I woke up for the hotel breakfast around seven. I’m not sure if this is a sign of maturation in my travels or if there just isn’t as much partying to do in the area but it says something that I woke up on time for every hotel breakfast during my stay in Jordan. After a pretty mediocre spread of bread and jams I was cruising toward Petra around eight. Already large groups were mulling around outside, and I followed a line of people through the gate and into the first stretch.
This time though, instead of going into the Siq, where the tourist population bottlenecked, I veered away from the gift shop and went under a tunnel, which lonely planet and a sign warning against going without a guide told me was a side trail into the ancient city. After passing under a fairly large tunnel I was spit out into a gorge much like the Siq, but wider, and much quieter. I couldn’t hear any of the rabble behind me and I saw no one in front of me. I walked.
Twenty minutes later I was still walking, slowly, enjoying the solitude of the stark mountains. It was hard to believe that somewhere around me tens of thousands of people were gathering and roaming around, because there was an eerie silence that had descended on the trail. I hear any birds, no lizards darted from between boulders and there was no detritus of tourism or old campouts. Eventually I began to wonder if this trail actually went anywhere at all. So as the sky darkened and rain drops started falling I pulled out my Lonely Planet to check. It described the entrance to the trail and then said, “Whatever you do don’t take this trail if it’s raining. There is a tendency for the wadi to suffer flash flooding.”
That sounded exciting enough, it also said that after 45 minutes I’d come to a T-Junction and there’d be a white arrow pointing left. Without that stupid guide book I might have given up and turned around, so this was one of the few days I was thankful to have it along. After a few more minutes of walking I found the junction and arrow exactly as it had described. Lonely Planet did its duty, I hucked it back in my Indiana Jones bag and plodded along the trail. It narrowed, it widened, I had to climb down a couple of “stairways” composed to wire mesh and old tires, and after another hour or so I hadn’t seen or heard a single human being, and I was spit out into a massive valley. In a 180 degree arc I was surrounded by the beautiful Nabatean tombs of Wadi Musa, carved into the mountain, and completely devoid of either Bedu or tourists.
I wandered happily around the empty tombs, climbing up and down the hillsides for the better part of another hour, before I made for a trail that I assumed would take me back to the heart of the city. On the way back in I saw a covered woman taking her goats into a cave. She waved at me and I happily sauntered up a small hill to the cave where she was feeding her goats. She was middle aged, missing a few teeth, but that only made her smile a little more genuine. I once again brought out my now very well tuned three phrases of Arabic and we approached something that could be described as pleasantries. Then she took out a little change purse and removed a silver coin a little bigger than a nickel and put it in my hand. I looked at it and back to her and she was beaming. The coin itself was very faded but the remnants of a man’s face. Around the head there was script that was still fairly distinguishable, and it was Greek. I know the coin was real because when I gave it back to this little goat herder she immediately snapped it back into her change purse and put the purse back in her pocket. This was a cherished possession. She didn’t try to sell it to me. This woman, possibly an illiterate woman, very likely someone who hadn’t ranged very far from her home here in the mountains, was carrying around a piece of history thousands of years old. Her good luck charm could have easily found its way into a museum somewhere, certainly the Beirut museum had coins just like this lined up in a glass case. It’s not often that any of us get to touch anything that old, to hold something in our hands which changed hands so many centuries ago.
Petra was growing powerful, but the spell of solitude was about to end. As I walked down the trail I saw a few dozen people milling around one of the larger edifices. The first populated tomb I came to was the burial chamber of the Roman governor in charge of Petra. The inscription (long faded) had apparently related to how this governor after ruling over the breathtaking spectacle of his territory wished to be buried in Petra rather than Rome. This tomb dated back to the reign of Hadrian, famous in history class for the wall he built to keep the Scottish out of Roman controlled England, a backwater hamlet that marked the northern reach of the Roman Empire.
