Sunday, April 23, 2017

Jordan and Petra

Let's get this out of the way right off the bat.


This most famous site in Petra is the Treasury, and they really make as much of the Indiana Jones link as they can. I was a bit disappointed to learn that there is only a single room inside this structure, but most of the structures in Petra were only facades. The ones with anything more also only had a single room. Granted, it couldn't have been easy to carve those rooms out of the stone. Maybe one room was enough.


This is the Monastery, and I was much more impressed by this structure than the Treasury. You can see how much bigger it is, but the Treasury is much more intact. The Monastery has a big crack running horizontally and some signs of erosion, but it's still in remarkable condition.


I had no idea how enormous the Petra site is and the wide variety of structures in it. There were quite a few carved into colorful stone that were simply amazing.


The dry climate no doubt helps preserve the site, and you can even see the remains of the original piping that brought water deeper into the site. The tiles and mortar are still in place.


Something that didn't survive so well...



Sri Lanka

It's great to have friends all over the world thanks to my job. In March, I visited Sri Lanka to catch up with friends I hadn't seen in several years, and we went to a mountain-top (hill-top? not sure how tall something needs to be to qualify as a mountain) ruin called Sigiriya and cave temples at Dambulla.


Ruins of the villages formerly surrounding the fortress are all around the main site. After climbing about halfway up the left-hand side of the mountain, we found an imposing set of feet, making one wonder what the original visitors used to be greeted by.


The cave temples were similar to ones in Thailand and Southeast Asia, but I hadn't seen any with such reverence for snakes. I don't know that I'd want to be sitting on a giant cobra.


Stop in the Maldives

While visiting friends in Sri Lanka, I was happy to learn that the Turkish Airlines flight had a required stopover in the Maldives. I figured why not get out?