camels – This Year in Jerusalem

Well, after another holiday (a whole week this time! Thanks, Sukkot!), some of the fellows and I decided we would go to Jordan for a few days to see Petra and Wadi Rum.

So Jenna, Ines, Will, Jake, and I packed up and shipped off to Jordan.

We started off in Jerash, a city known for its beautifully maintained Roman ruins. Our guide, Mahdi, says that they are the best maintained ruins in the Middle East, “and maybe even the world!” (I’m not so sure I side with Mahdi on that one, but the hyperbole worked in the moment. These ruins are so well-maintained because of an earthquake from a long long time ago that buried them in sand. They were only rediscovered in 1806, and have been carefully rebuilt and restored over the past 200 years (see photos below for highlights from Jerash).

After that, we toured around Amman – the capital of Jordan – on the bus. I would say it’s a cool city, but I didn’t see much of it due to my very uncomfortable bus nap, but the crew told me I didn’t miss much. What I did see reminded me of what Jerusalem might have looked at 30 years ago.

We headed from Amman straight to our Bedouin “camp.” I put “camp” in quotes because it was not a camp. It was a glampground. There were insulated tents, with actual beds, a huge firepit where they walked around serving us the sweetest tea I’ve ever tasted, hot meals, running water… You get the picture. It was nice.

The next morning, we headed to Petra. All I have to say about Petra is:

WOW.

Petra is one of the seven wonders of the world. And now that I’ve been there, I totally see why. We had just over 8 hours there, and I still feel like I didn’t have enough time to see everything I could have (again, photos below).

Details to note about Petra:
• People were actually living there until the 1980s when the Jordanian government asked them to move so that they could declare it as a UNESCO Heritage Site.
• It’s probably been inhabited since 9,000 BC.
• After it was abandoned by people in the early Byzantine Era, it remained unlived in until it was rediscovered in 1812.
• Probably the most famous line every written about it is: “A rose-red city half as old as time” (John William Burgon).

Also: it’s really freaking cool.

You start with a walk through the canyon, with enough ruins and wall carvings to show you a lot about the Nabateans, who inhabited Petra (many eons ago). Then, you emerge on, possibly the most famous ruin in Petra, the Treasury. Although you cannot go in, the outside is majestic enough. Although it’s called a treasury, historians and archeologists have actually discovered that it’s a burial ground, and you can actually see the tombs below the building. It’s all very historical, which might, at face value, sound boring. I assure you, it’s not.

You continue walking and you see the Royal Tombs, the theatre, the old temple… It’s all so incredible, and much of it is not pictured below only because I felt my photos to be inadequate to just how cool Petra was.

Now, you may be thinking: Emily, calm down with the praise of Petra. You might be overdoing it. And if you are thinking that, you probably haven’t been to Petra.

Anyway, after lunch, we climbed to the top of Petra – up 800 steps (in about 39 degree celsius weather) – to the Monastery. And just… wow. The fact that people were living in Petra up until the 1980s is pretty incredible just due to the fact that, while at the Monastery, I was looking around thinking, imagine if this was your morning coffee view.

After Petra, we spent a little bit of the next day in Wadi Rum on a jeep tour. You might recognize Wadi Rum from movies like “The Martian,” or “Lawrence of Arabia,” or “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusader,” or even “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” So yeah, it’s picturesque.

The sand is endless in Wadi Rum. (But Emily, of course the sand is endless. It’s a desert!) I don’t mean that I wasn’t expecting to be surrounded by sand in the desert because, hello, that seems obvious. I just mean that, at one point, standing atop a sand dune, the sand around us literally looked like it went on forever. It’s actually both breathtakingly beautiful and also slightly ominous at the same time.

All in all, the trip was great (or couldn’t you tell?), and I’m so grateful and glad that I got the privilege to go.