Day Six - Petra-fied!! (Don Abramowitz)

Monday was our journey to Petra, a day I was especially excited about, from the bits and pieces I’d heard before our trip.

We began riding our bus bright and early (7:00ish) to the border crossing to Jordan. At the crossing, we showed our passports to lots of officials, collected stickers, stamps, and important bits of paper, and showed off our ability to ignore simple directions and wander randomly. After testing the patience of our trip leaders (mainly Rabbi Gerber...) and their deputies, we begrudgingly allowed ourselves to be successfully led across the border without an international incident or lost soul.

Once in Jordan, we met our terrific guide for the day (whose name already escapes me) (RJG addition: his name was Talal) boarded another bus and journeyed 2 hours through the Jordanian desert.  We partook of a rest stop at a facility with arguably the finest views I’ve ever seen from a bathroom window.

At last we arrived at our destination, where we showed that repeating instructions over and over using simple phrases and stern countenances could result in a kind of progress. 

Thus began our trek through sun and shade, past crazily driven horse carts and cagey trinket and post card salesmen (seems that everything is just one dollar in Jordan and many items happened to be on special sale today, especially for you, my brother, but I digress...) to at last view what remains of the lost civilization of the Nabataeans in the old town of Petra.

What we have here is a town literally carved into the sandstone cliffs and hills that thrived as a major stop on the spice route from say, 800 BCE to 106 CE, when the Romans took over.  Lots of tombs, culminating in the iconic “Treasury,” which probably never had any treasure, but which was most certainly the top tomb in town.  Lots of details of what all went on here seem lost to the ages, as it seems the townsfolk weren’t big fans of written records.  Or if they were, they used biodegradable writing materials, like post-it notes, the adhesive for which did not stand the test of time.

Anyhoo, some of us made it as far as an ancient, 6,000 seat amphitheater that offered some clues to what people did with their time when they weren’t busy carving everything with their Iron Age chisels. Then we realized we’d better hurry up and get back to the group so we didn’t miss lunch.  Which was a good thing, since lunch was tasty and filling, which made for good snoozing on the bus ride home. 

We made our way back through the border in a well-behaved fashion, showing everyone in sight our passports and stickers and important slips of paper, all the while thanking them for allowing us to proceed to the next person who wanted a look.

All in all, my step counting app tallied 7.4 miles and 19,847 steps, a record day for this trip. T’was a really great day, capped by a particularly sumptuous all-you-care-to-eat dinner back at the hotel, which we really deserved, being that we walked so far and didn’t lose or (seriously) injure anyone all day.