Petra

Petra is ancient, and silent, and raw, and wild. You’ve gotta see it, to believe it, and you’ve got to feel that rose-red limestone, and get all that nasty dirt and sand from climbing on your shoes. After the broad sweeping vistas of the desert, and the relatively minimal tourist traffic at Moses’ various rest areas and the calm of the Dead Sea, Petra is like a slow and crazy ride through an ancient Atlantic City boardwalk carnival, or actually, a Nabatean fun-house — anywhere where you can get mowed down by a camel, have your donkey run away with you up ancient rock-hewn stairs through the wadi, be totally ignored by men riding horses wearing their keffiyah (just like Yasser Arafat used to), or be consistently harrassed and chased by a chorus of vendors, who’ve never seen you before — “latah, lady you said latah – one dinar!!” …but it’s also phenomenally inspiring, uplifting, and a true marvel.

The Nabateans were ancient traders, who became rich, first by stealing and plundering and later by levying taxes on the trade caravans passing through the areas under their control. Due to trade agreements with other peoples in the area, they had a monopoly on frankincense and spices from Somalia, Ethiopia and India. Although never having a true empire, like the Romans, they had an economic development zone, of sorts, that brought them their glory days under King Aretas IV (8BC-AD 40), when Petra was home to about 30,000 Nabateans. Shortly after this, the Nabateans lost ground to Rome, and then the Byzantine era kicked in. By the time of the Muslim invasion, Petra was no longer a happening town, except for a moment when the Crusaders, in the 12th century, built forts in the area. From 1189, after Saladin conquered the Crusader castles, through the early 19th century, when Johann Burckhardt, a hardy Swiss who traveled through Syria, Jordan, and Egypt disguised as an Bedouin re-”discovered” Petra, it was a lost city known only to local Bedouins, who would camp in the hewn rock caves. Excavations are on-going; and amazing finds are constant (in 1992, mosaics of Petra Church were discovered; in 2003 a tomb complex was discovered under the Treasury). It’s only been an international tourist destination since sometime in the 1980s.

Vegas couldn’t make this any flashier, or sexier, or cooler. It’s amazing, and worth every admission dinar. Let’s hope it never becomes Disney’fied, because the traffic and noise in city center or modern Jordan is part of the experience; and the solitude and peace and awe, after struggling up a hill to see a breath-taking panorama with many-thousand-year-old theaters and ceremonial buildings hewn out of stunning, color-shifting, almost painted rock, is something that you ought to have to suffer for, at least a little bit. Kind of like walking barefoot up the rocky hill to Medugorje, I figure. We cherish more what it is that doesn’t come easy; and we assign a higher value to those things and experiences that we’ve had to earn, or that are more difficult to come by.

I got into town late, stayed at the Moevenpick (where I had Swiss ice cream – yum), and immediately ran into a a group of five tall, blonde, and really, really clean families from Orange County doing a tour of the Middle East. Given that I hadn’t run into many Americans in the prior week, this was odd; but no odder than sharing the elevator down in the morning with a kid wearing a Brown T-shirt who was starting at my alma mater in the fall.

I walked into Petra and almost immediately ran into my travelling colleagues, or at least some of them (the 3 Wageners, Melody and Andrew), who had come down from Amman the day before. We had been having some difficulty connecting, earlier in the week, so it was great to see them again.

And then, I spent hours and hours just walking around the amazing city of Petra. I’ll just post the pictures below, and where they warrant comment, I’ll comment. If you go, (and you should; it is one of the seven wonders of the world, after all…) wear sunscreen, and good walking shoes. Petra is huge; and there are many places to explore. I wish I had had many days here; would’ve been great to do a long hike through the outer reaches; as it was, I just had time to hit some of the highlights, pictured below.

I strolled through The Siq, above, 1.2 km long, and up to 200m tall, a single block of stone rent by tectonic forces. And then saw The Treasury, or Al-Khazneh, below, built sometime between 100BC to AD 200:

Kinda cool, eh?

These are some random tombs along the way…but it only gets better.

Brown University, in conjunction with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, has been working on an excavation of the Great Temple in Petra since 1993. You can see Camp Bruno’s flag flying proudly, between the columns, in the photo below:

This is the shopping drag, or OK, market… in Petra (and the Great Temple sits along this Colonnade):

And this is where I caved (yuk yuk – no pun intended) and took a donkey up the 800 steps to the Monastery. Since I only paid 3 dinars instead of the 7 Jamil had asked for, he dropped me off a little before the Monastery, so I had to actually climb up the steps, not like the young woman in shorts from the South, who his 17 yr old brother was taking all the way up to the Monastery, or the older Japanese man who Jamil took up after me, and sat with for a bit. 10 dinars, I expect. Whatever. I got a little more exercise than I bargained for (especially since I took a wrong turn and ended up at a completely different vista), but then came around a corner and saw this:

I took a look from the various viewpoints scattered nearby, and walked on down, through 45 minutes of passing sweating, donkey & horse-back riding tourists, hassling vendors, and spectacular scenery.

The kids were hanging out back at the mall, just like they have for thousands of years.

One of the places I wanted to stop in at looked like it had been all boarded up for a really long time.

And it looked like it was time to clean-up and call it a day, in Petra. So I did. And went to see Little Petra, just for kicks.

~ by mimi on July 2, 2008.