Day 6: November 10

Then the narrow Siq canyon begins, and around us the tall pink rocks bend in bizarre curves. The canyon is very beautiful! For more than a kilometer we walk through the canyon, and suddenly it ends at a small square with the most famous building in Petra carved into the rock - the Treasury of Al-Khazneh.

There is a bustle near the Treasury, and local touts offer to take you to a viewing platform overlooking the Treasury. Tourists crowd around, taking photos. Because of all this noise and commotion, the Treasury does not make much of an impression.

We move on. Along the way, in one of the souvenir shops, we watch a man making pictures out of sand; he deftly pours colored sand into transparent bottles, and a picture of a camel emerges. We are amazed at how quickly the sand artist manages to create a picture from multicolored sand.

We pass by the theater, then along the main street with columns. We slowly make our way to the second most popular building in Petra, the rock-cut Ad-Deir Temple. The temple is located on a mountain, and a scenic trail through the rocks leads to it, along which vendors sell souvenirs.

I feel that Volchiy isn’t particularly thrilled with Petra. I ask him why. We start recalling all sorts of wonderful places we’ve been to. Volchiy remembers the magnificent temple with elephants carved out of the rocks in the Ellora Caves in India. It was truly a work of art. That temple, compared to the Treasury, is simply night and day. Although, of course, the temple in Ellora was carved 700 years later… that must not be forgotten.

Borobudur, Bagan…. Probably we still haven’t quite understood something about Petra. Why was it chosen as one of the seven new wonders of the world…

Meanwhile, we reached the temple. It is indeed beautiful, thanks to the fact that there is more space in front of it and there are still not so many people around it - they are able to enjoy it more. We climb a little higher up the rock - from there a beautiful view opens up. We stop for a snack, rest, and eat bananas and cookies.

We slowly descend. I am captivated by the color of the rocks; it is amazing — from purple to crimson, in such streaks, as if someone had painted them with paint.

We covered 15.5 km today. We were so tired from walking around Petra that we decided to have dinner at a café not far from the hotel. We ordered two soups (vegetable soup and lentil purée soup) and baba ghanoush (this is what they call finely chopped eggplants with vegetables here). The soups were so-so, and the baba ghanoush turned out to be completely inedible.