Day 147:

D asked me a while ago if I am awestruck when seeing the "wonders of the world..." if I am bowled over.

Sometimes, I said. Not at the Great Wall - it's overly reconstructed and fake. Not really at the Taj Mahal - it's just not that interesting. A little bit, maybe, at the Potala in Lhasa. The natural wonders of the world, generally, are what do it for me... the occasion of staring into the Nile, and up at the peak of Mount Everest are the events that have struck me sideways. Likewise, laying in the sand dunes of the Gobi counting shooting stars by the dozens left me senseless for a week.

I'm at Petra now. It impresses as both a natural and man made wonder. Carved into the sides of a hidden valley are dozens of temples, tombs, palaces... and even simple storerooms and stables. All of it is more than two thousand years old.

It's all stunning. The approach to the sight - a 1.2 kilometer defile - is a sort of canyon, with impossibly high sides, incredibly far from the sky above is incredible. It's like walking through the grand canyon, perhaps, with the expectation that something BETTER is to come. And something even cooler does arrive... at its end, the canyon deposits visitors at the steps of the Al-Khazneh, an impressive facade carved, like everything else here out of the pink sandstone of the cliff side (and yeah, you might recognize the sight from that Indiana Jones movie that was filmed here).

And, well, pictures are necessary in order to describe the rest of Petra. There is the Al-Khazneh... and it IS incredible, and then there are fifty more sights just like it down the road: a 7000 seat theatre, the "Great Temple," and most impressive of all, "Al-Dier" - a massive monastery some 50 feet high into the cliff. Everything is so MASSIVE, indeed.

Anyways. Got up nice and early and took a minibus to get here. Arrived around eleven am. The town surrounding Petra is called Wadi Musa. I found a clean and quiet little hotel without too much difficulty and negotiated a fair price. I'm going to spend tomorrow making a second visit to Petra. I'll leave here the day after tomorrow... I hope to visit a couple of crusader castles to the north. I've decided that there will be no DAWDLING in Jordan.