jackhammer. Let’s hope they don’t work all night. Let’s pray they don’t work all night. I’ll let you know.
Yesterday I tried to describe at least in some small way what Petra is like. Today we hiked probably around 5-6 miles with a pretty decent elevation shift. Petra is spread out in a way that confounds my expectations of what ancient life was like. This place is huge. We finished our visit to Petra by viewing its most famous individual site, the Treasury. It is in fact actually a tomb, but early explorers believed that the huge column and urn on the top was full of treasure. So, naturally, they shot at it. You can see the bullet divots on the façade. The usual tour of Petra begins at this location and you approach it the same way people have approached it for 2000 years. You walk through a mile long Siq. A Sig is a very narrow, very deep canyon in the rock. Once you arrive, you are facing the Monastery. One difficulty for the usual visitor then is that everything else after that doesn’t look as good. Our tour company arranged things so that we’d build up to the piece d’ resistance, the Monastery. Their plan worked to perfection. The Monastery is around 150 feet high and is awe-inspiring.
The walk through the Siq was really amazing. Both sides of the canyon, about as wide for the most part, as your average two-lane road in BG, were lined with water channels lining the side that brought water from a reservoir into the city. Everywhere you look in Petra you can find ancient water cisterns, dams, water channels that made it possible for so many people to live in one place. Estimates range from 30 to 40 thousand people by the way.
Now the walk out of the Petra area would have been a lot more amazing if it had been at least fifty degrees cooler. Very little shade. It was so hot, that when I stopped to read an informational plaque, which is an activity those of you who know me I do with gusto, I was unable to process any of the English words I was looking at. Interestingly, the Arabic was a little more comprehensible. ;)
Dinner tonight will be at the Sheiks and tomorrow we are into Wadi Rum for two more nights in the desert. Then one night on the Red Sea in Aqaba and then back to Amman for the remainder of our visit. After tomorrow I’ll be half-way home! (Yes, I am a little on the lonesome side...;)
Salaam,
Lane/Mr. Hakel/Dad/He Who Sweats