Day 3 Monday 31st May 2010, Wadi Musa, Petra.

'You are more than welcome'

Today's breakfast was pretty much the same as yesterday only the cold scambled egg was replaced with a warm hard boiled version and a choice of coffee!

Wow Jordan is so expensive, to get into the Petra site it costs 38 dinars for 2 days that is about £40! Thankfully we didn't come later in the year when the price of the same ticket will rise to 55 dinars.

Oh my god it is so worth every piastre (Jordan pennies) though. After walking down a long dirt track you reach the damn where a river has been diverted through an 88m hand cut tunnel to leave its old course dry to use as an entry to Petra city. As you walk down the bed of this now dry river you marvel at the gorge it has cut over the millennia into the sandstone rocks above you. It is incredibly beautiful, nature at its very best. They call it the Siq.

After about 1.5 Km walking down the Siq you near the end and catch your first glimpses of the sunlit building facing the end of the Siq, the Treasury. It is revealed slowly by the receding walls of the gorge, like the stage of a theatre as the curtains are slowly drawn apart. Wow, when you reach the clearing in front of this building it strikes you by its size and the way it has been cut from the massive block of the gorges face, it must be five stories high, amazing!

It was here were we met a Bedouin guy who we instantly christened Johnny Depp as he looked like captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribean. Turns out Johnny Depp is a bit of a bigot though!

Once we had our fill of being amazed by the treasury, we headed off the main track to get away from all the people on a loop through the mountains, visiting the less busy Petra sights as we went. We got a bit lost on the way down so we decided to ask a couple of policemen on horses where Petra city centre was. After about 5 minutes of them chatting in Arabic over our map we gave up and stumbled off down the track we were on to find we had reached our destination. We say the city centre meaning what was the city centre, now it's just a load of rocks and rubble!

In Petra city centre the buildings are free standing instead of being carved from rock faces, but non the less impressive. The Temple was the one that stood out as it was absolutely massive it even has a couple of floors!

After all this we were pretty tired so we made our way back to town. Walking back down the Siq was even more impressive than before as now the sun had moved to light up different parts of the rock faces, amazing!