Petra in a Day

Petra has always been on my list!

Check it off baby!!

So after a tedious border crossing which was probably a little more difficult than it could have been due to the fact that we have collected a couple souvineers and now Robby is dragging around a giant black trash bag.  Which could quite easily be disquising a human head.  So therefore we get weird looks and lots of questions, haha!

The next battle was dealing with taxi drivers trying to rip you off like crazy.  They agree with you on a price, then once you get to the destination they demand more saying you never agreed on anything! We were pissed but refused to pay more so they back down eventually.  Even though it's a hassle, taxi rides and just about everything else is dirt cheap in Jordan! We ate amazing meals of hummus, falafel sandwiches and fresh fruit juice for about two dollars each!

Anyway once there we went straight to the city of Petra.  It was night time so we did a short hike into the ancient city kind of as a "warm up" for the next day.  When the warm up leaves you breathless, exhausted and dehydrated you know it's a bad sign of things to come, but for better or worse at least we knew what we were getting ino the next day.

Lots and lots of hiking in lots of heat!! But so incredible to see what we saw.  It's an ancient city carved into these giant rocks! How these people were capable of creating this thousands and thousands of years ago? Blows my mind!  Even after almost 2500 years some of the big temples and buildings they carved are still breathtaking.  We did it all in one full day but there was still so much to see!! Pictures will give you a better idea, but we felt like it was a mix of the beautiful scenery of Zion's National Park mixed with some ancient history and a lot of questions as to how this place can even exist.

This is the first carving you see in the rocks as you are walking in.  It's pretty big and who knows what it was once used for. Perhaps a temple or place of worship? Or maybe a mall or a night club? Hard to say but it is cool looking.

You weave around through these giant rocks for a bit..and then you come out to this:

Boom!! It's giant and immaculate...this is the Treasury, the most popular site in Petra.  Its about 40 meters high and carved out of solid rock back in the 1st century BC! The dont know what it was used for, definitely not a treasury so i have no idea how it got its name...but they speculate maybe a temple or a tomb.  So many of the intricate carvings made so long ago are still there and very detailed.  I found a picture of what it looked like back in 1835 before the influx of tourism..and Indiana Jones.  It's crazy to see the difference that 150 plus years makes...imagine what it looked like 2,000 years ago!!

Also...The Treasury may look familiar to you from deep back into your childhood.  It's in Indiana Jones!

There's so much to see as you just wander around Petra, everything is pretty amazing and the color of the rocks is so cool!

It wouldn't feel old enough if there werent donkeys hanging out no would it?

There's little "communities" built into the rocks everywhere!

It's a brutal hike to one of the other most immaculate sites called "The Monestary."

The Monestary is even bigger than the Treasury! But there are less intricate carvings and statues left in this one

He is an ant in comparison!

We kept hiking and got to some incredible views...really high up!

Look at the higher middle pillar.  See the guy on it?! He is a local Petra guy and he was standing by us and then all the sudden started scaling the sides of the Monestary!! He jumped from pillar to pillar at the top too!! My heart was going to stop just watching him!

See him on the left? He jumped over to the next pillar! Killin me!!!

We found another cool tomb, the rock color was like a red/purple. So cool

Loooved this rock inside the tomb!!

Inconspicuous 

And another one.  All over the place!! Seriously you could spend days and days here.

But we couldn't...we had one full day there which wss actually good for us, we saw a ton and were sooo exhausted after just that day.  We were planning on heading to India or maybe even Egypt so we were ready to move on.

One funny thing about Jordan is their bus system.  Which pretty much is no system at all.  They have bus statins but with no schedules for when buses leave - they leave when the bus is full.  So y can show up to the station and get on a bus to your destination, but you won't be leaving until the driver thinks the bus is full enough to be worth going.  If no one comes, then the bus doesn't leave!  We got one of our half full buses to leave to take us to the city wher we'd head to the airport, but only when each of us on the bus agreed to pay twice the fare!! So funny to me, and extremely unpredictable! Good thing Robby and I don't plan too much in advance in the trip anyway...but in this case we needed to get out of Jordan ASAP.  Not because we were caught smuggling drugs again, but because we had to get to Thailand!!  Because of this newfound urgency to Thailand we had to ex our India and out potential hopes of a day at the Giza pyramids.  Maybe for the better, who knows.

Although we didn't have a set timeline before - I found out some of my friends were going to be in Thailand for an incredible festival that goes on there from November 16th-19th.  Its called Yee Pang but Nicknamed the Latern Festival because locals light giant lanterns and let them off in the sky as a gift to Buddha and they also make little floats with candles on them to launch down the rivers.  We HAD to see it - this is a picture we had seen online of previous festivals.  

It was going to be tight - the massive amounts of lanterns were going to be let off at 6:30pm on the 16th.  We left Jordan on the 15th and arrived in Thailand on the 16th at 4:30pm to a city that was about two hours from the launching point. It would be a miracle but we wanted to get there as soon as possible since there were other festivities going on til the 19th.  The race was on!!!