It’s said that the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones. If that’s the case, Jordan is still well and truly in the Stone Age. They are everywhere. Even the desert sands around the Wadi Rum monoliths were strewn with random rocks. We just passed a truck taking a bunch of large rocks somewhere and you have to ask, what is the point? It would be like filling up a tanker with sea water, taking it to another place on the coast and putting it back in the ocean.
But if stones are pretty much all you have, you have to make the most of it. So you build forts out of them to dominate trade routes like the Romans and Crusaders did or you carve monuments and tombs out of them like the Nabataeans did about 2200 years ago at Petra. It’s just a pity they didn’t foresee the influx of tourists a couple of millennia hence or they would have made them a lot closer to the carpark.
Apart from a couple of stops on the way back to Amman, Petra was our last day devoted to another wonder of the ancient world of which we have seen plenty on this trip. By this stage there’s a lot of lead in the saddle-bags so the 4km stroll in the shade, early in the morning down to (almost) the end of the main Petra drag becomes what feels like a 40 km slog, uphill all the way back to the start, mostly in the midday sun. At least there’s a bar at the turnaround point so a liquid refreshment can be had prior to confronting the walk back.
Of course there are alternatives to walking in the form of horses, donkeys, mules, camels and some other combination of two of the preceding or you can choose the rich man’s camel – a golf buggy to take you back. But that would be cheating says he now sitting in the shade in a 5 star hotel sipping an ice cold ale. Then it was stubborn pride, hubris, stupidity or something that kept the head down and the bum up and the legs relying on muscle memory i.e. remembering how to walk, to get me back.
Had we done Petra on day 1 of this trip the CB and I may have even attempted the 900 steps up to what is known as the Monastery, right at the end of the walk in. But half way in you reach the Treasury which is what you see in most of the pictures of Petra and the Monastery is a similar shape and size so there didn’t seem much point. Besides, if the Treasury and all of the other incredible sights don’t blow your mind, you need to get back to Bali.
Unusually for us, the CB and I have really behaved ourselves vis-a-vis bar visits on this trip. Concessions have to be made for the fact that this is the Middle East with all of the connotations that implies but it’s also bloody hot and bloody dry. Notwithstanding, it’s been a couple of beers or wines after a long day touristing and then collapsing into bed. Souvenir shopping has been kept under control also so we have spent very little during the majority of this trip. Then yesterday we went to a mosaic and carpet shop and the spending restrictions of the previous two weeks went BOOM!! We’re suckers for hand-made carpets, especially if made by charity organisations. So two rugs later, the credit card was woken from its slumber and had its arse severely kicked.
We have one more day in Amman because of rearranged flights after the Israel leg cancellation. The positive from this is being able to sleep in and not worry about alarms which have been going off any and every time between 3.30am and 6.30am in the last two and a half weeks. The negative is it’s Friday, the Muslim holy day, and everything is shut. Religion still trumps mercenary mercantilism in this part of the world, it seems. Give them time. Still, it means we save our last few Jordanian dinars which are worth A$2.20 each so everything here is pretty expensive in Aussie dollars. The upside is that like most places in this part of the world, you can bargain. That doesn’t mean you can challenge the barman over the price of a Heinekan but it does mean we were able to beat the carpet man down and save a few hundred bucks