Our Trip to Jordan

Whew.... what an experience! We just got back from three days in Jordan... and I. am. tired. We had a great time though, and I'd like to share some of the photos of what we saw, along with a little bit of explanation. I'm going to post them all small, and you can click any of them to enlarge and see more detail. I took over 200 photographs, but I will try to pick the best ones to show you....
Ready? Here we go....

We actually got to visit three different Biblical lands on our journey. The first stop on our trip was to a place called Jerash. Jerash is in the land of the Ammonites, in modern day Amman. It is an ancient Roman city, now in ruins. They have only excavated a portion of the city, since some of the modern homes were built on top of the ruins. The part that they have uncovered is massive... it was a very large, popular city when it was still inhabited. It was odd to see this type of architecture in the middle of the Jordanian desert. It was very obvious that the Romans wanted to leave their mark on this city they had conquered. This first picture is at the entrance to the city.

This is called the "Oval Plaza". I'm not sure what it was used for, but it's size suggests something spectacular. Here is a section up close:
And this is the entire Plaza from a distance. You can really see why it was called the Oval Plaza.

Here is the amphitheater. The sound carried very well, right up to the top seats; just like it was designed to do.

Here, some Jordanian Bedouins put on a little 'show' to earn money. This is something that I never thought I would see. A Jordanian playing "Yankee Doodle" on the bagpipes! Quite a mixture of cultures there. They were quite good though, I must say.
Like most ancient Roman cities, there was a temple to their false gods. This temple was for Artemis, or Diana, as she was sometimes called. We can see her mentioned in the Bible in Acts 19.
I have so many pictures of this city, but I will not bore you by posting them all here. Just imagine lots and lots of stone columns and arches.

The following day we journeyed to Petra. This is the Biblical land of the Edomites, the children of Esau. As soon as you get near the city you can see the locals trying every ploy they can to make money. The third Indiana Jones movie was filmed here (not that I'm advocating that movie), so I guess this shop attracted some people.
That one at least made some sense. This next one.... I'm not quite so sure what they were thinking. Will someone please tell me what coffee has to do with Petra or the Titanic??
We were all able to ride a horse for about 700 meters, down to the entrance of the mountain. This is a safe bloggy picture of my daughter riding her horse, and you can see my horse's head.
This may not seem special to some of you, but this was a first for me and my children. We really enjoyed this part.... and I was so glad that I wore culottes!

I wrote about Petra a few weeks ago and explained the significance of it. You can read here if you missed that info. The city of Petra is very large; over 50 sq km. But the entire city is inside of a mountain. You can see from this picture, taken from the road, that you can see the mountains, but you cannot see the city inside.

This was part of the reason that the site was so militarily defensible... the enemy just couldn't find it! The other reason was the entrance to the city. The only entrance is a long, narrow gorge called the Siq (shaft) that cuts through the rock. This is the beginning of the Siq.

I took so many pictures inside this gorge... everything looked so beautiful, I just couldn't help myself. I'll only put a couple of them here; I hope you can sense what it would feel like to have these massive, red stone walls enclosing you.


At the end of the Siq the mountains close out almost all of the sunlight and it becomes very shadowy. Then, you can see the sunlight shining at the end of the gorge and you are surprised with the most famous of buildings inside Petra.... the Treasury.
All of this was carved out of the rock, and was used as a burial chamber for a king. Later on, after this city was rediscovered, there was a rumor that the Pharaoh of Egypt stored his treasure inside the urn-shaped piece in the center, on top. There are pock marks where their bullets tried to break it open and release it's treasure. But, there was no treasure inside... it is solid rock.

There weren't as many carved buildings in this city as I had imagined there would be. The next most famous one is the monastery, but we were not able to see that on our visit because we didn't have enough time. There are many pictures of it on the internet, if you are interested enough to do a search for them. Here is another, more crude building in the rock:
They did have an amphitheater:

But most of the "carvings" in the rock were caves. It seems that they did the hardest, most intricate work for their tombs, not their homes. This is what the sides of the mountains looked like:

There are many, many caves where people lived up until only a few years ago when they were moved out to a nearby town.

It was a beautiful city, and really we needed several days to be able to see the whole thing. But, we saw enough to be satisfied.... and the kids were exhausted by the time we were done!

Later in the day we went to the Wadi Rum desert. This is a beautiful desert with rosy red, soft sand and many mountains and rock formations. I thought this was a beautiful sight with the sun behind it :

I love this lone tree in the desert. Our tour guide said that it stays green year round.
Against one of the mountains a large sand dune had formed. My husband took my kids to the very top..... and when I say "took", I mean 'dragged'..... zoom in on the picture to see what I mean.

Here is my husband at the top of the mountain:
My kids didn't want to get that close to the edge, so they're not in the picture. But I promise, he didn't leave them up there ;) They all had so much fun on the way down! And I had lots of red sand to wash out of their clothes. It was worth it though.

The last day of our trip we went to Madaba and Mt. Nebo. This was the Biblical land of the Moabites. We saw both of these places on our way back from Egypt, so I didn't take any additional photos of them. If you'd like to see those pictures and an explanation of their significance, you can click here...it's at the very end of that post.

We had a great time and are so thankful that God allowed us to go on this trip! I hope you enjoy seeing a little piece of what we experienced.