Trevor & Jonathans Cruise & Trip to the Far East and Australia 2016

Day 10 - Thursday May 19th 2016 - Aqaba, Jordan

The alarm woke us up at 07:15 and the ship was still moving toward the port of Aqaba in Jordan. Despite the captain’s foot on the pedal it seemed that we had not made up as much time as he had wanted and we were still heading for port.

We followed our normal routine of breakfast on the 14th floor but stopped before coffee back in the cabin to pick up all our essentials for the day like cameras and the GoPro video camera etc.

Coffee in hand we headed for the theatre, the meeting place for the hore excursions. It seemed like nearly all the boat were heading for Petra today and there were some 37 coach parties being organised and processed by the staff. It was organised chaos and like all things like this, the wait time to get off the boat seemed like a lot longer than it actually was.

Getting off the coach we were greeted with the longest line up of coaches, it really did look like a proper bus station rather than a line for day trippers. We were bus number nine and like before the bus was full of mainly retired people of the right age, this could be a very slow day.

As we set off through the town of Aqaba towards Petra (it’s about a two-hour drive) our guide started to fill us in on the local history and its geography in the world. Jordan is on the whole a very peaceful country and has managed to escape the threat of terrorism

and war that has blighted the middle east so much. In his speech he talked about the devastating effect that the wars and fighting had on Jordan in respect to tourism numbers. Despite Jordan having a clean bill of health understandably people were put off coming here as effectively you are surrounded by countries in some form of conflict or other. You could really her the emotion in his voice as he talked about this and it did make me feel sad for the world. Jordan had also at this time taken some four million refugees with the majority coming from Syria, all this from a country that does not even farm oil.

For me (Jonathan) it was quite strange being back in the middle east and seeing the familiar Arabic writing on the car number plates and shop fronts. Having spent some years in Saudi Arabia when my father served there in the Royal Navy it had a certain amount of familiarity to it although the landscape was very different. This was to be Trevors first time in any of the middle eastern countries so a completely new experience.

The road to Petra was all about changing landscapes. We started by passing through limestone dessert mountain ranges. The rock itself looked like something from the moon’s surface with holes like emmental cheese and smooth polished surfaces. You would look across flat plains of dessert with these table top rock formations pushing out of the ground punctuating the clear blue skies. It was not to dissimilar to that of Ayers Rock in Australia in terms of presence but very different in terms of makeup, colour and setting.

The road was also littered with check points or customs points along the way although we seem to have very special dispensation as we sailed through all of them when the local buses seemed to be stopped, the people pulled off the bus and kept waiting, lucky for us.

Now believe it or not we actually passed fields and fields of watermelon plantations along the road as well. The water table is apparently quite high in Jordan so it does not take much digging to get to the wet stuff and this enables the Jordanians to grow fruits etc. and we passed fields and fields of watermelon, quite unexpected.

As we were about an hour out of Aqaba the landscape changed yet again to a fine low corn growing from the dusty dessert floor. This was the land of the Bedouin farmers with their herds of goats and sheep and camels. Living in some of the most unhospitable landscapes in the world these people are absolute hard core. The Jordanian government has supported these traditional people and the only change in their lives might be that it is now compulsory for their children to attend school. Over forty percent of the Jordanian population work for the government in some shape or form and receive free education, medical care and all the thing you would expect in the west.

So back to the Bedouins, they live in what look like make shift tents in the middle of these barren lands, Huge canopies of cloth make up their shelters and they do all look very makeshift. Their dress is that of the traditional Arab, a smock like cotton dress with a cotton headdress.

We stopped for a comfort break with some amazing views out across the Petra valley, truly stunning. The rock colour had also changed here from the sand coloured stones and mountains up near the port the colours here were burnt oranges, reds and blacks. We were soon back on the road and passing through the city of Moses then onto Petra itself……so excited about what we were to experience.

Off the coach and it was a short walk over to the entrance and the visitors centre. As per normal with all coach rips there was the normal hanging around waiting for all the group to make it back together. I will freely admit to getting a little more than impatient to get this thing started, the clock was already ticking and I wanted to get going!

