In this third and final travelogue from our visit to Petra I’m going to cover our descent from the Monastery through the main route of the ancient city, past the Treasury, back along the Siq, and out past the museum. If you’ve read the previous two Petra posts and are thinking this will simply be what I’ve put up already only in reverse then you’re only partly right. There are still events to recall and impart. The photos will be from new angles. The sun will be in a different position in the sky. No two journeys are ever the same even if they’re being taken just a few hours apart.
You might recollect from our hike up to the Monastery that the path involved in the region of eight hundred steps and that these were uneven, angled, different heights and widths, sometimes near sheer drops, covered in loose stones and sand, interspersed with stretches of unstepped pathway, and frequented by donkeys clip-clop-thundering past every couple of minutes. All of this was true on the way down too because these weren’t your Harry Potter-style steps that transform when you’re not looking. You might think that descending the hiking trail from the Monastery to ground level in Petra would be considerably easier than the initial climb but it would be more accurate to say it was simply different. For me, yes, an easier task because going down is always easier than going up. Please take your filthy mind out of the gutter. For my wife and her historical injuries to ankles the descent was as bad as the ascent because the slope on many of the steps put a lot of pressure on sore points. Not only that but her shoes – proper hiking shoes – seemed to have more trouble keeping a good grip on the sand-covered sandstone. And, of course, a fear of heights on uneven surfaces is a fear of heights on uneven surfaces no matter which way you’re facing. Progress was slow but that was why we’d elected to head off early. We’re semi-sensible like that sometimes.
Slow progress meant I could stop to take photos when I wasn’t stopping to help my wife down another scary part of the trail.
Where there are tourists there will be people trying to sell things to tourists and the hiking trail to and from the Monastery at Petra is no exception to this rule. You’ll find three or four spots along the route where a handful of tented stalls are erected, some selling drinks, many others offering souvenirs. One thing we particularly liked was that there was no hard sell from any of the stallholders; when we stopped and looked we were left in peace, no lifting of goods and proffering, no attempt to encourage a sale at all. This was a refreshing contrast to many other places we’ve visited on our travels over the years. Another thing we liked were cats because we saw quite a few in Petra. Only ginger ones, mind.
In the two photos below you can get some sense of how the Monastery hiking trail turns on itself, how the steps are, how the donkeys carry the tourists along the path, and the sort of drop along the route.
It was not far beyond this point on our return to the main part of Petra that my wife’s feet slipped out from under her on the sandy steps. Luckily, nowhere near an edge and not in any donkey droppings either. More importantly, the only bruising was to her ego and she wasn’t hurt at all. She also wasn’t the only person to fall that we witnessed with a least half a dozen tumbles seen going up and down.
The descent was taken even more slowly but with no major breaks to recover our breaths that we’d needed earlier in the day and with fewer stops to get some respite from the sun as it had moved around and was being blocked in many points by the sandstone walls we were passing, it took no more than around thirty five minutes to make our way to the base of the trail. And that’s with lots of photos along the way of rocky walls and narrow gorges, of course. I am me, after all.
The lower end of the Monastery trail brought more evidence of human activity in the sandstone walls with plenty of niches, caves in some instances, and carvings.
And thus it was that we completed our descent of the trail. More weird rock formations as we’d come to expect from Petra marked the point at which we’d reached level(ish) ground…
… but it had something else too.
At the base of the trail and identified as toilets on the map we’d looked at there were a few buildings and lots of seats outside. We both needed to use the loo thanks to the volume of water we’d put into ourselves not actually all being sweated out on the hike up and down the path so we made our way to them and made use of the facilities. A local was sat at the entrance to the toilets pointing men to one side and women to another but with toilets being the way they are all over the world this meant there was a queue for the ladies’ side. After I’d relieved the pressure inside and washed my hands I indicated to some women in the queue that there was nobody in the men’s side and there were a couple of cubicles in there. They shot past the guy telling people where to go who looked shocked at first but then quickly resigned to the fact that practicality was probably the priority.
My wife had already passed into the queue the other side of the door by this point so I had to wait for her to complete what she said was a snake around the inner walls of the toilet block which gave me time to look at the rest of the building we’d found. Amongst other things there was a café there (hence the seating outside) and attached to it a small shop where things could be ordered through the hatch. And one thing caught my eye: beer. A horrible assumption on my part was that Arabic countries are dry countries (where alcohol is concerned as well as just in general). Not the case at all.
There are many things we like doing when we travel and one of them is trying local drinks in countries we visit. When my wife emerged from the toilet I pointed at the beer and got an “Oh, hell yes!” look from her. We had plenty of time thanks to our guide’s forced march up to the Monastery which I’d initally thought might mean we could explore the Royal Tombs, perhaps, on our way out, but with so many other things to see that we could really do with a longer visit anyway the lure of beer won us over. We’re easily won over when it comes to beer.
The beer was not cheap and that’s coming from someone who’s bought drinks in Iceland and Hong Kong. We were behind a hiker who also enquired about the beer and quickly opted for water when he was told the price. For us, no problem at all. We grabbed the cans of cold lager – and we are not lager drinkers under normal circumstances – and found a seat in the shade of some trees where we both uttered deep aaaahs of contentment. So now we can say that we’ve drunk beer brewed in Jordan in the ancient city of Petra. That’s the sort of thing we live for.
