The Rose-Red City
at the End of the World

There is a moment on the path to Petra's Treasury — the Al-Khazneh — that I have thought about many times since. You have been walking for twenty minutes through the Siq, a narrow canyon whose walls rise two hundred metres on either side, close enough in places to touch simultaneously with both hands outstretched. The rock changes colour as you walk — striped red, orange, white, purple, all of it carved by water through millions of years of geological time. Then the canyon curves, and between two walls of stone, at the end of a narrowing slot of sky, you see the Treasury for the first time.

Nothing prepares you for it. Not the photographs, not the descriptions, not Indiana Jones. The facade is 43 metres tall, carved with extraordinary precision directly into a cliff face of rose-red sandstone, and it simply should not exist. The Nabataean people — Arab traders who controlled the incense and spice routes of the ancient Middle East — built it sometime in the first century BC as a royal tomb, and it has been standing, largely intact, for two thousand years in a desert canyon that most of the world didn't know existed until the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt stumbled upon it in 1812.

The Siq is 1.2 kilometres long and it is not incidental to the Petra experience — it is integral to it. The Nabataeans understood theatrical architecture, and they understood that a wonder revealed instantly is less wondrous than one arrived at through time and anticipation. The Siq was their arrival sequence: a passage through geological drama that prepares the eye and the imagination for what waits at the end.

Walk it slowly. Look at the carved niches in the walls where the Nabataeans placed their gods. Look at the channels cut into the rock to carry water into the city — an engineering achievement in its own right in a desert environment. Look up at the strip of sky above you and how the walls lean together at the top. The Siq has been modified by water over two millennia but the essential experience of walking it is unchanged from what a merchant arriving in Petra two thousand years ago would have felt. That continuity is part of what makes it so powerful.

The Siq — the 1.2-kilometre canyon passage that the Nabataeans designed as the approach to their city.

Most visitors to Petra see the Treasury and turn back. This is the single greatest missed opportunity in Middle Eastern tourism. The Treasury is the beginning of Petra, not its entirety. Beyond it, a full ancient city opens up — the Street of Facades, the Royal Tombs carved into the cliffs in a row of increasingly ambitious scale, the Roman Cardo Maximus, the Great Temple, and the Monastery, which is even larger than the Treasury and reached by 850 rock-cut steps through a landscape of extraordinary desert beauty.

The Monastery — Ad-Deir

The hike to the Monastery takes forty-five minutes to an hour and is worth every step. The path climbs through the ancient city and up into the mountains, past Bedouin tea stalls carved into cave openings, until the canyon opens and the Monastery — 47 metres wide, 48 metres tall, even more imposing than the Treasury — appears with an unobstructed view across the Jordanian desert to the mountains beyond. There is a tea stall at the top run by a Bedouin family. Sit with a glass of sage tea, with the Monastery behind you and the desert below, and let the scale of what you're looking at fully arrive.

The High Place of Sacrifice

A two-hour round trip from the main trail, the High Place of Sacrifice sits at the highest accessible point in the Petra basin, with a carved sacrificial altar and views over the entire ancient city. This is where the city's religious life happened — exposed to sky, on the highest available ground, in the way that desert cultures have always oriented their sacred spaces. The views are the best available in Petra and the route there takes you through parts of the city that almost no casual visitor reaches.

Jordan is one of the most rewarding countries in the Middle East for visitors — safe, welcoming, deeply hospitable, and possessed of extraordinary diversity in a small geographic area. In three days you can move from the ancient city of Amman to the rose-red canyons of Petra to the desert of Wadi Rum to the coral reefs of Aqaba on the Red Sea. The country rewards the itinerary that takes it all in rather than focusing on a single destination.

Amman

Jordan's capital is built on seven hills, and the old downtown — the Balad — contains the Roman amphitheatre, the Amman Citadel with its extraordinary views over the city, and some of the best street food in the Middle East. Mansaf, the national dish — lamb cooked in dried fermented yoghurt, served on a bed of rice — is found in its purest form here. The Rainbow Street neighbourhood above downtown is where Amman's creative class gathers in the evenings, in cafés and galleries and restaurants that feel like they belong in any international city.

Left: Wadi Rum — the desert that surrounds and completes the Petra experience. Right: the Royal Tombs, carved into the cliff face above the ancient city.

On my second day in Petra I left the main tourist path entirely and followed a trail that climbed out of the ancient city basin and up onto the ridge above it. After an hour of walking I was completely alone, looking down over the entire site — the Treasury invisible from above, the Roman street a thin line through the valley, the Monastery on its opposing ridge, and beyond everything the desert mountains of the Jordanian highlands stretching to the horizon in every direction.

The Nabataeans chose this place for their capital because it was defensible — hidden, approached only through canyons that could be blocked, supplied by water channels ingeniously cut from the rock. They built it as a working city of perhaps 30,000 people, a hub of trade routes connecting the Mediterranean world with Arabia and the Orient, and they made it beautiful because they could, because they were wealthy, and because the rose-red stone of these particular mountains invited it.

Two thousand years later, standing on the ridge above what remains, I understood something about the relationship between beauty and purpose. The Nabataeans built to last because they built for meaning, not for spectacle. The spectacle is what endures — but only because the meaning was there first.

Go twice. The first time, you see it. The second time, you understand it.