Petra

So, we went from Luxor to Jordan slowly, first a 16 hour bus ride over to, and up the Gulf of Suez, through a tunnel under the Canal, back down the Gulf of Suez to the Southern tip of the Sinai and Sharm el-Sheikh, and North again to Dahab.

We spent the night there. Then a bus to Nuweiba for the ferry to Aqaba. The ferry trip took basically a whole day. We left for the bus at 10:30 am and ended in our hotel in Petra at about 11pm, although time spent in what could be considered actual transit was about 4-5 hours. There was a lot of waiting, waiting for the boat to load, waiting for our passports to be processed, bargaining for a taxi to take us from the dock to petra, waiting while our taxi driver and his friend stop to have tea in-route to Petra....it was a long day.

Jordan is in fact the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. We looked up the word Hashemite and found, “Hashemite: a member of an Arab princely family claiming descent from Hashim, great-grandfather of Muhammad.”

The next day we got up early and were on our way to Petra at 8am. We passed a few cubes that had been carved out of the rocks and this is one of them.



As we started to walk into the al-Siq we could of course not keep from humming a little bit of the Indiana Jones theme song.



And at this point I felt like I was Indiana Jones:-)



Here we are, in Petra, in front of the treasury!



Petra was vast, we spent two days wandering around and I think we could have spent several weeks to really see everything. Here a a few more pictures to try and give a feel of just how big and amazing it was.




Eric in front of the Monastery.



Me in front of the monastery (yes it is massive).



Eric in a little cave room, that has a good example of the rock in that area. All the hills and valleys we just covered in streaks of color. I found it quite hard to believe, I have never seen anything like it in a stone.





Some ancient granite columns in the midst of all the sand stone.



This is the ceiling of one of the carved out caves,



and here I am in that cave.



We tried to get a wide view picture to show you all, this is the best one. However, it was so huge that it impossible to do it justice in a photo.



After two days in the HOT sun of Petra, we went to the beach for two days! We went to a small town on the Red Sea and we were the only people staying in our beach front location. We had a little bungalow type room and we could walk out and swim and snorkel with no one around except a roaming camel! We had a great time snorkeling (it was actually my first time) and saw some great fish including several puffer fish. Actually several small puffers and then one huge one! It was wonderful and relaxing.

We were staying near the foot hills of Mt. Sinai which is where Moses is said to have seen the burning bush and received the ten commandments. There is a huge working Monastery located on the said spot of the burning bush. We did not go up there but we met some people who did. They said that is was nice and the walk up was long and views were great.