The bus from Wadi Rum village dropped me off in the city of Petra sometime in the early morning. I walked for about a half hour before I stopped at one of the obligatory backpacker hotels and shelled out 30 bucks for a room. The hotel was dingy but I was happy just to drop my pack somewhere.
Since Wadi Rum had somehow managed to turn all of my socks into some kind of cotton/sand blend I would need some new ones for another few days of walking, a little shop across from the hotel had some children’s socks with kangaroos on them and the old bitty charged me ten bucks for four pairs. The village of Petra, a meaningless fleck on the map twenty years ago, had acclimated to becoming a tourist hub.
I walked down the hill toward Petra proper; the road was thankfully only built up on one side with the bric-a-brac of Jordan tee-shirts and bottles of colorful sand. It was cheerfully touristy and devoid of neon. As I closed in on the entrance the hotels became more monolithic and extravagant, the Petra Hotel, and Nabatean Inn gave way to Movenpick and Crown Plaza. I would soon discover that Jordan attracted a rather geriatric crowd, many of whom were probably thankful that after a day of walking that their 5-Star resort was only a few minutes away.
The first indication that all was not well in the ancient Nabatean capital was the scraggly looking Jordanian twenty-something that accosted me at the gate. “I’ll take you in for free,” he said. “They charge so much money for tourists to come here, and the bedu don’t get anything,” he continued, “this was our home, and the tourists stayed with us, now the government doesn’t care about us, they moved us and give us nothing, I’ll take you anywhere you want to go and you won’t have to pay.”
I think most people would have the same reaction in this situation, which is to say something polite and move gracefully away, I would discover later that this wasn’t actually a scam, and he could have very easily taken me around the side and down into Petra without any trouble, and he was motivated more by spite at the government than to gouge some gringo bumpkin. At the time I just said, that from what I heard about Petra it was worth every penny and I don’t mind paying. He scowled and went prowling for another young backpacker to convince.
When I got to the ticket counter my jaw dropped. A one day pass was 55 Jordanian Dinars, a two day pass 60 and a three day 65. That came out to about 80 dollars just for entry. That’s the same price Disney or Six Flags might charge, and they actually BUILT the cities of entertainment behind the gates, and required thousands of employees to maintain them. This was an insane amount of money to look at some ruins, it dwarfed Machu Pichu, the Pyramids, and Ankor Wat, probably all three put together. Luckily I was making Arab money, so I just paid. Making a fuss would get me nowhere anyway.
It was around noon when I got there, and I was advised by some American lads on the bus ride over to get one of the free tours, but I was burning daylight. I walked past a few shops and through the gate, to the left some dashing Bedu were offering tourists rides on horseback, the horses had their own track that went about a mile or two, this ostensibly cut down on the walking time for the open area before the real entrance to Petra that didn’t offer much in the way of sights. I skipped by and walked into a wall of badly dressed humanity. Petra was packed.
I dodged between the awkwardly coalescing bubbles of tour groups summoned haphazardly by their English, or French, or German, or Russian speaking guides. Small megaphones blared, flags waived and hordes of aging, fattening tourists bumbled across the path. I bobbed, I weaved, I scoffed, and I was unhappy. After the solemn, silent power of Wadi Rum, Petra represented everything tainted and wrong about the Amerification of the exceptional.
After a mile the herd didn’t thin out, but it focused into the Siq. This was the real entrance of Petra. The path narrowed to about ten feet across and the smooth rock walls rose fifty feet into the air on both sides. The air rushing through the crack tempered the Jordanian sun. It was imposing. It was also an echo chamber of ignorance. The tour groups didn’t stop, they seemed to multiply, slow down, and chatter more. It felt like a church service that piped Norwegian Death Metal through the speakers.
Horse drawn carts clambered by, forcing people to hug the rock walls during their passing. Many of the tourists gladly shelled out ten bucks if it meant a ride back to the hotel, I had trouble believing that after charging so much money that they would inconvenience and risk injuring so many of their patrons. I was annoyed, bordering on angry.
And then after thirty minutes of rising tension I turned a corner of the ravine, and glowing through the cracks was the treasury. I couldn’t believe how instantly every emotional trigger in my body could be switched off. The massive, pink building hewn into the rock of the mountain was almost perfectly preserved. The lines that cut across the rock were stark and crisp. The scale of the art was jaw dropping. As I neared the Siq’s exit, I still don’t know why, but I was fighting back tears. Something about the misery of that walk and the beauty of that building rippled through the skin and into the nerves.
You don’t see the treasury coming, it isn’t some beacon like a pyramid in the desert which you anticipate in the distance. The treasury explodes into your field of view, though it’s carved into a mountain it manages to materialize, a rose colored masterpiece against a brown wall.
