It was another early morning, and it was quite cold too! We ended up sleeping in socks and long underwear since it was so cold, but between that and the 4 blankets we had we kept warm through the night! Breakfast was at 7 and consisted of pita, hummus, feta that looked homemade and was more the consistency of cream cheese, and hardboiled eggs. We packed up our things and took a few more pictures of the camp, the camels and the surroundings. Then we loaded our gear in the pickup to make our way back to Rum Village.

Our driver, Zaid, was a bit late meeting us because of the fog he ran into coming from Amman (he left his house at 4am to pick us up at 8:30!). That surprised us a bit since it was overcast in Wadi Rum, but not overly so. As we drove it started to rain and the higher we went the more fog we ran into. There were definitely some spots where he had to slow way down and turn his flashers on. We were supposed to stop at some lookout points throughout the two hour drive to Petra, but since you couldn't see more than 2 cars ahead of you, it didn't really make sense to stop. So, for me it meant nap time since there was really nothing to see!

I awoke as we were entering Petra city. I hadn't realized it was actually a small city, I thought it would be a relatively small town, so it was larger than expected. It was still very cold, raining and foggy, and we were getting nervous that we really wouldn't enjoy our Petra tour at this point. We talked to Zaid about possibly cancelling and trying it tomorrow, but our Petra guide talked us into going today since there is a chance of snow tonight! It all worked out well. After getting situated in the hotel, adding some layers and brushing our teeth we met our guide for our tour. At that point the rain stopped and the fog cleared! We did a three hour tour with our guide, Ali. He was born and raised in Petra, so he knew all about the site, had helped with at least one of the excavations and had a few secret picture spots that he took us to. It was very nice.

Petra is a Unesco World Heritage site, where the Nabataeans basically carved a city into the sandstone mountains. It's ridiculous how detailed and huge some of the structures are, knowing that they did it all by hand, often while standing on ladders. Ali took us down through the caverns explaining the different gods that were worshipped, the different types of people that lived in Petra including the invasions by Romans, Crusaders, etc. and facts about the different groups that helped with the excavations. It was very interesting that even in the first couple of centuries they had already mastered plumbing for a city of about 20,000 people. They had troughs bringing water into the city that had various filters throughout, as well as workers to make sure trees or other debris didn't clog it, and they had ways to get dirty water out of the city. After the tour Ali pointed us to the stairs up to the Monastary, one of the main attractions of Petra. We were tired, and knew it was going to be difficult, but we did it…we climbed 850 steps up to the Monastary. At that point we definitely weren't cold anymore! It was quite a site! It was huge and the pictures won't do it justice. At that point we were ready to be done, but we had quite a ways to go. We had to walk down the 850 steps, through the entire park and most of that was going to be back uphill (the majority of the park is in the valley of the mountains)! We made it back to the hotel, luckily for us it's the first hotel outside the gates of the park! We relaxed for a couple of hours before our Zaid picked us up for our cooking class.

Our cooking class was at the Petra Kitchen. We had a group of 13 people from the US, UK, Chile and Germany. We made about 9 different dishes as a group! It was quite fun to see how some of the things we eat in the US, like baba ghanoush and lentil soup, are actually made. Plus we made lots of dishes that I had never heard of before! We were broken up into two groups and each given a chef to watch over us to make sure we didn't mess anything up. There was a lot of chopping of tomatoes, onions, garlic, potatoes, etc. Lucky for Kevin he is used to having someone look over his shoulder while he is prepping food, so having the chef watch over him was nothing new! Once we had everything for a dish prepped the chef would take us to the stovetop where we would all have a job to do: adding salt, tomatoes, garlic or stirring the pot, etc. The most difficult job was the one who had to come back in five or ten minutes to stir it all up again! At the end of the night we had about enough food for double the size of our group. Luckily some of the guides stayed to watch the class so they got dinner as did all of the chefs and the dishwasher! Kevin and I liked the same dish the best, it was the "bride's sandwich", araies lahma. It consisted of ground lamb with onion, chili, garlic, tomatoes and cumin, spread inside a pita that was coated with olive oil and backed in the oven. It came out crispy and delicious. We then topped it with galayat bandura, a dish of sautéed tomatoes with garlic, chili and pine nuts. The main dish, magluba (literally translated "upside down") was also delicious though. It was a dish of boiled chicken, rice, eggplant, cauliflower, and then cumin, turmeric and some other seasonings. It paired very nicely with the cucumber and yogurt salad that we made. We left stuffed and happy!

It is raining again and still very cold. There is a chance of snow tonight too!! We decided to start a little later tomorrow since we had such a long day today, and hopefully that will give the sun some time to burn off some of the expected fog again. Tomorrow we make our way through some of the Biblical sites of Jordan on our way to the Dead Sea.

Keely