Petra

Who cannot remember the scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark when Harrison Ford exits the canyon and before him appears the Treasury of Petra?  What a place...but so full of tourists it was all but impossible to get a decent picture.

This page's main picture is of a place in Petra called "The Monastery" and you can see from the sweat on my shirt that it's a hard uphill walk to get here.

Below is the start of the way into Petra...just a wee bit of a canyon very close to the hotel we stayed at.

If you don't want to walk all the way there and back you can hire a horse drawn cart like these two gals from our group did. The problem though was they'd only take you down to the end and then straight back out again so doing this you would miss a lot. Both of these gals had mobility issues and it would have been impossible for them to walk all the way down and back.

It's quite wide at certain points.

And gets narrower at other points.

The guy in the middle was our guide for this segment - Khaled was his name - no one could pronounce it correctly.

Some very dramatic spots.

These are "the elephants".

What looks like troughs cut into the rock are exactly that - troughs to bring water into the ancient city. Now they are just above the street level but when they were built the street was much lower and they were high above the street and inaccessible.

It's strange...sometimes there are people...

sometimes not.

And soon you see the Treasury coming into view

and there it is.  Not as dramatic as Indiana Jones' first view but pretty cool nonetheless.

There's a variety of critters...camels for riding...

kitty cats..the one below though she'd found her mom.

...and dogs.  Our friend Ray giving the pooch a scratch.

below is a feature of the Treasury...at some point an army decided it would be  for good target practice

It's really a huge site and there's so much to see. The time we had there was insufficient to see even a fraction of what there is. And by mid afternoon it was so hot we just had to call it a day.

At the end of the street we came to a restaurant and thought it was time for a beer...well they had no cold beer as they'd just received fresh truckload.  We saw a sign that pointed to The Monastery and decided we'd take a walk there while the beer was cooling down. Only 800 steps...piece of cake.

It was quite the uphill hike and we almost called it quits a couple times but we made it and saw some fantastic views from the top.

A view from the path looking back to where we came from.

Here's Ray again coming up the path behind us. I said there's no way he's going to lug that big belly to the top but he did.

There are numerous small businesses on the way to the top, mostly selling junk, and there is a small restaurant at the top - they don't sell beer though.  All items are brought up the hill on the backs of donkeys.

It's a bit of a tricky climb as the steps are unmaintained...you have to really pay attention as sometimes there are drops off the side that would kill you if you went over.

There are lots of vendors selling a variety of things on the way up. It was pretty much all crap though and we never bought a single thing.

The Monastery.

There is a small white thing on the top of the mountain in the picture below.

zoomed..it's the tomb of Aaron who was Moses's brother.  More here.

A few more views from the top.

Done.