(Her: Joanna)
To minimize the time being in the heat and sun, and massive
flock of tourists, we entered Petra before 8 AM. It was perfect. We got to the Siq and the Treasury with just
a few people. And the number of
donkey/horse/camel owners, and souvenir sellers to urge you to buy or use their
service were less.
We met a kid, Oman, who spoke better English than most
adult Jordanian we have encountered, persistently trying to sell us his donkey
service. I’m truly impressed with his
skill in offering us different price for different routes to lure us into
hiring him. If he had a camel instead, I
would have definitely taken his offer.
Eight hours later, we bumped into Oman again. Seeing so many tourists, Oman recognized me
and attempted for the last time to get me to take his donkey - impressive kid.
It was hard to imagine that Petra used be a place with
rivers and trees. It is all dry land
right now. I can imagine that this city
must be a beautiful place with magnificent buildings caved out of rocks. The details of the decorative craving on the
building exterior wall are already decayed but the few preserved in the museum
showed that the building used to have really impressive craving. I found Petra impressive but required some
imagination to make it magical.
