Petra

ancient world came to worship or feast, the sight of the Monastery is profound.

I stared at Ad Deir for what felt like an eternity, marveling not only at the building but the way it had provided the exquisite pleasure of delayed gratification. When I returned to Ahmed, he was on the phone with his 2-yearold daughter, who was begging to get a new teddy bear on their upcoming trip to town. Ahmed has five other children. His oldest son, Khaleel, also works as a guide in the park. Khaleel had taken me earlier in the day to a ledge above the Treasury, a view even more vertiginous than the trail to Ad Deir. I needed several minutes before I could inch to the edge and appreciate the view. When I steadied my nerves and was able to peek out through squeezed eyes, I could grasp the monumentality of the Treasury—how it loomed, emerging out of the mountainside like an apparition, a building that wasn’t a building, a place that was there but not there.

What will it mean to create a perfect model of a place like Petra—one that you might be able to visit sitting in your living room? Will it seem less urgent to see Petra in person if you can stick on a pair of virtual reality goggles and make your way through the Siq, gawk at the Treasury, hike up to the Monastery, and inspect ruins that are thousands of years old? Or will having access to an almost-real version of Petra make it easier for more people to learn about it, and that, in turn, will make more people care about it, even if they never walk over its red rocks or slide their way through the Siq? The preservation aspect of projects like Virtual Wonders’ is undeniably valuable; it saves, for posterity, precise images of the world’s great sites, and will allow people who won’t ever have the opportunity to travel this far to see the place and experience it almost as it is.

But visiting a place—breathing in its ancient dust, confronting it in real time, meeting its residents, elbowing its tourists, sweating as you clamber up its hills, even seeing how time has punished it—will always be different, more

magical, more challenging. Technology makes it easier to see the world almost as it is, but sometimes the harder parts are what make travel memorable. The long climb to Ad Deir, with its scary path and surprising reveal, is what I will remember, long after the specific details of the building’s appearance have faded from my memory. The way Petra is laid out means you work for every gorgeous vision, which is exactly what I imagine the Nabateans had in mind. AS SOON AS I LEFT PETRA, I found myself staring at the pictures I had taken and finding it hard to believe I had been there; the images, out of context, were so fantastical that they seemed surreal, a dream of a red stone city dug into the mountainside, so perfectly camouflaged that as soon as you drive the steep road out of the park, it seems to disappear, as if it were never there.

In Amman, where signs advertised this fall’s Dead Sea Fashion Week (“Bloggers and Influencers Welcome!”), my driver pulled up to the front door of my hotel and I stepped out, passing a sign directing Fashion Week attendees to the ballroom. The hotel had just opened for business—it was a glossy, glassy building that advertised itself as being in the heart of the new, modern Amman. But ancient Jordan was here as well. The entry was puzzlingly dark and small, with a narrow opening that led to a long hallway with walls that were akimbo, leaning in at some points and flaring out in others, with sharp angles jutting out. I inched along, dragging my suitcase and banging a corner here and there. Finally, the dark hall opened wide onto a big, bright lobby, so unexpected that I stopped cold, blinking until my eyes adjusted to the light. The young man at the reception desk nodded at me and asked if I liked the entrance. “It’s something special,” he said. “We call it the Siq.”