Day 4: 12/27: Petra

William from work had told me to make sure we reach early at Petra before the crowds start flocking. So after an early breakfast at 6 AM, we started walking from Amra Palace (our hotel) towards Petra visitors’ center. Ticket was 21JD per person. We had already saved 57JD by not taking a private guide and denying the donkey ride . Turned out, it was the right decision. At the visitors’ center, we picked a copy of a map + information brochure for us and started walking down the road at 7:30 AM. There were people ahead of us, but not too many. Some were walking like us with a map, some with guides, some on donkeys and some on horses/chariots. In about 500m through ‘Al Siq’ (a deep and narrow gorge formed between the sandstone rocks), we reached Al Khazneh – The Treasury. Entire Petra formations have been built by the local Nabatean people somewhere between 100BC to 200AD, before the Romans came to the area. Al Khazneh was magnificient indeed!
Also surprisingly met my senior from PICT: Bhagyashree with her husband there. Later, we followed the map and saw bunch of monuments including royal tombs, the great temple (1 AD) excavated by Brown University in 1993, the colonnade street, the monastery ‘El Dier’ at about 1500 ft. It quickly became very hot by 9:30AM and our earlier buy (4JD) of an umbrella proved priceless. On the way back from the top, I saw lots of envious looks from hot/tired/sweating folks going upwards – but we enjoyed our umbrella none the less – it was the neighbor’s envy & the owner’s pride!

For more useful links/history for Petra – www.google.com is your friend. On the way back, I and Rohit bought a small sized sand bottle (highly recommended by lots of websites) with our names inscribed on it. It was so pretty and indeed a great memory of Jordan-Petra. We were back in our room at Amra Palace at 2 pm and were wondering what all people can do in Petra when they buy 3 days pass! I like what Rohit said - You need more than 1 day if you plan to excavate the area yourself. Again following our routine, we slept yet again for 4 hours and then had a hearty dinner in the hotel at 7:30PM. It was not hard for us to go back to sleep and so we did only to reach a new record time for me to get up at night (after a satisfying sleep) at 1:45AM. There I was happy and wide awake.