Petra at last ...

Well, I have been here over two months now and it took me nearly all that time to finally get to Petra, but boy was it worth the wait ... it was nice discovering it for the first time with my folks too, and we spent two days wandering high and low and peering into nooks and crannies together - and there is still so much to see!

So, first thing is that Petra is ENORMOUS - as I said, we spent two days there and managed to have a look at most of the main sights, but with STACKS still left to discover off the beaten track. Amazingly there are tourists who come and 'do' Petra in a couple of hours before piling back onto the tour bus ... in fact, my Mum and Alan went on the 'Petra by Night' tour, which is an evening concert in front of the Treasury (left, you know, where Indiana Jones went ...) which is very near the Petra entrance, and they overheard a couple say that they felt that they'd 'done' Petra after this (in the dark, remember) and didn't need to come back the next day! Fools!

But the plus side of this, of course, is that there are fewer tourists the further in you go, and it's fairly easy at this time of year to find yourself pretty much on your own with the Nabatean kingdom spread out below you ... fabulous!


So let me share just a few of the highlights from our two days of climbing, delving and just standing in awe and wonder ...

Walking down the 'siq' or canyon from the entrance to the Treasury (you know, the one Indiana Jones galloped down ...) at dawn, with no-one else around ... free to imagine how impressive it must have been to visitors in Nabatean times (2000 years ago) to walk down this 1km long path with carvings and tombs along the walls and cliffs towering above you ...


Then you come out of the end of the siq to have that first amazing building in front of you, the Treasury. I am sorry to confirm that there is no tunnel, there are no rolling boulders or invisible bridges and there is certainly no treasure, but that doesn't really matter when you see it and realise what an amazing task it must have been to carve this thing out of the rock face ... and what amazing stone they had to work with! Below a picture of inside the main room of the Treasury, and you can see how all the multi-coloured layers of the sandstone give it the most amazing atmosphere ...



And then there's the rest of Petra ... there is a whole city to explore, with buildings and tombs carved into the rock from ground level all the way up to the top of the mountains all around the the main city - to the right an obelisk next to the High Place of Sacrifice (they carved this out of the mountain too, can you imagine?!), and below a view of the eastern end of the main city site from above - at first it looks like just mountains and ravines, but when you look closely you can see that literally hundreds of houses have been carved into the rock, but in a way that makes it hard to see when the mountain ends and the city begins ...






One of the most extradordinary things is the variation in the colours and patterns in the rock faces - from the simplest caves to the grand tombs and temples, the Nabateans certainly didn't have to worry about interior or exterior design, although I think many of the walls and facades were plastered over ...






But most of all we spent two days staring at miles of stuff that is downright breathtaking ... nuff said ...

Food pt 7 - pudding!

As I seem to have been focussing on the savoury side of things, here's another example of the sweet end of the range - and here they don't seem to just do sweet, they do sweet with extra sweet in a sweet sauce. You think I'm exaggerating ...

So this is kunafa, which seems to be something of a national obsession. There are a few kinds, but this is my fave - something like deep fried vermicelli wrapped around what I think is some kind of soft white cheese, all mixed with huge quantities of sugar ... and then with extra rose-flavoured syrup poured over it (that's what is bubbling in the pot on the right ...)

And this is another grainy kind of kunafa, with the syrup being poured over it in a liberal manner ... I think I'm getting fat just writing this! Sorry to anyone on a post-festivities diet ...

Jordan rocks!

Well, not in a rock and roll sense, but there are certainly plenty of interesting stones and mountains to look at. It's been great having a geologist staying with me for the last couple of weeks as he's been able to throw some light on some of the great rocks all around me here - I just thought they were pretty, but apparently they're fascinating for scientists too!

So, here's a first selection of the many beautiful rock types and formations on offer - these are all from the Wadi Rum area.

As you can see pretty clearly here, there are lots of levels of rocks in Wadi Rum - the mountains there are mainly sandstone, a kind of sedimentary rock which is made by layers of sand settling under water. Sandstone is pretty soft and is easily eroded into different shapes, which is what makes Wadi Rum's mountains so varied and beautiful. Under the sandstone is a base of much older and harder granite, and you can see this base layer in some of the mountains - this is part of the darker band at the bottom of the mountain above ...

Here is a closer look at some layers - you can see how different the layers are, which is apparently because of different conditions when the layers were being created. In this photo, in the bottom section are hundreds of very fine layers which were made by a very gentle lapping sea. Then you can see that the section above, where the hand is, does not have the same layers and has little stones in it - this shows much more turbulent conditions for a period of time. Then there's a different section again, with less even layers and some higgledy-piggledy lines above that (not the correct geological term I'm sure...). So each layer has a story to tell about the earth and the weather millions of years ago ... how cool is that!


Here are a couple of examples of different kinds of erosion in the sandstone - I love the way that some of the mountains look like they've had wax dripped all over them, and others look like they've been munched by small (or not so small) burrowing animals. Both the dripping and hole effects are different types of something called tafoni, which means 'small caverns' in Italian and is to do with water dissolving some of the calcium in rocks and drawing it out. It reminds me of some modern art - and can anyone else see a monster's head in the photo on the left? Or is that just me ...