It seems even more remarkable now, with all the advances in technology, and all the failures of modern governments that without cars, planes, and telephones the Romans not only ruled, but maintained such an unbelievably vast swath of planet Earth. Empires aside though, there was a large stairway nearby that nobody was climbing. As most people read the inscription took a photo and headed back toward the main path I went up the stairs. A half hour later I was still climbing the stairs and reaching the top of a mountain with an amazing view of the city below.
Not long after turning from the peak I spotted an unladen donkey near a small, abandoned cave. After a moment a boy came out and offered tea. I was glad to have somewhere to sit down away from the wind that was whipping around. There were a few people at the entrance to Petra handing out flyers about the plight of the children who were skipping school to make some money off tourists, it’s sad that I would be contributing to what might amount to be the theft of this Jordanian child’s future, but I really wanted some tea.
The kid, who was not much older than nine or ten, had a whole array of items to keep himself warm and occupied. Some school books were collecting dust under his radio, but his English was passable. He said his friends came up to the cave at night and they slept there often. I asked him about his family, which was sizable. He had a horde of brothers and sisters, some in school, and some scattered around Petra working in various odd jobs. After I’d had a few cups I paid the kid and left. I didn’t really know where I was going, if I’d reached the end of what I could see, or if something spectacular loomed along a different horizon. I just walked.
I got lost for a little while, climbing over an old cistern, up and down stairs carved into the rock millennia ago, and to a point where there were hardly any remnants of human activity. I turned myself around a few times before I found my back to the tea-cave and then discovered that there was a rather obvious trail leading in the opposite direction from where I had just come.
I followed the trail, which had some recent footprints etched into the loose sand, and eventually passed a couple from New Zealand I’d seen on the way up. Not long after that I was struck dumb by what I think is the coolest view in Petra. After all that meandering I’d managed to get myself directly back to the entrance where the pink stone treasury lay. The difference was this time I was at least a hundred feet above it. The magnificently preserved façade seemed even larger from the heights above, where the throngs of tourists were reduced to pin pricks against the sandy floor of the city. Once again I found myself completely isolated while simultaneously in the same place as tens of thousands of tourists. It felt like I was doing Petra right.
By the time I climbed back down, past the tea-cave and the Roman Governor’s tomb, and reached the main thoroughfare of the city, it was mid-afternoon. I’d seen all of the major sites, but there was one more trail I wanted to go up before I left Petra behind me. This one was a little more crowded than the previous trails that day because the staircase began adjacent to the main road near the Amphitheatre. It climbed to the remnants of a sacrificial alter. When I got to the top I read one of the handy placards that described how the grooves around the sides of the square were drainage for the bloodletting of animals during the rites and rituals of the Nabatean kingdom that preceded the Romans here. The view was again, spectacular, but not nearly as stark as the views over the Monastery from the day before or the Treasury only an hour or two ago.
No this last hike was remarkable more for the two people I met on the way down. Two shaggy, long haired Jordanian Bedu in their mid-20’s introduced themselves as “VIB’s” when I met them.
“We are very important Bedu.”
They called me up to the small plateau fifteen or twenty feet away from the trail where they were sitting. One of them, named Sami, was high as a kite and looked it. I pulled out my notebook and wrote the word “Visine” on it. They had liberally applied “kohl” the black Jordanian eyeliner underneath their eyes, and they cat-called everything with tits that walked up and down the mountain for the twenty minutes I was sitting with them.
“Hello, beautiful you will come camping with us. Get the real experience of Jordan.”
“Yes, yes come here, have tea with us, we will take you in the mountains and drink with the fire.”
At one point they tried to decorate me with kohl but one of my travelling rules is that I don’t let stoners go to town with anything that looks like a needle near my eyes. They wore pretty shabby looking clothing, and seemed to creep out every woman they yelled at, but they were masters at playing up the Arabian “mystique” and there were apparently no lack of woman looking to go native for a night or two. At least according to the stories they told. We swapped phone numbers and they told me that they had planned a rendezvous up in the mountains with four girls they’d met who were shockingly inclined toward their awkward pickup lines.
