Jordan 🇯🇴 - Day 6 & 7 - Petra

We set off in the late morning to go visit Petra, one of the 7 world wonders. We chose to stay at Dana when going there for the day as it was only a 45 minutes drive.

We got there just after lunchtime, close to the visitor center because we thought would be where to start.

However, as soon as we got there, a very adamant taxi driver came to us to explain what there is to do in Petra and how to get around. He immediately submerged us with information we couldn’t keep up with, so we agreed to his offer to bring us to the back entrance of the Monastery. 

To be fair, it was a good idea, the hike up to the monastery from the back was very nice, but the way he did it was just to get us to get a ride from him and take our money.

The plan he told us and we agreed to was to leave the car at the visitor center, he drives us to the back entrance of the monastery they call Little Petra, and we walk the back through the monastery and the old village to the car. We would also come back the next day to see the rest as we would only have time to see the monastery.

Instead of paying for a taxi, we simply could’ve driven ourselves to Little Petra, walk to the monastery and back through the back entrance, then the next day leave the car at the visitor center and enter through the regular entrance.

Even though it wasn’t a great start to the day, it was still a very enjoyable walk through the jordanian landscape.

However, we ran into complications again on our way to the monastery…

At the first sort of rest area with a tent and benches, at the very start of the mountain part, we met some other tourists who were also trying to get to the monastery. They left at the same time as us from Little Petra, but quickly overtook us because we stopped to have a picnic, and we take our time when hiking to look closely at our surroundings.

They told us that it wasn’t possible to continue up to the monastery, they walked for an hour but reached a dead end after a while.

We were very surprised but still preferred to be cautious, so mum stayed back and Jonathan and I quickly continued further to see if we could find the dead end they were talking about. 

We weren’t surprised to find there was no such dead end, we even saw other people going the other way who told us to just keep going and follow the path to the monastery.

At this point we called mum to tell her to continue walking now to avoid wasting too much time.

We arrived at the monastery well before she did, so we got to enjoy the sight a bit more before sunset. I still dont know where these people thought there was a dead end.

By the time mum got to the monastery, the sun was already setting, so we quickly went up to a viewpoint to enjoy the last rays of sun of the day.

Once the sun had gone, we started the 3-hour walk back down to the car.

We saw along the way a lot of police and military forces, which seemed very strange. We later found out it was because during the night, some local people try to set up little shops along the paths of Petra, but they aren’t authorised to so the police is trying to fight against them.

One person did ask us for our admission tickets at one point, to make sure we were actually tourist who were just hanging about after hours.

We eventually got to the car without any problems and drove back to Dana. The lovely people at the camp had kept over some food for us to have once we got back.

The next day we took our time to sleep in after the long day, and had breakfast in bed.

Our plan was to go back to Petra to finish visiting what we hadn't seen yet, however, when we got there the tickets we took with the Jordan Pass the day before weren't valid...

When we took our tickets the day before we clearly asked for two days, and the person at the desk said we could take another one day ticket tomorrow. but when we tried to do that, they told us only one entrance to Petra was included.

We were obviously unhappy again and felt like we'd been lied to, so we decided to just leave.