Exploring Petra and the wonders of Jordan
The lost city, a heritage site, includes intricate temples, obelisks and burial chambers
In Jordan’s extraordinary rose-red “Lost City” of Petra, I have just huffed up 700 zigzagging stonecarved steps to the ancient mountaintop High Place of Sacrifice, with its sacred altar and goat-blood drain. And now, along a dirt trail, I rest in a rug-draped souvenir stall. An octogenarian Bedouin woman, who grew up in a cave and now is clad traditionally in a long embroidered madraga dress, deftly strings a fragrant necklace of dried cloves to sell me.
Way down below, camels with tasselled bridles emit rumbling, dinosaurlike roars while being led by robed Bedouin tribesmen past monolithic, 2,000-year-old tombs.
Mystical, mind-blowing Petra literally rocks. Around the first century BC, the now-extinct Nabataean people ingeniously chiselled the capital of their Arab empire from sheer sandstonecliffs. The once-forgotten marvel includes intricate temples, cave dwellings, a theatre, obelisks honouring pagan gods and etchings of snakes, lions and eagles. It holds more than 600 massive burial chambers.
“Petra is one of the world’s biggest mysteries,” says Omar, my Jordanian guide with Exodus Travels. “There is no record of history. And 65 per cent of Petra is still underneath our feet, hidden by dust.”
For almost two weeks, I traverse much of Jordan by bus with Exodus, an adventure company that also brings us 16 intrepid voyagers to the less-visited far reaches of this Middle East nation. Petra is Jordan’s primo tourist draw, but elsewhere we’re the only ones clambering over archeological ruins.
One day, I’m bouncing in the blanketed bed of a Bedouin-driven Toyo- ta pickup tearing across the UNESCO-listed Wadi Rum desert, nicknamed “Valley of the Moon” for its rippling peach-pink sands pierced by titan sandstone and granite peaks.
In Wadi Rum, I sleep inside a goathair tent in a rustic Bedouin camp set against wind-buffeting cliffs on the desert floor. The next morning, I wake up the entire camp shrieking as I clumsily mount my ride. “Yalla, yalla,” Rashid gently urges his herd of five sibling camels, meaning “Let’s go.” Atop cud-chewing Aliya, I hypnotically watch the flaming sunrise. For 90 beyond-belief minutes, the only sounds are the camels’ feet softly sinking into the powdery dunes and the chirping of Sinai rosefinches.
Every day of our itinerary, we hit an archeological treasure. I feel like I’m in Italy as I wander the immense 2,000-year-old Roman city of Jerash, dubbed the “Pompeii of the Middle East” for its well-preserved ruins buried for centuries by blown sand. Petra, though, is the jackpot. Abandoned in the seventh century, it was rediscovered by a Swiss explorer in 1812 and became a UNESCO heritage site in 1985. To get to the hidden-away ancient city, you have to trek through the dramatic narrow Siq, a long slot canyon sandwiched by 24-storey-high veiny rock edifices and at times only three metres wide.
At the end, the Siq cracks open to reveal the grandstanding, rock-whittled funerary-urn-crowned Treasury, likely a former temple.
After dark, I return for the cornycool “Petra by Night” ceremony. Even with my flashlight, I can barely see as I stumble through the ghostly Siq, lit only by hundreds of luminaria candles, and then sit in the luminaria-lit dirt in front of the shadowy Treasury. Bedouins play a flute and rababa string instrument before the big reveal — spotlights suddenly bathe the Treasury in changing psychedelic colours.
Over two days I walk 37 kilometres in Petra because the scenes won’t quit. On the High Place of Sacrifice climb, I smell the pungent smoke of juniper branches, and soon a Bedouin man is hawking me a morning shot of Arabic coffee heated by a campfire teetering on a killer-view ridge. Later, as my elderly new friend Hammadeh strings that clover necklace in her ramshackle stall, she tells me through interpreter Omar how she once lived in a cave in Petra and still follows the old ways, herding her sheep and goats. Without tourism, she frets, she has no money. “I thank God. I thank God for everything,” she says as I buy three more necklaces.
Petra’s most jaw-dropping high place is the Monastery, accessible by hoofing up nearly 1,000 Nabataeancut steep steps. After the path’s last bend, this mammoth stone temple — it’s 47 metres wide — magically pops out of a remote mountainside towering over my puny presence. From the Monastery, I continue ascending a boulder-strewn trail until next to a grazing grey donkey I see a piece of scrap wood lying against a pile of rubble and hand-scrawled, “Welcome to Top of the World Cafe.”
Up further, I reach the “cafe,” a tattered, tented platform precariously perched over a rocky ledge in the heavens. And there, a 17-year-old Bedouin named Lost (“because you’re always found,” he smiles) offers me another cup of tea, this one with a sprig of mint.