Petra

A second stop missed from our cruise attempts was Petra. After a quick breakfast, we walked out of the Petra Guest House hotel and there were the ticket barriers into the site. Now that’s convenience! We were met by our Bedouin guide, Mahmoud, who spoke excellent English and, with a degree in archaeology, was both very informative and easy to listen to. He lived in the nearby village.

Petra began to prosper in about 1000 BC under the Nabataean empire due to trade in Myrrh, Frankincense and spices. The geology is stunning but not something for this blog, other than to say the natural colours were extraordinary. The walk down and through the city is some 4 kms – all downhill, and in no time at all, we encountered our first building - the Obelisk tomb with four pyramids atop. What makes Petra so special is that most buildings were carved from the top down (rather than built up). This is the burial site for five people.

The main street runs through a natural gorge and is hence subject to flooding (on the few occasions it rains). To counter flooding, they built a small dam and tunnel to divert the water away from the gorge.

The size of the gorge is immense, and hopefully, this shot, which includes visitors and the distant cliff tops, provides some indication of scale. The engineering continued with two water supplies. The one on the left would have been covered with stone slabs and supplied the lower part of the city. The line on the right contained a vitreous clay pipe that operated under some pressure to provide water to the upper side of the city.

The left-hand gravity supply included silt traps to help keep the water clean.

As with all our visits, these two found something to talk about and brought up the rear. Even with the floor concreted to protect the friable sandstone, it still appears to be hard to talk AND walk! Above these "statues", the gorge narrows to a bit over 1 metre. 

The light was spectacular, and every so often, some of the natural colours really stood out.

After about an hour, the gorge (or Siq) opened up to Petra’s most well-known façade – the Treasury. It is 40 metres high and beautifully decorated with Corinthian capitals, friezes and figures. At the top is an urn that for years was thought to hold treasure (hence the name), with accompanying bullet holes. Science has now shown that it is purely a funerary urn.

Of course, you could also pose atop a camel with the treasury in the background – that was a step up too high for our mob!

As we moved further into the city, our next encounter was the street of facades. 

Mahmoud suggested we go into one 

and after the eyes had adjusted to the dark interior, we found several of his relatives selling trinkets and spices.

A challenge for any city of 30,000 people is entertainment, and for that, you need a theatre. As room was tight, the location did unfortunately mean a couple of lesser tombs were encroached (the rectangular holes) – such is the price of progress! The engineering for this was advanced when you consider this was carved top down, and when finished, the acoustics had to be perfectly attuned to the centre of the stage.

Nature continued to impress with its natural patterns and colours.

At the end of the main path were the Royal Tombs (Urn, Silk, Corinthian and Palace) dating back to 70AD. These four are all surprisingly different. They could almost have been part of a design competition; however, their carving spanned 150 years.

Age was not limited to the tombs – this pistachio tree is reportedly some 450 years old – not bad when most average a mere 300 years!

We then entered the lower part of the city on the collonaded street. This was built in Nabataean times and then refurbished by the Romans. It is very similar to earlier streets we have seen on this trip, with cart ruts and what would have been a covered walkway protecting shops.

Finally, there was the Qasr al-Bint temple (50 AD). What differentiates this from other built temples is that it has withstood several earthquakes. One reason for its resilience may be that the two horizontal bands (which can be seen on the left-hand wall) comprise timbers. These would have provided some tensile strength to otherwise brittle walls.

We then faced a change in direction and started walking uphill. As a child, our guide initially lived in a cave. One of them in this shot was a playground where he could recall feeling very frightened when his father was fighting in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Most of those working used to live in Petra but have now been relocated to a nearby village and given the rights to manage all tourist activities. 

As we approached the bus stop for our lift back, the final tomb was Turkmaniyya. Unusually, this has a Nabataean inscription over the door.

It mentions the tomb has a courtyard, dining halls, a water cistern and retaining walls. It seemed rather like a "for sale" sign, but in fact was a dedication to Dushara, "the god of our lord". The tomb is only for those authorised to undertake the act of consecration.

Far less prescriptive was the timetable for the bus ride out. My enquiry as to the expected schedule (half-hourly or hourly) was somewhat wide of the mark. Apparently, the bus moves half an hour after the first passenger gets on board! 

And with that, a long-time bucket list item was ticked off! What a brilliant tour! Add it to your bucket list and make it happen!