Potfest

Saturday : We wake to a grey, drizzly, cold morning – Lake District weather has caught up with us. Unfortunately we wake rather later than planned due to an alarm-setters malfunction and I have to rush down to reception to reschedule our driver and today’s guide to Petra. Once that’s done we get wet again going to graze the gargantuan buffet, and get even wetter going back to our room to repack the daysacks. Perhaps a four star could run to an umberella for every room. By 9-30 we were safely delivered into the hands of Joseph, our own tour guide to the site of Petra - and so began, courtesy of Petra’s own Jack-the-lad with cousins in every stall on site, our magical tour of the rose-red city.

 As visual artists we both find it difficult to assimilate lots of historical data, we'd much rather take things slowly and just look – we carefully explained this to Joseph who quite understood, agreed that that was the way to go – then told us it all anyway, at breakneck speed, with the occasional dig to the arm to make sure we were still with him, followed by an Americanised “ you got that?” to make sure it had all sunk in. Judicious dodging of the larger tour groups meant we got some good relatively empty pics of that magical walk down the Siq to the Treasury.

We couldn’t stop the ear to ear grinning as we finally realised we were actually there in Petra. The morning passed very quickly as we were whisked past the major sites along the route – Siq, Treasury, Street of Facades, Theatre, Museum, etc – knowing that we had a full day there by ourselves tomorrow to do it more at our own pace.

By early afternoon the weather had really closed in, and now on our own we decided to leave the High Place, and the Monastery till tomorrow as the clouds were too low to have seen anything from up there anyway. At three-ish, thoroughly drenched, cold and tired we started to make our way back through the Siq – only to be met by a torrent of water rushing down from the town.

The Dunkirk spirit emerged as tourists battled the elements and sloshed their way back up through the worst floods for sixteen years.

The underfloor heating was put to very good use when we finally got back to our hotel, and by next morning most things had dried out enough to put back on.