Petra.35
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You may recall that your last glimpses of Petra were my tea stop during my walk back down from that lovely morning spent watching the sun rise high enough to shine directly on the whole “Treasury.” That trail brought me back down to the Royal Tombs, which you see in the first photo, taken from a ways down the path. Turning around to look ahead, you’d see what’s in the photo just above: the path leading onward through the Colonnaded Street towards Qasr al Bint, the Church (the real Byzantine Church), the Great Temple, and the paths leading up towards the (so-called) “Monastery,” which was yet a further one hour +/- from Qasr al Bint, which is that large free-standing structure in the distance on the photo above. Make note of it – and remark that it stands out quite literally, in that unlike nearly all other Natabataean ruins here, it’s free-standing instead of carved out of the cliff faces. Below are a few more shots taken along the walk down towards that structure and others in the basin at the base of this path. In the days ahead you’ll see more of the (real, Byzantine) churches, and other sites along the road. If you’d like to follow along and have a sense of what’s yet to come, remember I put a map (click on that word) in one of the earlier posts here. I’ll post most of these remaining Petra posts (I’m guessing it’ll take about two more weeks to wrap up our Petra tour, depending how many posts I choose to break it into) mostly in the order in which I saw things, as I walked those paths you see on the map. It’s a very enveloping experience, being in Petra :-).
Petra.32 – Treasury Video Bonus!
One last view of the treasury, in 360-degree video reality for those of you with sufficient bandwidth to load it, so you can see me in situ at the beginning of my morning contemplating the beauty of the universe. If you’ve had enough of Petra, then … sorry, there’s still more to come, another eight hours or so of hiking and, if you go back to the map I posted in Petra.3, you will note that once I climbed back down to ground level at the base of the Royal Tombs, well…there’s a lot more of Petra left to be seen, and see nearly all of it I in fact did.
Petra.31 – Treasury Special Edition
We come to the highlight of my morning on high: sitting in stillness for a few hours as the sun rose, the day warmed, and remarkably few tourists made it up to these heights to enjoy watching the line of sun versus shadow steadily creep lower and lower on the Treasury. A reminder: it’s not a treasury, it’s a tomb. Most of these buildings were tombs, but later generations decided money must be hidden there so they called it a treasury. Above is a photo taken out of sequence, and I chose it because it gives you a sense how the Treasury sits within the cliffs and hills of the landscape, not because it’s the best view of the building itself. 🙂
There’s a lot more of Petra to come – also more from Jerash and Amman. I hope the rest of the photos below this will appear: I’ve had trouble with more complicated formats so it’s possible they will disappear, as they did when I first put this post up yesterday….It’s a lot more of this building then you ever thought you’d want to see, but it was a lovely morning.
Petra.23
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 :-). 
Petra.22
(so much world, so little time....) 