Petra

the treasury

If there is one place you see before you die, forget about the eiffel tower, forget about the colisseum, forget about minnesota (I know you were debating this one;)....and make it Petra. First walking down the siq (a rock canyon) towards the stunning treasury was an unforgettable and indescribable experience. The Nabateans were skillfull carvers that way back around 300 or so bc carved tons of tombs out of the rocks. However, the impressive thing about it was the geological landscape. The rocks were incredible...pictures are unable to capture the beauty of them...the various shades and concavity of the rocks were beyond words. In different sunlight, the rocks were different colors....reds, tans, browns all in different layers and patterns. Pretty sweet place. We spent two days exploring Petra, although I'm convinced that it could be done in one. The first day we went along the main path and saw all the big sites, including a trek up a hill to the monastery. The second we spent hiking along one of the many paths. Trekked around with two 30-some year old aussies named Hulgar and Nathan, which pretty much describes itself...I mean, how can you beat hiking with Hulgar?! Well, I guess we kinda did, by grabbing beers afterwards in a 2000 some year old cave bar...which was, well cold and dark, but the company was fun. Dinners at valentines were amazing....for 4 JD, we got a buffet style dinner with around 20 amazing vegetarian dishes of homemade Jordanian food. It was pretty great.

petra

Took a bus to Aqaba where we got tickets for the ferry to Nuweiba, Egypt. It was pretty hilarious how unorganized and lack of directions there were....we first went up to the second floor of this building to buy tickets, where we had to go across the hall to the bank to pay for it, and then go down to the first floor to pay a departure tax, and then go back to the second floor to get our passports stamped...there were no directions or signs to this all so it was figured out by wandering around and showing up to windows where they would point us in the right direction, along with a few fairly confusing english words. We finally made it though and grabbed a bite to eat, and wondered where we would get on the ferry until I found out we had to take another bus to the ferry, so we took off so we could catch the ferry before it left. The ferry was fairly uneventful and longer than expected although apparently in the opposite direction in can be delayed (and often is) by as much as 12 hours! We ran into a tour guide who basically got kicked out of Jordan for bureacratic reasons, so she gave us the downlow on what to do (since the officials seem to let you do whatever-they are great at telling you what not to do, but tend to fail when it comes to telling you what you should do;).

From Nuweiba we immediately jumped on a bus to Dahab, which is basically a backpackers/diving central and heaven for sore eyes;) More to come....