The walk into Petra is down a long downhill rubble lined path split into two. One side of the path is for the many horses and horse drawn carriages that you can pay to use if you don’t feel like walking the really uneven terrain underfoot. The horseman and carriage drivers all bore a striking resemblance to Johnny Depp’s character in Pirates of the Caribbean Captain Jack Sparrow complete with eyeliner around their eyes, quite comical actually. The carriages tore back up the path looking for other customers to take down into Petra itself. At this stage you have no idea just how far the journey is on foot….it is quite a way especially in the dessert sun and you are quite exposed at the beginning of the tour.

So the first part of Petra is very different from the bits we have all seen in magazines or history book. It’s very open with more traditional rock formations (well, traditional for what we had seen in Jordan so far). These rocks were sometimes cave homes and sometimes impossible intricately carved temple fronts or burial chambers.

Our guide was moving us along the various sights quite quickly as we had an awful lot to cover during this trip and it was a struggle to keep up, take it all in and take all the photographs to remember it by, especially when there are a lot of tour groups from the boat littering the pathways……It was busy!

Finally, we got to see the Petra we had seen in magazines. What Jonathan remembers as a child of say seven or eight having an encyclopaedia on his bookshelf that he received as a Christmas present and within those pages was a picture of Petra and he was inspired by that. That picture stayed in his brain, parked up somewhere and today it was to become more than a picture.

Petra is located with a narrow extremely high canyon, now when we say narrow we mean narrow. This allowed enough light to shine through but also kept the town shaded ad the rocks made for great natural shade and also for safety from attackers.

So the history of Petra is huge and far to much to go into here but predominantly it made its place in history and its wealth from being a trading city. Goods passed in and out of the town until it was abandoned and its whereabouts forgotten except by those of the Bedouin tribes only to be rediscovered by a Swiss explorer posing as an Arab tricking them into revealing its location again for the world…..I say thank heavens for the Swiss!!

You enter Petra through The Siq as it is called. The Siq is a narrow gorge approximately 1 mile long. Along the side of of each side of the canyon face are water ways , tunnels and troughs used to carry water down into the heart of the city. These troughs even had built in filtration systems to take out any loose stone or sand sediment. All this carved out of the hard stone. The sky is just visible as is like a slit keeping the gorge cool and shaded. The rock itself was originally one piece but a natural split took place forming The Siq. If ever there was an impressive entrance way into an ancient city, this was certainly it. The colour of the rocks changed as you looked up the canyon walls, like looking at the rings in a cut down tree these colour changes in the rock showed the eras of time that had past and the change in sea levels. The surface of the rocks themselves was smooth and almost shiny. In places you would pass more tombs and dwellings in the rocks themselves along with intricate carvings that once would have lined the rock faces depicting market scenes and camels and important traders that would have paid for them in the first place. Now you can just about make out their shapes and scale but enough to imagine what a spectacle it would have been for anyone entering into Petra all those years ago. Frankly you would have been blown away.

Every step is a photograph, every step a step into history and wonder. Horse cartages raced past you even on these narrow stretches and boy hawkers tried to sell their goods of bracelets and postcards, everything was a dollar! As you winded in and out of the gorge you stared to see glimpses of probably the greatest building of them all in Petra. The building that had been in Jonathans encyclopaedia all those years ago. That building is called The Treasury.

As you step in front of the treasury it just takes your breath away. You leave the steep walls of the gorge behind you and enter into a kind of town square surrounded by tall rock formation and the treasury is literally carved out by hand into the rock face. What a feat of sheer human determination and blood sweat and tears. Its facade is fascinating, intricate and unworldly. Its pinkish, orange stone creates an early feel of unworldliness we have never experienced before. So intact is the façade itself that you can really imagine life and the people that would visit Petra. Now the town square was just as busy but filled with tourists and camels and donkeys all available for hire to take you back up the mile of the siq should you choose. Away from the Treasury are other tombs and houses and carved building but the Treasury itself consumes you, it grabs you and your eyes and does not let go of them, you literally have to pull your eyes off them and force yourself to walk away.