We negotiated the chicane of resting camels and found ourselves back on the Colonnaded Street heading directly towards the Royal Tombs. My camera immediately attracted the attention of some French girls who assumed that lugging a great big DSLR around meant you must have an innate skill at using a stranger’s iPhone and mimed some gestures to get me to take their photo with it. I don’t like touching Apple products and I don’t like holding expensive equipment belonging to other people and I sure as hell wouldn’t trust anything I was carrying to people I didn’t know – I’m guessing they realised there was little chance I was going to run off with it – but I persevered and there’s a reasonable chance I got them in the shot I took.
I looked longingly at the Royal Tombs from afar and glanced at the time. My wife said she’d wait if I wanted to get up closer to them but I decided we’d stick together, take our time leaving Petra, and make sure that a return trip in the future would include a visit to them instead.
We followed the main route through Petra and next passed the Theatre which was now proving to be popular with goats and people wanting to take pictures of goats alike.
We retraced our steps past the tombs lining the Street of Facades next. There were plenty of souvenir stalls along this route and we stopped to take a look at some of them but didn’t see anything we fancied purchasing.
This brought us back to the building that this ancient site is most famous for, the Treasury. You can see some more photos of the building and read a little more about it in the first part of this subset of the Jordan travelogue series where we walked from the visitors centre to the Treasury at Petra. The area in front of the building was in shade now making it a far more pleasant time of the day to gaze up at the workmanship and take in the scale but we weren’t sure how long it would still take us to get back to the coach and so didn’t dawdle long.
Stepping into the Siq – the long gorge you pass through to get to the main parts of Petra – I turned back to take another shot of the Treasury through the narrow gap in the sandstone walls. A tip if you’re visiting Petra and want this classic (fine: clichéd) photograph is that the later afternoon period is better for it because there are fewer people around to get in the way (unless you want them for scale) and the light contrast between the inside rocky walls and the outside area where the Treasury can be seen is lower meaning there’s far less chance that your camera will overexpose or underexpose the picture.
Just the Siq to go and then the trail up to the visitors centre. Mostly flat from here.
Is it? Is it really? Because I seem to recall there was quite a slope heading down to here this morning.
Well, a hint of a slope perhaps. We’ll probably not even notice it.
We noticed the slope quite a lot as it turned out. It isn’t steep, it’s true, but it’s constant and it’s longer than you remember. However much time you take heading through the Siq to get to Petra’s impressive sights in the first place, add half that time again to head back. And after you exit the gorge the steepness increases. Prepare to be a little out of breath and just this side of completely knackered by the time you complete it.
One thing we noticed was that there seemed to be a lot more horse-drawn carts galloping past us on the exit from Petra. I suspect that people who’d been up for the walk earlier in the day were in more of an up for the terrorise pedestrians from the comfort of a seat mood as the afternoon headed towards evening. Luckily, horse-drawn carts aren’t quiet things and the walls of the gorge carry and echo hoofbeats well and even in the narrowest parts of the Siq we were able to get close enough to the wall to not be too threatened by the speeding vehicles.
The final bit of walking was in sunlight and as has already been mentioned a little bit steeper than the walk preceding it which meant I was called upon to take some tactical photo stops along the way. The Obelisk Tomb and Djinn Blocks were the most interesting of the features along this last bit of the route out of Petra and you can read a little more about them in part one of this series of posts too.
Amongst the souvenir shops around the vistors centre area we finally picked up a few purchases but still had money left over. Luckily, the two-hour bus ride back to the ship at dock in Aqaba included a stop at a store and we got rid of almost all the remaining Jordanian money we’d taken with us then. People who know us and who know how much we like soap will be unsurprised to learn that we came away with lots of soap.
Just before we reached the bus park I was taken in by the modern architecture of the Petra Museum and the gorgeous light conditions of the time of day. We didn’t quite have enough time to pop in and visit but if its interior is as nice as its exterior then I’d say it looks like it’s worth a visit if you’re there.
We weren’t the last people on the bus but we might have been the penultimate couple to arrive and only by a minute or two. As regular cruisers and regular partakers of excursions this was a pretty close to unique experience for us as we’re usually back with plenty of time to spare and invariably have to wait for stragglers to turn up late. That wasn’t the case here and possibly because everyone had sensibly allowed more time than they needed to get back from sightseeing, and our bus was able to leave ahead of schedule as a result.
It goes without saying that Petra is absolutely incredible. It is one of the most impressive places we have ever visited. If you’ve not been then you must go and there can be no argument about it. If you were to visit as part of a cruise excursion like us then I’d also recommend the hike to the Monastery that we did if you think you’re capable of it. It isn’t easy but it’s rewarding and it’s an experience you won’t regret.
In the final part of this Journey to Jordan Cruise travelogue series I’ll cover our last night and morning on Marella Discovery plus our experiences in the airport at Aqaba and on the flight back home. Well, not quite home.