At dinner that night, the hosts kept asking us what they did wrong, why we spent the day in our room. instead of doing activities - it was pretty irritating how many times they asked, actually. At dinner, we overheard some Australians planning to do a morning camel ride to see the sunrise, so we added ourselves to that activity. Given how poorly that went the next morning, I was glad we had not planned any more expensive or more complex activities the previous day.

We got up early to find no one around, five camels sitting outside the camp, and the sun slowly rising. I walked around until I found and woke up someone who I had not seen before. This new fellow, a young chap, grogilly got up, got us all on our camels and walked us into the desert as he texted someone on his phone. The sunrise was beautiful, we were about 200 yards from where we started. We then went back 200 yards to settle up and then go eat breakfast. We weren’t told to pay or not to pay, the guy had no idea what to do, either. Eventually, we just paid him and he disappeared into the desert with his camels.

We then asked if we could get a ride back to our car, ready to drive up to Petra. I had to ask three or four times before they finally decided it was an appropriate time to take us to our car. When we got to our car, the beautiful haggling that we had not realized we were going to have to do started. They insisted we owed 75 JOD, we insisted we owed 55 JOD. The owner got on the phone to explain that while we booked 55 JOD that we actually owed 75 JOD. This went on for a while, me insistent that we pay exactly what we agree, which resulted in him taking our money, changing his demeanor and leaving. We later found out that they cancelled our booking on booking.com so we would not be able to leave them a bad review; we found out why they have such high reviews. After a few well placed emails to the info folder at booking.com, we were able to leave an honest review.

Petra

We hit the road to Petra, not the pedal to the floor, but we were driving in Jordan, so the pedal did hit the floor a few times. The drive was mostly the same until we broke off after a police station to hit the back roads, then the switchbacks into Wadi Musa, the city closest to Petra. We went straight to the site, which was about noon, that is 12 o’clock for some of you, parked our car amidst the hundreds of other cars and buses and legged it to the gate. We opted for 2-day tickets, deciding that we could spend about 5 or 6 hours here on our first day, then go back the following to see anything we missed.