Petra and Wadi Rum, Jordan

The night after our last rough camp, we headed into Petra, the rose red city. We grabbed lunch, then split up in pairs and sojourned to the site to purchase tickets. Apparently "groups" are required to take a very expensive ride on a horse cart. The ticket people caught on to us anyway, because we all purchased student tickets. Not much they could do about it though, though I do think they would have liked to force us into that horse cart.

Petra is absolutely breathtaking. I know I say this about nearly every place I visit, and your eyes may be glazing over as I continue to rave about site after site. However, it's so very true. The sandstone formations are so psychedelic they look like they were created by a hippy while he was baked out of his mind on acid. The buildings are monstrously large, so much they seem unbelievable. We spent one afternoon and the better part of a morning at the site, and were able to see the majority of it in the seven hours we spent there. (The first day we stayed at Petra until the sun set. Taxis were not plentiful, so we then flagged down an empty charter bus for a ride. The guy was so cool that he took us all the way home--free of charge.)

The first day we mostly loitered around the canyons and explored the main tourist bits. The second day we hiked up to the Kazneh, which was a somewhat strenuous climb; however, it was totally worth it because the view and ruin were both spectacular. A few people rode donkeys, but I opted to walk instead. Didn't really want to attempt straddling a donkey whilst wearing a skirt. I'm not that acrobatic.

While in Petra, we watched Lawrence of Arabia, as a lot of the scenery was shot in Wadi Rum, our next destination. The movie was fascinating and poignant, and I was captivated by Lawrence's struggle with his personal demons. Okay, I'm completely full of crap. I didn't make it five minutes into the movie before I completely zonked out. When I woke up, Lawrence was deadpanning terrible lines directly into the camera after his buddy managed to suffocate in two inches of quicksand.

Anyway, Wadi Rum was far more exciting in person. We went on a pretty rowdy jeep tour, and skidded out of control down several embankments. It was kind of like riding a roller coaster. A very scary roller coaster with no safety harnesses. Look ma! No hands!

One of our stops was at some really cool arch-shaped rock formations. We wanted to climb on top of the arch, but found the main way up to be too steep. The girls and I started searching for the easy path, which was through a tunnel. I started climbing first. The slope became wickedly steep very rapidly.

"Hmm, this doesn't look like the easy path. Perhaps I shouldn't be climbing this," I thought to myself in an unusual moment of sheer wisdom. However, I overrode my common sense and survival instincts, hiked up my skirt in a most unladylike fashion, and continued climbing until the wall became completely vertical.

"This doesn't seem safe. At all. Perhaps I should turn around," I thought to myself. (Sometimes I am very slow to catch on to things.) I looked down to plan my descent, but realized I had reached the point of no return. There was nowhere to go but up. So I dug my toes into the cliff wall and (somehow) managed to scramble up--without breaking any appendages. Hooray!

We checked out some ancient Biblical inscriptions carved on the cliff walls. They mostly dealt with the Exodus and the promised lands. Unfortunately the my photographs of the inscriptions didn't turn out as well as I hoped. That night we stayed in a Bedouin camp, where we slept in the open air around a fire. In the morning, we awoke to discover one of the dogs had puppies in the middle of the night. How cool is that?

Though I was a little bloodied/bruised from my climb, I couldn't have asked for a better (or more exciting) time at Wadi Rum.