This is a different kind of weathering of sandstone, where the lower layers weather faster than the upper ones and make mushroom-shaped stones. I've included this here because they look good and also have the best geological name I've come across so far - they're called hoodoos!

And here we have our (temporarily) resident geologist in front of some 'desert varnish' - this is when a sandstone surface is covered by a thin dark coating which looks like some kind of staining. It's actually caused by colonies of bacteria that live on the surface of rocks and deposit black and red oxides on the the rock surface. Apparently it can take 10,000 years for a full coating to build up ... and over the centuries these coatings have been scratched by passing nomads with all sorts of pictures and inscriptions, such as the Thumadic inscriptions on this rock (about 2,000 years old). Do you remember covering coloured paper with black wax crayon and then scratching a picture out of it? That kind of thing ...

And then there are the real and fake fossils ... in the above photo are what looked like some kind of tubular plant or possibly animal remains fossilized in a rock. To be honest, while there were definitely other kinds of fossils in the same area, we were not sure if these were really fossils or simply 'concretions' - which in sandstone is when minerals are deposited unevenly in the sandstone (any soft-rock geologists or fossil specialists out there who can help?) In the picture below, the bobbly bits in the rock (another non-geological term I think) are definitely concretions. (Don't know what kind of finch this is by the way, again if anyone can help?)

Next week - pretty stripy rocks ...

Wierd and Wonderful Pt 1

There have been so many wierd and wonderful things that I've seen here, I've got a growing list of blogs that I've been meaning to write and haven't gotten around to ... so here is the first of a new mini-series to celebrate the strange, the funny and the very very odd things that the Middle East has to offer.

Today - gruesome practices from the past. I suppose that some of these have been practised all over the world, but if this isn't the only place where people did such things, it may certainly have been one of the first places in the world where they happened. Makes you glad that we've moved on ...

1. Plastered skulls


Found in Jericho and dated to the neolithic period. People used to take the skulls of their dead ancestors and cover them in plaster so that they could keep them in a corner of the room to be worshipped by their descendants. Check out the eyes ...

2. Child burials in pots


I've put a picture of one of these on the blog before, but they fascinate me - this one dates back to the chalcolithic period (or Copper Age, around 5th millenium BC), and archeologists think that the pots may have been buried under the living room floor to keep the child within the family circle ...

3. Trepanation


Trepanation, also called trephining, really makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end just to think about it - drilling holes in a person's head to make them feel better??! The poor guy who used to own this skull (dated to the early Bronze Age) underwent four operations - according to the museum blurb, he survived the first operation as witnessed by the small hole nearer the forehead which is almost completely healed over. As they say though, "The latter three operations were apparently less successful and he died shortly afterwards." Understatement of the century ...

Food Pt 6

The Bedouin do a good line in comfort food, and we tasted one of their dishes during a stay last week with my Mum and Alan - this is called Zarb, and is basically fantastic roasted chicken and veg ...

So, first of all you make a hole in the ground and get a good fire going in it - not sure what they did before, but these days they use a cut down oil drum to make the fire in;






Then you let the fire die down to coals, and put all the chicken pieces and veg onto a grill to put into the hole over those lovely glowing coals;



Lower the grill in, then cover with a metal lid and sand for about and hour and a half;





When the time's up, sweep all the sand off the cover (don't want sand all over the goodies);


And voila! Oodles of juicy roasted food to tuck into on a cold night in the desert ... yummy ...

Under the sea ...

One of my Xmas presents was an underwater camera mask, and I got to test it out this weekend! Unfortunately the sun decided to play hide and seek, so it was a bit too cold to stay in for very long, and I also didn't have a Micro SD card so was limited on how many photos I could take, but here are the first attempts ...

Different corals, with a purple clam shell nestled in one of the cracks

Coral covered in multicoloured Christmas Tree worms (real name!)

And last but not least, a few fish swimming around for you!

New year, new adventures

Well, another year has gone and a new decade is upon us ... no new year's resolutions again this year, apart from continuing to love and appreciate being loved by all my wonderful family and friends around the world. My world adventures continue, and I continue to learn and grow from them, even if it's sometimes a lonely road - so once again, can I invite you all to come and share them with me at any time, there are things of wonder to behold, do and eat!

If there is one thing that I wish for this year, for myself and for all, it is that we seek and find happiness, our own and that of the world around us. I keep going to go back to the Dalai Lama on this, and his wonderful book on The Art of Happiness;

"1. The purpose of life is happiness

2. Happiness is determined more by the state of one's mind than by one's external conditions, circumstances or events - at least once one's basic survival needs are met.

3. Happiness can be achieved through the systematic training of our hearts and minds, through reshaping our attitudes and outlook.

4. The key to happiness is in our own hands"

Sounds simple really - not easy, but I actually think that it may be as simple as this - all coming back to the basic question of "DOES IT MAKE ME (REALLY) HAPPY?"

So please, be happy and remember the love that I and others have for you - and have a wonderful 2010!