A sight I’ll never forget are these two stoned Bedouin slowly packing up their camp (losing and finding their lighters a half dozen times) and then climbing onto their donkeys before going at a gallop down the narrow trail. The donkeys apparently saved up a whole days worth of shit, and God (Allah) know what they were feeding the things, because green splatters of poo flew from them like candy from a broken piñata all over the trail.
The sun was slowly setting and I was exhausted so I shimmied back to my hotel, stopping for pizza again on the way back. I walked up the hill to the hotel grabbed my swimsuit and then walked straight back down toward Petra again. It was time to hit up a Turkish bath. The Hemams (which actually just mean bathroom in Arabic). On the way out of the hotel I ran into Sami again. He had a small brown paper bag and he smiled at me as he opened it up and pulled out what was inside…Visine. He told me he was still waiting for the girls to call him back, but he still planned on hanging out in the mountains somewhere nearby tonight.
The Hemam was an interesting experience, somewhere between the Onsens of Japan and the bathhouses of Shanghai. It starts with a blisteringly hot sauna for about 15 minutes. This is followed immediately by a cold shower. It should be noted people wear bathing suits in these as opposed to the au natural of the former two. After the shower I laid down on this tile slab and a Jordanian dude came over and rubbed me down with soap and then scrubbed off the dead skin with something that felt like a cat-o-nine-tails. After that I got a pretty decent massage. I would hardily recommend this to anyone tired from marching around Petra for a whole day.
After I got out of the Hemam I called Sami, who informed me that the girls would, sadly, not be joining us. Shoganai, I was still excited to go chill out up in the mountains with my VIB’s. After getting lost for a little while I managed to find Sami along the road that ran along the edge of Petra. A Bedu fire was burning, and an old man and an adolescent kid sat around it, one drinking gin the other Pepsi. When the Bedu make a fire they don’t start with little stick and brush (for obvious reasons), they usually just light a big branch or log that will continue burning for a long time.
Soon after sitting down Sami offered to go buy me some booze, so I gave him a few bucks and he came back ten minutes later with a little bottle of vodka, which I mixed with a bottle of orange soda they brought with them. I sat somewhere away from the road, and Ali, the old man pointed into the darkness ahead of us, “right down there is Petra, we can walk in from here and nobody would ever know.”
I sat with my back to the wind and my face to the fire, perched atop the cliffs a short walk from Petra, indistinguishable from the other dark rocks and spires of the night. It’s no wonder that this place had been completely abandoned and forgotten for so many hundreds of years. But once it was found again, there was a group of Jordanians that immediately took notice. “We lived there, in the caves” Ali Said. “And I was born in a cave. Until 1989 the tourists would sleep with us in our tents. We would guide them around to all the good places, and then the government made this city,” he pointed to the lights in the distance, a town I’d noticed when I’d first met the woman with the Greek coin, “they moved us there and forgot about us, now they make so much money from this place, and we don’t get any of it.”
I imagined how amazing the experience must have been such a short time ago, the double barrels of the incredible edifice of Petra, and staying and eating with the Bedu who lived there. I also thought of the young guy who approached me before I got my ticket to Petra, it seems like he was right, I could have just walked down from the hills into the city, and he was probably right to be as angry as he was.
They didn’t stay angry for long though, as the vodka and fire began to warm me up a little Sami and Ali went on for quite a while about past sexual conquests, all involving tourist girls. They’d say a name, an age, a country, where the deed happened. For instance Else, the blonde Swedish student, 10 years ago, camping out right over there etc…This carousel of carnal memory was interrupted when Ali realized that he’d lost his little black book, and spent the rest of the night wandering around the rocks trying to figure out where he’d dropped it.
When I’d polished off my vodka, and Ali wandered back to the dying fire, frustrated with not having found his book, it was time to call it a night. I made the long walk back up to my awful hotel for the last time and decided to leave Petra. I had a three day ticket but I thought I’d seen all that I was really going to see in two. The next morning the hotel owner took me to the bus stop and I paid some small amount for a trip up north, next stop Amman.
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