Petra

We arrived in Petra at about 11.30am and went straight to our hotel 🏨 - La Maison - just a 3-minute walk🚶‍♂️from the entrance to the archaeological site. Luckily, our rooms were ready so we were able to have a quick shower before having our guided walk around Petra with Sofyan.

Mark visited Petra once before - on a day trip from Israel 🇮🇱 in the early nineties. He said the town and the entrance to the site were both unrecognisable from those days!

We bought our two-day tickets and Sofyan showed us on a large plan of the site what our options were for exploring on our free day tomorrow. We began our visit by walking the 800 metre downhill path through an area called Bab as-Siq (gateway to the Siq).

Petra is a vast concealed city built by the Nabateans (Arabs who dominated the region in pre-Roman times). These desert tribes chose to make Petra their capital. They carved the buildings into the towering rock walls of multi-coloured sandstone and made them impenetrable by cutting a 1.2 km path (siq) through the rock. This was the only way in or out of the city, meaning that enemies had no chance of attacking unnoticed.

The most iconic of all the buildings in Petra is obviously the Treasury. It's the first building you see as you emerge from the siq. It is instantly recognisable from movies 🎬 like Indiana Jones. However, there are 800 registered sites in Petra including 500 tombs! I had not appreciated the sheer magnitude of the place! It is completely overwhelming at first. I'm glad that we had a guided tour on the first day, and that we had the opportunity to go back on the second and explore some more at our own pace.

I shall break down our time in Petra into several footprints 👣. We took hundreds of photos 📸 so I will try to pick the best!

Accompanying this footprint 👣 are photos 📸 of the entrance, the Djinn Blocks (enormous monuments built by the Nabateans as dedications to their god, Dushara), and the Obelisk Tomb.Read more