Jordan Rocks. Literally.

So it turns out that Jordan really IS getting better and better with every passing day. At this rate, at some point I won't even be able to handle how awesome it is!

Yesterday on the trip to the Dead Sea, we met Tibor and Bela, two Hungarian guys who are backpacking through Jordan for about a week. We got to talking and once we realized we were all planning to go to Petra today, we figured we would go together as four heads are always better than two, especially when trying to figure out the seemingly random Jordanian transportation system.

It's about a 3-hour trip to Petra from Amman and we managed to get there, find a hostel and make it to the park by around 1:00. We bought a 2-day pass and figured we would spend the first day mostly just getting a sense of it and its layout and then we would know better what we really wanted to focus on when coming back tomorrow.

Petra is one of the new Seven Wonders of the World, a long-lost ancient city that was rediscovered in the 1800s. It's a city that is carved into the sides of rock mountains in the middle of the desert. The sheer size and detail of some of the buildings is truly staggering, especially when you think that the work was done by hand about 2,000 years ago with crude tools. Incomprehensible.

The span of the city is rather large, about 4 km (2.5 miles) so it's a pretty massive thing to walk around and see. You start off by walking about 1 km (over 1/2 mile) through the sik alone, a mountain that was naturally split by an earthquake thousands of years ago. That part in and of itself is impressive, like you almost feel that even if that was all there was to it, it would be amazing enough. But then towards the end of it, it gets even narrower and you start to get glimpses of a building and all of a sudden you walk out into the wide open and right in front of you is the mammoth Treasury building. Stunning.

We spent the rest of the afternoon taking in the grandeur and the scale of it all, looking at other buildings and the open-air theater and hiking up to caves/rooms (presumably where the people lived) carved higher up in the mountains. We scaled high stairs and mountains to get up to a magnificent stretch of tombs. The view from there looking down on the rest of the town was a-ma-zing.

More walking, more marveling until we reached the point where we figured we should head back out for the evening. We were only about 3/4 of the way in at that point and it took us nearly an hour and a half to walk back out from there. In the blazing sun. Uphill.

We got back to the hostel a sweaty, smelly, dusty mess. But, for the first time since leaving the guys' house in Istanbul, we were able to take a hot shower (our hostel in Amman only has cold water, despite the fact that they advertised hot... when I asked the guy at the desk about it, he said that they DO have hot water. I said it was not hot. He said they had it. I said they didn't. He said it's on 24 hours a day. I repeated the part about it being cold. He shrugged. I shrugged. We parted ways.). It really is funny how traveling can make you appreciate the littlest things in life. Like suddenly taking a hot shower is the biggest, best, most luxurious thing I have ever done.

And then we went down for dinner, all fresh and squeaky clean, and were blown away by the food we were served. It was one of those deals where you just order dinner, yes or no, and you get whatever they happen to be serving that night. It turns out it was all homemade and when they started bringing outside to the deck, it was like never-ending servers bringing tray after tray after tray of scrumptious, homemade, colorful, beautiful, exotic food. It was overwhelming... and delicious... and so cheap it was hard to believe.

Another most excellent day in Jordan.