Our World Travels...

Eric and Laura in front of the Treasury. Petra rocks! Wow! This place was amazing in so many ways. We saw so many neat things here, and had quite a few adventures and stories from this place, as you will see below. For those of you who don’t know, this was a city carved into sandstone mountains of southern Jordan around the 1st century AD, and was the capital of the Nabatean Empire. It was annexed by Rome hundreds of years later. The city lies along the ancient silk and spice caravan trade routes, and thrived on bringing goods through the desert. We took a small bus from Amman, which was super full. We had to stack our backpacks on top of some backpacks of a group of South Koreans for the sake of leg room. A three hour ride for 5 Dinars ($7) each. Not too bad, but no air conditioning. The ride was interesting , but mostly desert on each side, just like we had seen before. We stayed up on the hill, in the town of Wadi Musa, which is about one and a half miles from the entrance to Petra.

Amman East, here we come!!! This city was such a surprise for us. We had some assumptions, but we really didn’t know what to expect from Amman. We had read our Lonely Planet guide book, but nothing truly prepared us for Jordan as a whole, which we found to be a wonderful and awe inspiring place. Our journey into Amman started with getting to the border from Jerusalem. It was Saturday, the Jewish day of rest, and we needed to cross the west bank, so we had to get a Muslim taxi driver to take us. Luckily, the staff at our hotel were very knowledgeable and gave us a name of a cab company (Abdo Cabs) in the Muslim quarter of the old city that would take us. They were right outside of the Damascus Gate, and we found it easily. We hopped in the cab, after a short wait for other passengers, and headed out through the West Bank to the border crossing. This was an interesting ride, because one always hears on the news how dangerous the Palestinian territories are. We found it to be quite nice,