Turns out this Artzuid thing was already happening when I landed, and the day I finally noticed it was the second to last day! It’s Amsterdam’s (the Netherlands’s_ biennial outdoor sculpture exhibition, in parks belts along some lovely lanes not far from my place. Wish I’d found time to tune in before…guess I’ll try again in 2023 :-).
We begin my second day, my truly full day, in Petra with this iconic image of the Treasury as you see it when you reach the end of the Siq. This image was taken before 7am, and I was hurrying through to begin the climb up the cliffs to the right in this photo, on a trail tucked behind the wall of the Royal Tombs cliff. I will leave the full date-time info intact and add identifications to the names of these photos, and I’m going to post them in order taken while I walked it, at least for the set that covers this morning that morning. I climbed up, waited with only myself for company as I watched the sun slowly rise high enough to illuminate first the very top of the Treasury, then slowly descend to illuminate the whole façade. It was one of the most precious and memorable mornings I’ve thus far lived, and I hope the photos presented this way will help you experience it a bit vicariously as I saw it myself, walking along :-).Â
Many of you fabulous readers have been posting comments or writing me privately to say you’re still loving this steady trickle of Petra photos. It’s amazing, indeed…and another amazing thing is that so far I’ve only shown you about half of the terrain. 🙂 The photo above is looking down from the Wadi al Farasa trail, toward what that map I posted earlier calls the Colonnaded Street. The tent you see? It’s covering the Byzantine Church, which has quite lovely mosaics (as one would expect of a Byzantine Church, correct?) that I guess need more protection from the elements than all these toughest, oldest Nabataean ruins do. Below, you can see two photos of what the brochure tells us is the only amphitheater in the world which is carved *out* of the rocky hillside, rather than built into it. In other words: to create the rows, they didn’t add blocks of stone in rows; they carved rows of benches out of the surrounding rocky hillside. And they did all of this more than 2,000 years ago. And of course an afternoon shot of the Treasury, that single most famous place in Petra. So much more ahead…so I hope you’ll continue to find it worth coming back for, from day #2 where we’ll see the Byzantine Church, the building called The Monastery (way upper left, on that map I included in Petra.3), and oh so very much more. Stay tuned and keep coming back :-).
We begin my second day, my truly full day, in Petra with this iconic image of the Treasury as you see it when you reach the end of the Siq. This image was taken before 7am, and I was hurrying through to begin the climb up the cliffs to the right in this photo, on a trail tucked behind the wall of the Royal Tombs cliff. I will leave the full date-time info intact and add identifications to the names of these photos, and I’m going to post them in order taken while I walked it, at least for the set that covers this morning that morning. I climbed up, waited with only myself for company as I watched the sun slowly rise high enough to illuminate first the very top of the Treasury, then slowly descend to illuminate the whole façade. It was one of the most precious and memorable mornings I’ve thus far lived, and I hope the photos presented this way will help you experience it a bit vicariously as I saw it myself, walking along :-). 
