A rose red city, half as old as time

Tastes in poetry have definitely changed since John Burgon wrote his 370 rhyming lines about Petra. I won’t even pretend to have read the whole thing (has anyone?), but he does seem to have compensated for pages and pages of overblown description with that famously quotable last line, though the "half as old as time" bit wasn't even his own.

To see Petra in full rose red glory you’d need to be there at the crack of dawn or at sunset, neither of which we achieved in our two days exploring. We were awake enough to see the sunset, but visitors are expected to clear out by 5 pm in the off-season so being law-abiding tourists that’s what we did. (Camping inside Petra is strictly forbidden, but there are so many caves and hollows a person probably could hide somewhere for the night, though you’d risk having goats nibble you or Bedouins sell you things.)

Photos really can’t convey the sheer scale of Petra (see, by way of evidence, the shots below). According to the official Petra website (www.visitpetra.jo) the cliffs that line the famously narrow entrance Siq are up to 80 metres tall in some places, which is high enough to make a person feel very ant-like, and that's just the beginning. My expectations about what we would see had been (ahem) somewhat coloured by Indiana Jones; the famous Treasury is dramatic and iconic, and it’s also the first thing you see when you reach the end of the Siq. Some people turn around and go home after that (which is a crazy waste of the entry fee, and makes about as much sense as going to Paris and only seeing the Eiffel Tower), but as the wise people on the ginsu knife commercials say, wait, there’s more.

Around the corner from the Treasury everything opens up. You can walk along the bottom of the valley admiring all the Nabatean tombs and other ruins – including an amphitheatre carved out of the cliff, various temples and other buildings, and a Roman road. There are also paths up the sides of the valleys to sacrificial sites, grand views, and more tombs. The paths are steep. Very steep. If you’re feeling lazy or very puffed you can take a donkey ride up instead of walking – but the paths are quite narrow in some spots, with steep cliffs to the side, and I’d rather be puffed than terrified. The combination of heights, depths and antiquity made my head spin.

 

The Nabateans really knew how to carve rock (it’s tempting to say that was their only building technique). Apparently they were also very good at stashing water in secret spots throughout the desert, , and some of their water-directing and storing was put to work at Petra irrigating gardens in front of the tombs. There are records of plans and contracts for tombs – you couldn’t just turn up and expect something to be prepared overnight – and some tombs were clearly started and not finished, possibly because the owner stopped paying the instalments.

In our two days (with a day off in between to do lazier things), we walked all of the trails we could. Up to the High Place of Sacrifice, out to the Monastery, up and around to a viewpoint looking down on the Treasury, all along the main path ... To go further we'd probably have needed to hire camels and guides, which isn't really our style. It was good to get away from the crowds on the main trail, and even better to get to stretches that were empty enough of tourists that there were also no locals trying to sell us souvenirs. (It's 10 a.m. and we're intending to walk around all day ... do you really think we want to buy a bronze camel?) Some of them forgave us a bit when they found out we were from New Zealand. Not because they're rugby fans, but because of Marguerite van Geldermalsen, a New Zealander who came to Petra in 1978 and married a Bedouin and is still the only Western woman to have lived in the caves. She's made of tougher stuff than I am, but it sounds as if her husband has plenty of cousins ...