Day 89 - Petra, Jordan

Today we had a free day to ourselves to roam around Petra and see the sites. Omar gave us an option to see Little Petra by taking a free shuttle bus, then another bus towards the Monastery, with a bit of a walk to it. Easier and more picturesque than climbing the normal stairs.

So we had breakfast at 6:30am and made our way to the visitors centre to take the shuttle bus to Little Petra (Triclinium).
We arrived at Little Petra and walked through the valley admiring the many cats & kittens around the area. Little Petra is a smaller version of Petra with one carved tomb called Siq Al-Barid, there is also a cave with the remains of a fresco painted by the Nabataeans that represented grape vines, which confirmed the view that Beida was the area of wine production. We made our way to the top of the lookout point and then came back down to take the next bus to the start of the back trail to the Monastery.

We climbed the 1750 steps along the trail and got some amazing views of the surrounding valley and landscape. Upon walking up towards the monastery from the back trail, you get first glimpse 5 minutes away and then you get to see it come into view for a couple 100 meters.
We climbed up to a lookout point to admire the Monastery, I found this more amazing than the treasury, as everyone was spaced out and there wasn’t merchants everywhere trying to sell you something. The Monastery is one of the largest monuments in Petra, measuring 47m wide by 48m high.

We started the downhill steps towards the basin, while we were had to dodge donkey & mulls either going up or down.
We walked up to the Royal Tombs which were two different families with two different facades.

It was a very hot day and not a lot of shade cover from the sun. We walked back to the Treasury and found it was a lot more quiet than when we were here yesterday. We admired it for a bit longer before turning and to start the walk out of the Petra site.

We planned to go to the museum that is included in the ticket, though on the walk back we were felling hot & tired & opted to grab some food from the supermarket before going back to the hotel.
We had a quiet afternoon at the hotel before 5pm, we had booked a Turkish Massage. The Turkish massage consists of a 15minutes spa bath, meant to be 15minutes in the sauna, (I stayed the longest awaiting to be called out) a scrub down and a massage. At the end they put you back into the spa bath for a while. It was good, we both thought the massage would be longer but good to get it after all the walking we’ve been doing.

Tonight we had dinner with the group down locally from the hotel, then we turned in as we have an early start tomorrow.Read more