So what was / is the treasury? The Treasury is forty meters high and is an intricate façade complete with those Corinthian columns (remember what we said about those when we visited Corinth in Greece?) The façade itself in crowned with a funery urn that legend has it houses a pharaohs treasure. It was probably constructed (so we were told) in the 1st century BC. Now with a name like The Treasury you might presume that the building itself was a bank, where money was exchanged for goods but this is not the case. The exact use of The Treasury is actually unknown but the thought is that it was actually just built to impress the traders arriving into Petra and its primary usage was that of a place of worship, a temple and / or a tomb.

Leaving the crowds behind at the treasury we headed of towards the roman amphitheatre this was a later addition to Petra as the town expanded through the years but it is the only amphitheatre actually carved out of the rock face. We also passed some royal tombs and those of high dignitaries all with weathered facades, all very impressive.

We had now been walking around Petra for the best part of three and a half hours and it was time to start thinking about walking back to the town up the dusty mule ridden track and back up through the gorge. The trip included a lunch back at a hotel in the town and we had to be there by three thirty so we started the slow slow trundle back along the rocks and grit and sand to the town taking in all the majesty and history of this place one more time.

We did not get to see all of Petra, just not enough time there on a cruise trip but we saw enough to really say we had ben and seen and taken in as much as you can. It truly deserves to be labelled one of the seven wonders of the modern world as it truly is. Being here today was special and I’m sure that we will think about this day for a long time to come. For now it was time to head for some air conditioning, brace the hill and leave these special ruins behind. Thank you Petra for being everything that we wanted you to be and more. You have inspired and made us think about things we have never thought before.

Back in Petra town we went to our designated hotel for lunch, to be honest this was a real feast of local Jordanian specialities like the slow cooked whole lamb with spiced rice and yogurt and hummus and dips made of artichoke and other vegetables you had never heard of. The sweets were sticky and sweet, wrapped pastries and sticky rice’s etc., all really really tasty. Unfortunately we ended up sitting on a table with this Australian guy who kept going on and on and he slowly drove the rest of the table away, us being British, we were polite to the end and put up with his political ranting and constant commentary on everything…..in the end we excused ourselves for the garden and some shade away from all his noise and waited for the time to re-board the coach back to the boat.

Half past five came and the coach set back off the road that we had come to Petra on, passing the same sights, taking in more of the Bedouin lands and the desserts that make up this country. The coach came to a complete standstill for the best part of half an hour due to a crash on the road. A container carrying lorry had caught fire and had jack-knifed and overturned on the road ahead with a burnt out cab. We had actually passed this on the other side of the road on our way to Petra but it had not affected our travel now were sat in a queue of traffic amongst the other container lorries and oil tankers all trying to get through the narrow gap, as recovery was still in progress.

We got back to the boat as darkness had fallen, it had been a really long day and we were both feeling tired and dirty from the dust of Petra so it was straight on board and showered to get the dessert out of our skin.

With neither of us feeling particularly hungry and due to our late arrival back on board we just headed for the windjammer for something to eat. We were on a bit of a mission as we wanted to go and see the show in the theatre at 21:00. It was a female singer who had previously starred in Les Miserables on stage as Fontaine and she was a real treat, great voice. She sang a mixture of songs from the shows, Barbara Streisand, Whitney Houston you know the kind of really big diva numbers.

After the theatre we met up with Martin and Michael again, exchanged notes on the day. They had booked a private tour of Petra and it sounded like they got a better deal both in cost and in what they got to see and have explained. They too were off to the theatre to hear the Diva Lindsay Hamilton sing having seen her before (they are after all diamond plus cruisers don’t you know…..we don’t mix with the riff raff!).

We said our goodnights and armed with a nightcap we headed for bed and some down time.

What a truly busy. Long, dusty but magical day. Great sights, great show and great to experience something so unique and inspiring.

Once again we feel blessed!