As incredible as this moment is, it is only a moment. The childlike awe that overtook me, despite my growing annoyance at my surroundings, passed as quick as it came. After the wave crashed the sounds of the sea returned. The endless clicks of cameras, the inane commentary of the touritariet, and the booming voices of the tour guides started up again. I lined up a few shots and moved on. The enclosed cavern of the Siq expanded into a wide open space, the mountains yielded to the sand. The walls of rock were lined with tables of tourist knick knacks sold by bedu woman. It didn’t take long to see that everyone was selling identical items. In Petra all roads don’t lead to the gift shop, the road is the gift shop, and it was overflowing with people. The population of Petra had to be numbered in the tens of thousands during the hours it was opened. There is nothing so majestic in this world that it can’t be ruined by other people.
I moved with the herd. On both sides of me huge walls of the mountains had been carved into funerary chambers for the dead. Archeologists who came upon Petra were incredibly confused about how much effort was spent preserving the dead, and how little effort seemed to be spent on the living. They found little evidence of how the Nabateans actually lived despite the abundance of tombs. Early excavators began to label this city, the heart of a thriving empire, as a necropolis, a city of the dead. The answer was much simpler though, and they wouldn’t have had to go far to ask. The occupiers of Petra were Bedu. They lived in tents, they moved often, and the followed the grazing. They didn’t leave much of their lives behind that wasn’t also used by their children.
I walked through the sandy street which gave way to distinctly Roman columns and flagstones. Here there was an amphitheatre built for a capacity of 5,000, carved completely from the rock. Surprisingly, the amphitheatre was original, the columns and flagstones were Roman. The Greeks tried and failed to march an army through the Siq and take the city, the Romans didn’t have as much trouble. Though the temples and buildings the Romans built here didn’t stand the test of time. Where the Nabatean structures have held up amazingly well, the Roman structures are simply basements and foundations. Petra has been rocked by dozens of strong earthquakes over the centuries, nothing freestanding stood a chance.
It was around two o’clock when I got to the end of the flat road that ran through the heart of the old city. I hadn’t bothered to explore any of the ruins as they were crawling with people. Now the road went straight up, 800 steps, to the monastery. This was supposedly the only building in the city that vied with the pink treasury in scale and beauty. A dozen young Jordanians offered me a donkey to ride to the top, but I pressed on, passing people as fast as I could, seldom looking back, just to get away from the throng.
The winding path up the mountain was also lined with stalls of identical goods, manned exclusively by local women, covered up. Their beautiful children roamed around often chanting the English alphabet, months of the year, days of the week, etc… One woman named Fatima brayed at me and I promised her that if she remembered my name and recognized me on the way down, I would buy something from her shop.
Eventually I reached the end of the stairs, and almost immediately turned a corner and was confronted by the awesome spectacle of the monastery.
It was roughly twice the width of the treasury building and probably a little taller. It was definitely worth the trip up. Fortunately it wasn’t nearly as crowded as the areas below, but still there were plenty of people around so I decided to roam. I walked around behind one of the tea houses and found piles of Pepsis and water bottles next to the remnants of campfires where the locals probably hang out at night.
As I meandered farther I also noticed foundations, and stairs. They were literally everywhere. There were no tourists within earshot yet there were still remnants of this ancient civilization in every nook and cranny of the mountains. I started climbing some stairs, and then I started bouldering, and then finally just climbing to get to the top of a little mountain. After a half hour or so I was standing a hundred feet above the monastery, on a mountain top all to myself, with an amazing vantage point of pretty much all of Petra. I was beginning to gleam the true value of this place. Directly across from me was another hilltop, swarming with people, with a huge placard that said “The Best View in Petra” on it. They were seeing exactly what I was seeing, but I wasn’t fighting a handful of Austrian octogenarians to take a picture of it.
After I scrambled back down, recovering the sunglasses I dropped, I went toward the very back end of the city, or the sights, or whatever obligatory boundary marked the end, choosing the dour “view of the end of the world” over “the best view in Petra.” There were far less people going that way. This time I had to give it to them, it was aptly named. From the very edge of the cliff I looked down on an almost endless array of jagged rocks and sharp mountains pitched at extreme angles. It would have been impossible for any army to come through Petra the back way. It was devoid of any vegetation, and the clouds rolling in shrouded everything in ominous shadows. Anyone riding through the desert, and entering through the imposing and easily defended Siq must have looked upon Petra as an oasis, an almost magical city that existed in spite of its surroundings.
I had reached the end of Petra, and in one of those moments when egotistical people begin to think that the universe is aligned specifically for their travelogues, it began to rain. I high tailed it back down the stairs with an old British foursome. We’d gone down quite a ways discussing the fate of one couple’s grandson (the same age as me) when I hear my name being called.
