Little Petra

Actually, we will not be making it to the Dead Sea because the King of Saudi Arabia has decided to pay Jordan a visit. I don’t know why they have to close off all access to the Dead Sea just because he is here, but what can we do? And what, exactly, makes him MORE important than us?
Today though, things were looking up for Jon and he was feeling a lot better since taking his medicine, so we teamed up with another man called Baz who was staying at the hotel and we took a taxi to a place known as ‘Little Petra’.
As we left the hotel and walked downwards towards town, we flagged down a taxi and prepared ourselves for some hard bargaining.
We asked the driver “How much to Little Petra and back?”
“Oh… It is seven JDs there and seven back, plus I wait there for one hour, so twenty-five JDs.”
The JD (Jordanian dinar) is roughly the same strength as the British pound. Through winding roads of steep ups and plummeting downs we sped in the taxi, gazing out at the marvellous rock formations that surrounded the Lost City of Petra and extended all the way to the horizon.
To cut a long story short, we ended up going to Little Petra for fifteen JDs (not twenty five) and we spent about an hour-and-a-half there, wondering through deep, sandy gorges where rivers probably once gushed water in between the natural, sand-coloured, rock formations.

Lizards scurried across the sand as we explored by walking through the ravine and climbing up rocks, with spectacular views each time, without fail. Baz and Jon revelled in the ascent up to the fantastic view-point, and Simon made it there eventually, if a little miffed…