It's Happy Hour in PETRA! (April 21-April 23)

Our friend, April, who we know from Madison, but now lives in California, was visiting Israel and staying with Katherine for the week. Katherine, Skye and I had been wanting to go to Petra from the very beginning and we decided to do it while April was here. I don't have to tell any of you what Petra, is, right? Indiana Jones.....a young hot Harrison Ford....ringing any bells?

Petra is in Jordan very close to the Israel border. We decided to access Jordan via Eilat, Israel. We had recommendations to do it this way but seeing Eilat was a bonus. Israelis often vacation to Eilat for its cheaper prices, relaxed atmosphere, and of course there's the Red Sea to lounge by.

We booked a full tour for Petra through Abraham Tours. It's much easier to deal with border crossing, lodging and transportation this way. Not to mention a tour guide through Petra itself. Abraham Tours had many options, we chose a tour package that included a ride from the central bus station in Eilat to the border, including assistance with passport control, then a ride from there to Aqaba, Jordan. It included that night in the hotel with breakfast then a ride to Petra the next day with a tour guide, and it even included a huge lunch buffet. Then of course a ride back to the border and to our hotel in Eilat.

EILAT

We left Sunday morning and got to Eilat around 2:30pm. We had until 6:15pm (when the tour would pick us up) to walk around Eilat a little. We decided to find our hotel for future reference (we would be staying in in Aqaba that first night). But then we had the rest of the afternoon to lounge. Eilat isn't very big, and its main attraction is the Red Sea. We basically walked through the whole thing getting to our hotel so we decided to take it easy by the sea until it was time to go. But first, I wanted to get IN the Red Sea, so we rolled up our pants and waded for a few minutes. It was really pretty water, and it was quite warm. The beach wasn't too crowded and the weather was perfect.

We found this great sea side restaurant with fancy circle tables. We ordered some fun summery drinks and appetizers then played cards and stuffed our faces until it was time to go back to the train station to meet our tour. Katherine and I got these delicious frozen drinks called lemonanas. They had fresh mint in them, oh my gosh they were good. It tasted like a virgin mojito! YUM!

After our lazy (and fun and relaxing) afternoon by the sea, we headed back to the train station for our ride to the border.

A white van (basically a sherut) picked us up and we were the only ones in it, we were excited at first, but then the van stopped off to pick up another couple, so we figured they'd be filling it. Luckily, it was just us and the other couple (who turned out to be our amazing tour buddies from the UK, but more on that later).

Our driver's name was David, and he was very sweet. He must have forgotten his notes or something because he had extra.........long.........spaces. Between.......words. He gave us directions for the border crossing, a breakdown of our itinerary, and tips for the culture in Jordan, then we headed on our way.

We lucked out on border crossing by going in the evening, normally it takes an hour or two to get through, but the evening wasn't busy at all and it only took us about 15 minutes. In fact, we waited for our driver on the Jordan side for nearly longer than the border took! Actually, our original driver may have died? David told us to look for Hanan on the other side, but when a man found our group and we asked if he was Hanan, he responded, "Hanan is dead". We all looked at each other wondering if we had heard him right. Never found out what happened to Hanan! I hope he is not dead though!

The wait for the driver was great because we met Mick and Dolly, the other couple in the Van. Mick is from Ireland and Dolly is from England, where they're currently living. They were so nice and fun to talk to. The six of us were the only ones signed up for the overnight in Aqaba.

We're in the Red Sea!

Eilat

Red Sea in Eilat

Awesome circle table

Red Sea in Eilat

AQABA

The driver was very nice, he drove us to the hotel, but he took a few extra turns to show us some of Aqaba. It's such a nice little city! They're building a ton right now! He showed us this brand new HUGE hospital and they have this huge beach front plan, sounded like they're doing very well. It was very clean and pretty. It almost reminded us of Florida, the way the palm trees were lining the perfectly straight and wide streets. Aqaba is beautiful because on one side you have the Red Sea, and the other side you have big pink mountains with stripes of black magnesium. It was amazing!

We were dropped off at the hotel which was actually a very, very nice hotel. By now we had spent about 45 minutes to an hour with Mick and Dolly and we were very happy when they wanted to have dinner with us.

We headed out to a place our driver recommended, Ali Baba, about a 5 to 10 minute walk away. It was a fairly fancy place, we sat outside and began looking at the drink menu. When you have a beer called "Petra" then the decision process doesn't even need to happen. We each ordered one, and you all know by now I'm new to beer, still in the process of acquiring the taste, it was a lager and was pretty good, so I guess I like lagers. I had a chicken kebab and Skye had some sort of lamb in flat bread. Their flat bread is similar to Israeli pitas, only it's much thinner and bigger. It was like a cross between a tortilla and a pita.

