The Trek
Ogla told us that most visitors to Petra go no further than the Monastery, and he considered it his duty to show us what they never see. He promised it would be 15 minutes of climbing and then basically flat. Yeah, no.
The only flat part is in the photo below, upper left. The shop below right and upper left was on a ledge at a wide spot of the trail. Young men on sure-footed donkeys offered a ride for five dinars, and a couple of people hopped on briefly. One said, however, she was terrified of falling off because she made the animal top-heavy.
In the photo below you can see tiny figures clinging to the side of the cliff ahead. What we learned as we approached was that the trail at that point was only wide enough to put one foot in front of the other, so these Bedouin boys had positioned themselves as a human guardrail, steadying us across. I shudder to think what a disaster it would have been if one person lost her footing and plunged over the cliff, taking the boys with her! When I took the shot I was blissfully unaware of what lay ahead.
By the time we reached the end of the trail we had hiked about ten miles, according to my Fitbit. After a bone-jarring ride back to the hotel in the backend of a pickup truck we gratefully shed our camera gear and stretched out for twenty minutes to gather strength for another foray down to the Treasury to experience Petra by night.
Those gorgeous shots are worth every harrowing step!