Petra, Jordan (N 30º 19.352', E 35º 27.091')
We woke up well before the crack of dawn in Jerusalem and boarded the bus after breakfast. We drove to Jericho and crossed the Allenby Bridge to Jordan. After waiting for a couple of hours (that is what customs and immigration usually takes there) we headed toward Petra. On the way there we stopped by a little restaurant which had large serving trays of Hummus, Tubule, and Pita bread…I would have been happy to spend the rest of the day there, but we had to move on. We stopped at Ain Mousa, the spring that formed when Moses struck the rock (and got into trouble see Numbers 20:11.) Since the Mosque was under construction, we were able to go inside and see the spring. We got to Petra in the early afternoon. It is a bit of a hike through the siq to the stone structures, but we took horses led by some locals there. That is also the place I learned that I was allergic to horses. It is one of the most magnificent places I have been to. Unfortunately we only had about 45 minutes to walk around. We did get to see several of the structures including the Treasury, which you might recognize from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and the Roman Amphitheater in that short amount of time.
We hit the road for the long ride back to Amman. It was a two-lane road that went from the port at Aqaba through Jordan to Iraq. The Iran-Iraq war was going on at that time and since Iraq had no port, the supplies had to go through Aqaba along that road. The poor little road was getting pounded pretty badly. It was being rebuilt into a four-lane highway at the time we were going through. That evening, while we were still on the road, the road workers had to do some blasting so the traffic was herded to a large open area out of the way. An ice cream truck was stopped right next to our bus! One of our group asked our guide (Mohammed) to see if we could buy some ice cream from the driver of the truck. Mohammed went over there and talked with the driver for a while and they both came back with a box full of ice cream bars. He started handing them out to us and Mohammed explained that the compressor broke on the ice cream truck and it was all melting anyway so we got the ice cream for free!!! After the blasting our bus driver (Ahmed) was able to thread our bus through the crowd and got us back on the road ahead of a lot of the other traffic. He saved us a lot of time. Finally, about nine at night, we got to our hotel in Amman. They had a large buffet dinner waiting for us. It was a good day!