There were also a lot of camels around, that was a little random! Everything was really good and we had a great time hanging out with Dolly and Mick. They have five grown kids and it didn't take long before we were planning a wedding for April and one of their sons! I even taught them how to say "ya'll" properly! We headed back to the hotel, and decided we needed to stop at a convenient store for another Petra beer, this was when we discovered that the 8% beer we had ordered at the restaurant was in fact the mild one! There was a 10% can also! We stuck to the 8%!

The next morning we headed to the rooftop for breakfast before the driver picked us up again. They had a huge selection and it was very fancy with great views.

Aqaba at night

Dinner time!

Yum!

Aqaba

Aqaba scenery

More Aqaba scenery

Our evening out in Aqaba

Best tour buddies ever! Mick and Dolly on the right behind April

PETRA

We piled in the Van and headed back to the border crossing to pick up the rest of our tour group, then it was onward and upward to Petra! It was a two hour drive and Jordan drivers are no less crazy than Israeli drivers. Skye, April and I were sitting in the very back, and we may as well have been sitting in a cart being pulled behind with a rope. Unfortunately April wasn't feeling too well with all that motion, but we eventually made it.

Petra was built by the Nabataeans sometime between the 3rd century BC and 1st century AD. Rome, Christianity, Muslims, and the Crusaders came in after that, but after the Crusaders in the 12th century, the city was forgotten and "lost" until 1812 when Johann Ludwig Burckhardt rediscovered it. (info from our guidebook, "Eyewitness Travel: Jerusalem and the Holy Land").

Our tour guide's name was Ramsey, and we had two vans of people in our group. It's a pretty long walk through a long narrow passage between rock walls before entering the actual city. This is called the Siq, it was formed when water from the Wadi Musa flowed through a split in the mountain. There are tombs and Djinn blocks (spirits) on the way to the beginning of the Siq. They had pyramids carved on them pointing the way to heaven and most of them had little stairs carved on them as a stairway to heaven. (info from the guide book, and from our tour guide).

There used to be an arch at the entrance to the Siq, but it collapsed in 1896. It's almost one mile from the ticket gate to the end of the Siq, but we walked a ways before getting to the entrance of the Siq, so the Siq itself is probably just over half a mile long. It gets narrower and deeper the closer to the city you get,  the narrowest part of the Siq is only one meter wide.

Our walk through the Sig was amazing! The colors and shapes of the rock walls alone were breathtaking, but then add in carved water channels, outlines of ancient deities, paving stones, and Nabataean graffiti, then there are just no words to describe it. We stopped every so often for Ramsey to point things out and tell us all about it.

Finally we stopped at what seemed to be just a little pocket of nothing on the side of the path. Well, turns out it was just a pocket of nothing. But as we all crammed in the little pocket, Ramsey told us to look straight ahead, and all we could see through the narrow opening was the treasury. It was awesome! Hooray for our Indiana Jones moment! We snapped tons of pictures and went into the city of Petra!

Ramsey took us through most of the city beginning with the treasury to the theater. There were hundreds of tombs, including royal tombs with intricate facades in between the treasury and the theater. There was also a temple, market places, and caves where the people made their homes.

Once he finished the tour we had 30 minutes to walk around and explore. We decided to climb up into the royal tombs. There are three royal tombs, the Urn, Corinthian, and the Palace Tombs. The Palace tomb is the largest of the three with five levels. There were tons of little rooms and chambers carved into the rock, and we just walked, in, around, up and down as many as we could. We even crossed an extremely sketchy bridge over a narrow gorge to get to more chambers. It was nuts! Of course on the way you pass many little stands and tents with people trying to sell things. But don't worry, as we were told by one of them, 'it's free to look!' Well, thanks!

It was amazing! The views, the detailed carving, it's crazy it has lasted this long! The treasury is carved fairly deep into the rock, so water really doesn't run or drip onto it at all. It's really cool. The Urn tomb interior was also very beautiful. The ceiling had black streaks running throughout it, probably magnesium. It almost looked like it could be smoke stains. We explored as much as we could before we headed back up the Siq to meet our tour group for lunch. When we passed the treasury again, we wanted to take more pictures of all of us, because on the way down we were listening to Ramsey. All of a sudden Skye was being mauled by all these cute muslim girls! Probably around 14 or 15 years old. It was hilarious! At first I had no idea what was going on so I was annoyed, but then I realized they were just very excited about an American with red hair and tons of freckles. Also, he's quite attractive. They took a group shot with him, then they each individually wanted their picture with him. It was so funny! I did lay a big kiss on him when they were finished with their photo shoot, just to claim my territory!

