Petra by Kathleen

We visited Petra over two days. Walking through the sic was amazing. The sic is a crack in the rock, 20 feet wide, 70 feet tall and 2 kms. long. The first thing you see when you come to an opening is the Treasury. It is magnificent! Rob and I had our picture taken in it with the guard and he was wearing the traditional desert uniform with his gun, bullets and knife strapped to his body.

Petra is huge! The first day we climbed to the High Place of Sacrifices, which gave us a super view over the whole site.

The next day, after walking through the sic again we visited the ruined Colonnade that was the main market back in 300BC. Then we hiked up to the Monastery, which is at the top of another mountain. It took us an hour to climb up but once there we had views of the beautiful Monastery, the site again as well as views towards Israel. We had our lunch up there, taking in the beauty all around us.

To leave the Petra site we had heard that there was another sic which we could take. The trail to this sic is not very well marked. Rob had gone over on his ankle the day before and by the end of the day it was bothering him, so we decided to hire a donkey and the owner of the donkey then showed us the way to the start of this smaller sic. This sic was terrific. It is very, very narrow, 2 feet wide and 50 feet tall and 1.5 kms long. It was very quiet in this sic as we were the only ones there. At times we were nervous wondering if we were on the right trail. Sometimes we had to climb up over big rocks, which made it an exciting adventure. We had snacks half way through and did lots of shouting to hear the wonderful echoing sounds. When we finally came out of the sic there was a sign that said “Venturing beyond this point is dangerous, without a guide.” We took our picture beside the sign and we were very happy to have tried this route by ourselves and succeed! Even though we were really tired, it made our trip to Petra very memorable.