“Steve! You say you buy something!” “And you, Ed-a-Na you say you buy something!” Fatima was one sly fox. It was one of the humbling moments when I was forced to admit that I wasn’t nearly as clever as I thought I was. So we stopped briefly and I bought myself a bedu necklace, which may or may not have been made in China.
The rest of the walk back passed without incident, but with the rain starting and the sun setting the whole city began to take on a more genuine glow. The boys yelling about donkey and camel rides, and the river of Tommy Bahama shirts began their slow erosion from foreground annoyance to background static. By the time I got out of Petra the rain was coming down in sheets, and I arrived at my hotel soaked and cold. I had a ticket for something called Petra at Night, but my hotelier told me the show would go on.
I bathed, napped, put on a jacket and a hat and headed back down toward Petra. The Petra at Night event was held a few times a week, and I was lucky to catch it on the first day, since I don’t think there was much partying going on in town anyway. They limited the tickets to a manageable number of people but I wasn’t sure how many exactly.
It was dark when I walked through the gate into Petra again, but where before there were hordes of tourists, and loud locals offering horseback rides the path was filled only with two rows of candles. The candles were placed within thin brown bags that protected them from the wind, and they lined the entire pathway from the gates, through the Siq and down to the Treasury building, whose pink walls radiated through the night.
There was something very genuine about crawling through the Siq by the light of actual candles. It had a timeless quality which is impossible to achieve in a theme park, and to everyone’s credit they seemed like a passive and humbled crowd from the simple spectacle. The candles multiplied and expanded into a vast circle in front of the treasury building. People began sitting down as they came in, and men, but not men in uniforms were constantly trying to squeeze all of these strangers closer together.
From somewhere little cups of tea appeared on trays, moving through the crowd. The cups were like paper shot glasses, but the warmth of the drink burrowed all the way to the blood after the walk through that humid night. After everyone had made it through the Siq and sat down, the show began. The old man who’d been trying to gather up the crowd sat down on a stool with a one stringed bedu guitar and began to play. There were no announcements or explanations, he simply waited for the crowd to quiet down and began playing and later singing. It wasn’t a performance I’d call beautiful, but adept. There’s only so much you can do with one string and a 60 year old larynx. When the music stopped the old bedu explained the significance of the instrument and the song he sang, which was a complex invitation to drink coffee. The sheiks of the desert would ask someone to play and sing in order to call some kind of meeting, or gathering in which the news of the sands was shared and decisions made.
After he finished another Bedu who was previously shrouded in the shadow of the treasury appeared, playing a flute. He also came without any kind of introduction, and the melody coming from the simple instrument was entrancing. He walked around the crowd, dipping into the light and then retreating into the darkness while the song continued. When he finished to some applause the original performer returned and this time spoke in a booming voice. It was a kind of story teller / history lesson about the Jordanian bedu. He spoke about the significance of the music they played, and how like almost everything in the desert, had a practical as well as artistic purpose. After he finished speaking the crowd dispersed as noiselessly as it had gathered. It was a surreal experience within the same site that had previously seemed drained of its charm by the masses.
Petra was beginning to redeem itself.
As I walked out past the candles, many of which were blowing out after burning through their paper prisons, I realized that I hadn’t had a decent meal all day. Past the Movenpick was a little pizza joint owned by an Egyptian and staffed by various Arabs and Africans. I listened to the Muezzin’s call come down from the hill above and die within the cracks and crevices of the ancient city. When the call to prayer finished in Petra the TV began playing the prayer in Mecca. The Hajj has begun in earnest. The TV showed the sprawling square of the Masjid al-Haram, the Mosque that surrounds the black cube of the Kabba. The densely packed crowd circled the small building and prayed in unison, but the interesting part of this televised pilgrimage was the interspersing of moments of prayer with nature scenery. Here a bearded man closes his eyes in the vast Mosque, there a waterfall, a boy crying in religious glee, then a bee pollinating a flower, faces to the sky in rapture, then a duck landing in a pond, a million white clad figures circling, then a sunset. This bizarre mash up continued accompanied by the voice of a female Arabic singer. Which is odd considering that music is considered blasphemous in the conservative halls of Saudi Mosques.
I was reminded a bit of what I’d managed to escape from for a little while to be enjoying a pizza, which was actually the tastiest I’d had in the Middle East, among a culture that actually took pride in its pre-Islamic history. The Saudis on the other hand, tried as hard as they could to downplay that the world had actually existed before Mohammed stamped Islam upon its psyche. I left and took the fifteen minute walk uphill in another downpour, vowing to return to Petra as early as possible to beat the mob, and do the next day right.
No comments:
Post a Comment