We made it back to the ticket gate and piled back into the vans and they took us to a restaurant with a huge buffet, which seemed to be the place for tourists. They had lamb, chicken, rice, pasta, tons of salads, flat bread and many dips, fruit and rice pudding and some odd jellos for dessert. It was all very good. After that we headed back to Aqaba to the border.

We stopped half way for a bathroom break. Apparently something had happened with the other van, so we had to wait there until another van came to replace it. We waited about 20 or 30 minutes, but in the mean time realized that right across the highway from us was Wadi Rum. Wadi Rum is an area of the desert with these crazy rock formations. Our guide book describes it as, "Huge ochre-coloured rock pinnacles, weathered into bulbous, outlandish shapes, rise up 600 m (2,000 ft) from the valley floors, like islands in a sea of red sand." So as you can imagine, it was quite beautiful. We only got to see it from across the highway, but it was a bonus so it was great. Not too bad a thing to look at when stranded for a little bit!

We made it safely back to the border and crossed again fairly quickly with no problems. The van picked us up on the other side and dropped us at our hostel in Eilat where we stayed for the night.

We made dinner plans with Mick and Dolly again, and met up with them at the Irish pub. Mick said it wasn't quite authentic, but it was a nice place nonetheless. We had a couple drinks, had dinner and hung out for a while. We saw the waitress go by with some shots and Mick jokingly asked her if they were for us, she said "no way! they're for the other table!" But he told her that if this was a real Irish pub, they'd give us free shots. He was of course joking, but a few minutes later she came out with six shots of Jameson! Ohhh to have the charm of an Irishman! The evening came to a close and we made sure to exchange information to keep in touch before saying our goodbyes. What fun people! We were so happy to have met them!

Tombs with staircase carvings on the way to the Siq

Path to the Siq

More tombs and staircases

If you look closely you can see writing in this stone

Obelisk Tomb and Bab el-Siq Triclinium

Siq Entrance! If you look up where those random people are looking,
that's where the entrance arch used to be.

Wall carvings

Water channel, ran the whole way through the Siq

Pretty Siq!

April and me in the Siq

More Siq

Siq

Siq

More wall carvings in the siq

Another wall carving. Look to the right, at the bottom,
see the legs and bottom half of a man?
  Then move your eyes left, you can see 4 camel feet,
and above that you can sort of see a camel belly. 

Siq

Seeing through the eyes of Indiana Jones!

Treasury!

City of Petra

Petra tombs

Caves where the people lived

More tombs

Tombs with Facades

The theater

Royal Tombs

Katherine, April and me in front of the Royal Tombs

Skye in one of the tomb chambers 

View from inside a tomb chamber

Caves and chambers

April, Skye Katherine and me in a royal tomb 

Awesome ceiling in the Urn Tomb

Katherine, me, Skye and April in front of the Treasury

Popular with the ladies!

Wadi Rum

MINERAL BEACH-The Dead Sea

The next morning we caught the bus to the Dead Sea. Katherine, Skye and I had been there before, but we wanted to make sure April got to see it. Also, when Skye and I had gone before, we didn't go to the beach with the mineral mud, so we made sure to go to Mineral Beach where there is plenty of mud to slab on your body. It's supposed to be really good for your skin.

The weather was perfect, hot enough to be in water but not uncomfortably hot. We went straight for the mud, covered ourselves from head to toe, or in my case from neck to toe, then floated around in the Dead Sea. We messed around for a while until we were hungry, rinsed off and headed up the hill for lunch. After lunch we wanted to start the process over again! So we mudded up, Skye let me draw a bikini top on him with mud, though...unfortunately he wouldn't let me take a picture of it! This time we wanted to "marinate" in the mud and sun for a while before getting back into the sea. While marinating, we had some fabulous entertainment. People watching...two in particular, Jackie and Joycey, a set of twins probably in their upper 70s or early 80s. They were hilarious! Skye and Katherine pointed them out to April and I, they were so cute! They had the best commentary and sound affects. At one point they couldn't find their umbrella and chairs, so were wandering around checking every umbrella. It was great! Mostly it was great because they were adorable and they were having a fabulous time. Good for them! I hope I'm like that when I'm old! We got back in the sea, goofed off a while, then headed to the showers before catching the bus back to Jerusalem.

It was such an amazing trip and with some awesome friends! Everything went smoothly, we met some really great people, and we got to go where Harrison Ford went. Can't ask for more than that!

A HUGE thank you to Connie and Alan for making this trip possible and stress-free!!!! We had an unforgettable trip and we're very grateful for your generosity! Thank you SO much!!!!!

Mineral Beach, Dead Sea

It's mud time!

He may have had a problem with the bikini top I drew on him,
but he liked the tie. All his ideas, even the bikini!

Ok, this wasn't his idea. And he didn't have much of a say in the matter.

Skye, April, and me (and some randos) floating away!

Pretty Dead Sea!