Welcome to Petra, Day 2

On our second day, we ventured out without a tourguide, and saw many of the things we had seen from on-high the day before. Adam was impressed by the Nabatean forum, which had great acoustics. This is a view from the side.

And here is a picture of Monica in the forum.

We tried to capture the essense of the size of the forum; see if you can find Adam (very tiny) in the seats.

After the forum, we walked along the colonnaded street; some of the columns were better preserved than others.

Only one free-standing building remains in Petra, damaged but not completely toppled by earthquakes. It was amazing in itself.

Here is a picture of Monica in front of the building.

This is a picture of what we think was a necropolis (city of the dead).

After pausing to eat oranges we bought the night before, we set out on a hike up to al-Deir, the Monastery, which we didn't realize was really that far away. It took almost 2 hours to hike there, but only 45 minutes to hike back (coming back it was downhill all the way).

At the top/end of the hike, we realized it was worth it; here is a picture of Monica guzzling water while she catches her breath; the Monastery is in the background.

And here is Adam in front of the Monastery.

Across from the building is a cave-restaurant that sells bottled water for the low price of a half-dinar (70 cents). I'm sure the owner could charge a lot more and still sell the same quantity. We bought three bottles.

A kind Brit took this photo of us in front of the Monastery.

On the hike back, we paused to see the Lion's Trinculum, but didn't see any lions.

Once we made it back to the colonnaded street, we thought we would splurge, so we ate a fabulous lunch (took a real photo, not a digital one; sorry) at a linen-tablecloth-and-silver-utensil restaurant; it wasn't until we got the bill that we were surprised. It was only 16 dinars ($22 or so) for the two of us.

So we decided to splurge and took a camel ride back. Unfortunately, the bedouin wanted 18 dinars for the ride, and we thought that was too much, so we bargained him down to 13 dinars (in the end we gave him a $20 bill, which was about the same).

He seemed none too pleased to have to lower the price, so we think that maybe to spite us he decided to speed up the trip.

The photo above is of Adam on the camel behind me; I have no idea how the real photos came out, because we were bumping along at quite a trot. But luckily the digital camera allowed me to see immediately afterward how the picture came out; I even deleted a few on the way, and re-shot them. This was the best.

Or maybe this was.

After the ride, the bedouin hissed and my camel plopped suddenly down; I tried to get a real picture of Adam on his camel while it was standing, but I got an action shot instead as the bedouin hissed and the camel began to plop down.

That was pretty much the end of our trip in Petra; after our walk back out through the siq we hailed a cab to take us back to the Petra Internet Cafe for a short while (we had wanted to take more pictures the night before but the digital camera's battery was running low). The pictures below are from our afternoon visit, before we headed back to Eilat.

Adam in Petra's Internet Cafe.

The inside of the computer room (Hisham has 7 PCs not including his own).

Monica working on one of the PCs, with Hisham behind her.

Adam relaxing inside the cafe on Saturday afternoon (we sipped a Coke and watched Iraqi soap operas for a short while, and our taxi driver drank his Turkish coffee).

View from the cafe part of the Internet Cafe into the computer part.

Anyway, so ended Day 14 (March 27). To read a recap of the trip (a post-mortem, if you will), click here.

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Last updated on July 7, 1999.