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Here are the photos. Be amazed :-)
Petra is everything they say it is. Go there, but make sure you're fit. It takes about half an hour to walk into the place, down a long initially quite dusty pathway which then goes inside a gorge where the pathway has been concreted. The action really starts when you get to the end of the gorge and are confronted by the Treasury sculpture/building/thing. This is the best preserved of the buildings carved into the cliff faces throughout the city, because it is protected from the wind by being inside a gorge. You can still see the detail in some of the corinthian columns although funnily you can also see a number of bullet holes! There is a vase at the top which some thought must contain treasure and, lacking scaffolding or other means of checking this in a manner acceptable to archeologists, they simply decided to shoot it to see if anything would fall out. It must have dawned on them before too long that it was solid rock...
There are two other main attractions at Petra. One is a good 40 minutes' walk from the Treasury, the Monastery. This is up about 800 steps and is actually bigger than the Treasury but less well preserved, being fully exposed to the elements. The other is the royal tombs, just around the corner out of the gorge, to the right, from the Treasury. This had the biggest room that I was able to walk into - and apparently the Treasury's room is quite small. No one is able to walk into that anymore as too many people were putting graffiti there. You will see in the photos that there is some amazing colouring in the rock ceiling.
The buildings were made fairly easily. Apparantly they simply piled sand up as high as needed to carve whatever section they were working on, removing sand as they went down. Simple! A guide took me through the first day and I highly recommend this. I was lucky to have him to myself as I arrived a couple of hours before closing time, actually getting back just as it was getting dark. He pointed out a half made carved set of rooms, you could see this because three side by side were partly done, then there was just gravel, the rooms were about a metre high up from this level. Another thing the guide pointed out was that there is a huge number of rooms still to be uncovered because the dam which protected the city from flooding collapsed at some point, allowing water, stones and sand to flow down the gorge again into the city. I got the impression that half of the place was still to be revealed, and the guide said it would be worth another visit in a decade for this reason.
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