M&I / GBMINI

Our reason for including Jordan with Egypt was specifically to visit the famous carved rocks at Petra, and today we do that! It’s a short drive from our hotel to the entrance, but then a long and fabulous walk through Siq – this is a geological crack which has then been worn more open by water …

At the end you get your first glimpse of The Treasury, and the narrow passage opens out to a huge and awe inspiring space.

There’s much more to Petra than just this famous carving/building – if you look at the map above you can see that the walk from the entrance through Siq to The Treasury is about half the length, and we now walked much further through the Street of Facades, past the Theatre, and along the Colonnaded Street (Roman built hundreds of years after The Treasury and other structures!)

And from the Colonnaded Street we can visit the [Roman] Great Temple:

Beyond this temple at the end of the Colonnaded Street is Qsar al-Bint one of the few ancient buildings still standing in Petra:

That’s the end of our walk (there is another long walk out to the Monastery but we skipped it); so then the long walk back seeing everything again!

Petra was absolutely worth the journey to Jordan, and is probably worthy of another visit one day …

Today we were driven an interesting way from Amman to Petra, first stopping at Mount Nebo: “mentioned in the Bible as the place where Moses was granted a view of the Promised Land before his death … provides a panorama of the West Bank across the Jordan River valley …. Jericho is usually visible from the summit, as is Jerusalem on a very clear day“. It wasn’t a clear day for our visit.

We drove further south, to the Dead Sea! We stopped at a resort which offered access to the water, Dead Sea Mud to play with, and a nice lunch buffet.

After lunch we were driven from the very low -1400ft Dead Sea, to a much higher Petra +2500ft, and the roads we drove on were very impressive!

Our nice hotel in the city of Petra offered another buffet for dinner, as well as views of the city.

After a couple travel days flying back to Cairo and then to Amman (international flights in Egypt can only go via Cairo), we are now spending a few days touring Jordan which we know much less about (other than Petra!)

Today we’re being driven an hour or so from Amman to Ajloun Castle which is a youngster compared with Egypt buildings, not even 1000 years old!

On the way back our driver/guide stopped at a nice view for “real” Turkish coffee:

We next visited the Amman Citadel, another “modern” ruin …

From the citadel we could see an impressive Roman Amphitheater down in the town, and we went there to get a closer look: