Day three of our Jordan adventure had so much potential, for both good and bad. Let me preface the actual day trip with a story of our 4 hour drive to Petra.
We left the Palace of Tobias in Ammon just before dark, to trek 4 hours in the bus to Petra – supposedly with no bathroom stops. Being the intelligent traveler that I am, I had my first “wadi potty” experience before boarding. A wadi potty is much like finding a tree in the middle of the woods, but with a lot less trees for coverage. It's more like, “Where can I find the largest rock to hid behind that also happens to be surrounded by other rocks for coverage?” It's a lot more difficult than it sounds. But I made it work, and proudly got on the bus to fall asleep. Apparently, no one else thought of this, and my intelligent strategy was for nothing. For, two hours later, we ended up pulling over at some souvenir shop because all the girls were about to implode from having to pee so bad.
So, we arrived at our hotel very late into the night, ate a decent dinner and attempted to go to bed early, because we would have to be getting up at the butt-crack of dawn to walk to Petra from our hotel. Yes, I did indeed say walk to Petra.
Not that it was a very long walk. But, at something like 6:30 in the morning, the last thing that you want to do is walk anywhere. I kept telling myself that it would be worth it because I would be walking where Sean Connery and Harrison Ford had walked! I'm talking about Indiana Jones the Last Crusade, for those of you who don't know. I thought it was going to be magical. And, at first, it was. I guess that most tour guides want to spend at least two hours walking down the long path that leads in to Petra. Oh, did I mention we had a tour guide with us for this whole trip? You can't tour anywhere in Jordan without an official Jordanian tour guide, it's against the law. I think they just want more money. His name was Aladdin and enjoyed telling all of us to “Wakey wakey, time to get more sleep” every time we didn't pay attention to him on the tour bus. Buckets of fun. Anyways, so our job, as students was to walk as quickly as possible, through the entry path, so we could get to the Treasury – the place that Petra is known for. Maybe you've seen it:
As I said, it kind of exciting to run down the path, occasionally stopping to take pictures. Here's a few of us on a rock that we deemed “Pride Rock”. Our photographer wasn't very good. If it was more zoomed out, you could see that it actually looks like Pride Rock from the movie The Lion King.
Unfortunately, as I was racing to get ahead of everyone so that I could take a picture of the Treasury without students in the picture, my Camel Back decided to leak everywhere. It's not the first time it's done this. At least this time it had a legitimate reason to leak. Typically, it leaks when I set it down on the ground or lean it against something or just to spite me. Well, I lost a good half of my water in the process and, as you know from my other blog posts, it's not like I could just drink from the water fountain in Jordan. But I wasn't thinking that far ahead. I just wanted a picture without any intruders.
After our tour guide spoke for a while at the Treasury, we were allowed another 4 hours to explore Petra. Honestly, we couldn't have walked the whole thing if we had two weeks. We had two sites to see: The high place, where they did sacrifices (150 steps up the side of a cliff) and the Monastery, with a beautiful view over the whole Jordan Valley (800 steps up the side of a cliff). Oh, and not only do they have so many steps going up to each site, but they are on two completely different mountain tops. But I was determined! I was going to have fun and see everything!
Well, I made it to the High Place fairly easily. Here's a picture of the view off the top:
I was with a group of two guys and three other girls. We hung out for a little while, and started climbing back down the way that we came up so that we could head towards the Monastery. On our way down, disaster struck. First, I fell and slid down a bunch of steps, potentially hurting my camera. It has a pixilated crack in the view-screen, now. Then, a Muslim lady said that if we climbed back up and took a left at the coffee shop, we could climb down the stairs on the other side, look out over a theater, and still make it to the Monastery. We went wrong when we decided to listen to her. We got lost for two hours, Technically, we were still on a recognized path, but it was pretty sketchy and a lot harder to hike. And we had no idea where we were going. I suddenly had to go to the bathroom really bad, and I ran out of water. It was a horrifying experience.
Finally, some man directed us to the foot of the mountain that lead up to the Monastery and I was able to find a bathroom. Content with this, I was still ready to climb up to the top, not even remembering that I had no water. It was half way to the first set of stairs, while walking through a pit of sad that took more effort to walk through then I have ever experienced, that I started to realize that maybe this wasn't such a good idea. But it wasn't until another 100 steps when I knew it wasn't a good idea. Then I went into tunnel vision where I would jog up a set of steps, try and catch my breath, jog up another set, try and remember to breathe. Meanwhile, not wanting to let on to everyone that I was with that I was in a lot of pain. I didn't want to look lazy or out of shape in comparison to them. Just after we were half way to the top, my cycle of jogging and resting wore on me and I started hyper-ventilating. At that point, I knew that if I drank any water that I would just vomit it up anyways.
All drama aside, my mini panic attack forced me to rest enough that I made it to the top and I'm not sure that it was worth all the trouble. Here's what it looks like:
It's kind of cool, I guess. I spent a few minutes there and turned my sad tired self around to drag my feet down all the steps and back to the hotel. I definitely had expended more energy than my body had.
After Petra, I slept the rest of the day until our one and only other stop, Bozrah. Bozrah was the capital of Edom. I'm sure you've heard of the Edomites. They gave Judah a lot of trouble during the exile because they wanted Judah out of their way so that they could prophet from trade. Edomites are the descendants of Esau. They're land is deep in the Negev and constantly pinched for resources. Their only chance of survival is dependent on shepherding and trade. Not that they should complain, they got filthy rich off trade because they were connected to a road that lead the to coastal trade with Phoenicia, copper trade with Egypt, and the spice trade in Asia. Bozrah was beautiful, and a decent end to an otherwise awful and exhausting day.
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