On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
TKH
I stayed in Little Petra for a day and a half and two nights in the Little Petra Bedouin Camp where I had deposited my food supplies for the hike from Petra to Wadi Rum. I needed to eat as much as possible and also to fix some gear. The people there were very pleasant and helpful.
Petra is a World heritage site that preserves the center of the Nabatean culture. Many readers may be familiar with Petra, possibly without knowing they are, from the Indiana Jones movies. I have not seen them, so for me everything was new.
Apart from the Bedouin Camp and a United Nations compound, Little Petra is a bunch containers where tour operators do their business and one container where you can turn your Jordan pass into a ticket for Petra. I had purchased a Jordan Pass with an option for getting into Petra for three days. The plan was to hike through the site on day 1 from the backdoor near Little Petra to the front door at Wadi Musa while taking in some of the sights. Wadi Musa is where all the hotels are and where most people who only spend a few hours in Petra enter the site. I intended to spend day 2 hiking around the site and taking in more sights, and on day 3 to hike through a part of the site again and leave through a different backdoor in direction of Wadi Rum.
From the backdoor entrance near Little Petra you hike about 1.5-2 hrs when you reach the Monastery. I think this has not been a monastery in the commonly accepted sense of the term, as the building is just not big enough inside. It is a nickname attached to a church of some kind. The building is not built up from smaller bricks or rocks, but is carved directly into the sandstone. It’s about 150 ft wide and 130 ft tall. A guide demonstrated the acoustics inside for his group while I happened to stand inside. That was quite something!
From the Monastery you then descend 900 steps, hewn crudely into the bulk rock to the central bowl with the ruins of the temple. As you walk down you make your way past an endless string of stands trying to sell you trinkets. All of the stands sell the same stuff. It’s just local people trying to make a living, and not much of a living these days as tourism is sharply down as a result of Gaza.
A view of the ruins of the temple in the central basin. Interestingly, this building is built up through assembly of smaller stones and not carved out from bulk rock.
A view of the amphitheater in the central bowl. If you look closely you can see little dots just above the jagged sunny spot at the bottom of the picture. these are people. This gives you an idea of the scale of this structure.
There is a row of tombs at one end of the basin where there is some spectacular, colored rock. You can see some color on the outside, but it is obscured a bit by dirt washed down from above during rains. When the sandstone is protected from dirt, the colors really come alive. I have seen a lot of sandstone during my hikes in the deserts, but I had never seen something quite like this before.
A closer look at the outside of one of the grave sites from the picture above.
Sandstone on the inside of one of the grave sites.
Little bit further on you come to the Treasury, another building carved into the bulk rock. Apparently this was actually used to collect taxes from the commoners who wanted/needed to get access to the inner bowl with the temple.
You approach the Treasury through a narrow slot canyon, Siq in Arabic. Here you can see how the Treasury reveals itself to someone coming through the siq.
On day 2 I climbed up to a viewpoint high above the Treasury to get another perspective.
Notice the steps hewn into the rock on the left and right of the second floor. In Utah or Arizona they would be called Moqui steps, which were used by Native Americans to overcome dryfalls in the backcountry.
I assume in Petra these steps were used by the artisans to get to their worksite as they cut the facade out of the rock. There was apparently no OSHA in the Nabatean culture.
This picture is taken in another part of the slot canyon. I direct your attention to the very bottom of the path on the right. What you see there is a groove cut into the sandstone that is used to collect rainwater that runs off the rockwall above. This water is then collected in cisterns and used to irrigate crops and as potable water (I assume).
In the Jordan museum I later saw clay pipes manufactured during Nabatean times that look like and have the dimensions of cast iron waste water pipes that we are used to, now replaced by PVC pipes. But the flanges for connecting the pipes to each other, that was all there, a couple of hundred years BCE. An amazing culture!
TKH
Correction/Addendum: The Treasury was also a tomb, the name is a nickname only and does not indicate function. In writing this stuff up one steals from the sources one has available and not the ones one wishes one had available (pace Donald Rumsfeld). Only after having submitted this write-up did I stumble across information indicating that the Treasury was a tomb as well. It make sense because every other building in the Petra site is a tomb.
Gloria DryGarden
Thrilling to hear about your time in Petra
YY_Sima Qian
Petra is definitely on by bucket list! I am enjoying this series.
oldster
Amazing photos! And interesting to hear about your interactions with people who live there.
Albatrossity
Wow! That sandstone really is something special!
Thanks!
Trivia Man
New angles i have never seen, incredible. Fantastic reward for the extra work of committing to the hike.
Wapiti
My wife and I went to Petra in 1996(?). It was very impressive.
At some point, Queen Rania of Jordan did a project with Google, narrating a tour of Petra. Now one can also find Petra on Google Maps (west of Wadi Musa) and use the street view to step through the site. They apparently used packed cameras to capture the details.
SkyBluePink
Fascinating!
Nelson
Thanks for very interesting post.
munira
Great photos – those colors are amazingly beautiful. Thanks.
stinger
Amazing natural sandstone and the intricate carvings. The siq view is most impressive. Thanks for sharing these!
pieceofpeace
OK, now this is in my must do sights, thank you.
BigJimSlade
I’m a couple days late here, but, TKH, did you happen to notice the little offshoots from the Siq in Petra that had dams (hand-built things a couple stories high)? These were to protect against flash floods in storms. They learned that if one storm came in, the dams would fill up and water from the next storm (if there was one) would just flood over the top and flood into town. So each damn has a small hole at the bottom so it would drain in a controlled manner. When you enter the Siq from the Wadi Musa side, there is a dam/diversion to push water around (to the right, facing the siq) the slot canyon – they had controls in place for flash floods!
TKH
@BigJimSlade: They were amazingly sophisticated in their water management! The Nabatean clay pipes I saw in the Jordan Museum blew my mind. Essentially modern design elements in pipes 200 years old.
I hiked that slot canyon going off to the right as you enter the Asia. Kinda rough, but very nice.
TKH
@BigJimSlade: They were amazingly sophisticated in their water management! The Nabatean clay pipes I saw in the Jordan Museum blew my mind. Essentially modern design elements in pipes 200 years old.
I hiked that slot canyon going off to the right as you enter the Asia. Kinda rough, but very nice as non-Utah slot canyons go.