After a lifetime of birthdays spent in the more-or-less freezing cold (thanks, December!), I finally got to have a warm one: Mike took me to another of my Most Wanted this year--Jordan. What an extraordinary place. Petra, obviously, with my penchant for all things ancient, was the main draw, and I'd heard faint rumblings about a place called Jerash, but honestly. I had no idea what else was there, and it is So. Much. We arrived in Amman in the evening, navigated the insane traffic to our hotel, and grabbed a quick meal at Abu Jbara, where the menu and all signage are entirely in Arabic, and where we were rather conspicuously the only non-locals that evening. We're so very fortunate that we were born in a country whose language is very nearly spoken everywhere, though, and so we managed to get some terrifically crunchy falafel, a bowl of ful soup, some very tangy hummus, and a ful-hummus mix into which we could dip the fresh, never-ending flatbread served by a guy with a giant basket full of it, who was always on the run. (The Jordanians are serious about the bread.)
The next day, we drove 4 hours south down a highway through the absolute flattest and most barren landscape I've ever seen in my life, until we arrived at Wadi Rum. Everything was flat and empty and utterly devoid of life and variation, and then suddenly it wasn't as we drove around a corner and down into a valley full of unbelievable rock spires and views that made the place look infinite. We met up with a Bedouin guide (because it's a protected area, as a tourist, you can only go so far by yourself) who took us on a short Jeep tour before depositing us at our camp for the night.
I feel confident in pronouncing that this place, by far, possesses the most amazing natural scenery I've ever seen in my life. Overwhelmingly vast and alien and gorgeous. Can't even tell you how much sand I got in my mouth, riding in the back of that Jeep with mouth constantly agape. Wadi Rum is so unbelievable.
I'm pretty sure we drove onto Mars, somehow.
Free-range camels! Most of the inhabitants of Wadi Rum are Bedouins, some of whom maintain flocks of goats for meat and dairy, and camels for tourism and racing purposes. (The family of one of our Bedouin hosts raises racing camels, and listening to him talk about that was positively surreal.)
On our first Jeep tour, visited a wadi with some ancient petroglyphs...
...some of which were goats!
Aside from scrub here and there, the place is basically devoid of plants, which made it all the more shocking to see these things (which looked weirdly like tulips) once in a while. Crazy green in the middle of all that red and brown.
Srsly. Mars.
I have never seen rocks like this in all my life. Some of them looked like they were actively melting; some were completely smooth and rounded, like massive river stones; and the erosion patterns on others looked, from a slight distance, very much like the hieroglyphs at the Temple of Isis, or the eroded Maya inscriptions at Tikal. Only several hundred feet tall.
Sunset from camp.
View towards the other side of camp.
Officially it was a luxury camp, since we had little huts, actual beds, and an honest-to-God bathroom that was far more clean and modern than many of the ones we saw on the road.
Dinner that night was zarb, a heap of chicken, potatoes, onions, and zucchini that was cooked for several hours underground, served with flatbread, rice, potatoes in broth, a cucumber-tomato-parsley salad with tahini sauce, yogurt on the side, and all the hot sweetened tea we could drink, cooked in a kettle over the open fire. After dinner we spent the evening sitting on cushions around said fire, chatting with our Bedouin hosts and some very friendly, well-traveled girls from Holland.
Mike managed to get a quick shot of the dramatic emergence of the zarb from underground.
Morning view from camp. That rock face on the right is several hundred feet tall.
Natural arch. That rock wall behind it is about 3,000 feet tall, or so we were told. Just jutting straight up out of the desert sand. (We also passed the tallest mountain in Jordan, which forms part of the border with Saudi Arabia.)
Martian panorama.
...we jumped in the car and headed south to Aqaba, just so we could say we'd seen the Red Sea.
Hey, there it is.
Then we got back in the car to head north towards Petra, past a weirdly high number of tomato fields...
...and stopped to check out Shobak, the ruin of a crusader castle built by the French in 1115.
The Arabic inscriptions were added in the 13th century by the Mameluks, who eventually claimed the castle after Saladin captured it (after a two-year siege!) in 1189.
Interior chapel.
One side of a four-iwan hall, which, as we learned, is a "classic Islamic architectural form" consisting of a square hall with a vaulted ceiling and an arched door in the center of each side of the room. Pretty.
Random chunks of embellishment stashed away in a side room.
Some of the pieces were fairly spectacular.
Fairly sure this has been reconstructed, but it's still neat to see that tiny bit of decorative edging in place.
Didn't notice on the way in that the inscription runs all the way around the building.
From Shobak we headed north to Wadi Musa, where we spent the night before heading into Petra proper the next day. Dinner that night was mezze plates in the Cave Bar, attached to our hotel and so named because it's built inside an actual 2,000-year-old Nabataean* tomb (...you know, the things Petra is full of). From a preservational standpoint, it felt a bit strange, but the place was cozy, there was live music, and somehow they'd managed to keep the interior architecture of the tomb intact. Go figure.
Cozy, for 2,000-year-old tomb...
And the next day, it was off to Petra, the visiting of which has been a dream of mine since I was 10 years old (thanks to Indiana Jones, of course). One thing no one really tells you about Petra is that it's far, far more than that impressive facade you see in the movie: the site is absolutely massive. We did our best to see everything of possible interest, and ended up hiking 12.5 kilometers that day. My legs haven't been that sore in years, but man, oh man, was it so very worth it.
The approach to Petra begins through this shallow valley, the Bab el-Siq, itself lined with little caves and very simple tombs in the rocks--themselves otherworldly and amazing--that are man-made and ancient.
You pass the Djinn blocks, carved sometime between 50 BC and 50 AD, and thought to be early Nabataean funereal monuments.
The first major monument is the Obelisk Tomb and Bab el-Siq Triclinium, the first stacked on top of the second, although the second is the newer of the two. (A triclinium is a room inside of the tomb, lined with benches carved into three of its walls, used for funerary banquets.) These were created between 25 and 75 AD.
The Bab el-Siq eventually leads you to the Siq itself, a sandstone gorge that winds down into the city of Petra. Even this thing is spectacular, just in and of itself, and it's lined with all manner of little niches and things carved into in the walls.
Plus, it's got these absolutely remarkable channels which were built by the Nabataeans to direct rainwater into the city. These things run for something like 2 km along the siq walls, and are probably just under 2,000 years old.
Nabataean paving stones from the first century BC.
The famous view from the Siq...
...out to the Treasury, by far the most elaborate facade in Petra. The name stems from legends about a mythological treasure stashed here, although the place was most likely a tomb or mausoleum. No one's quite sure when it was built, with a date range from 100 BC to 200 AD.
The Street of Facades. Throughout the site, the architecture is a mix of Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman styles.
East meets west: Nabataean crow-step pattern at top, Egyptian cavetto cornice (that rounded bit that flares out) in the middle, and Hellenistic pediment and columns at the bottom. Amazing.
Just so many caves and carvings, the simplest of which could have served at various points as tombs, shops, or even homes.
Really, everywhere you look. (These fancy ones were more likely tombs or mausoleums.)
Did I mention that the colors of the rocks here are insane? This series of tombs looked like it had been painted.
Roman amphitheater, cut out of the rock in the early 1st century AD.
The Royal tombs.
Colonnaded street built by the Romans around 100 AD.
Decided to make the long climb up to the Monastery, and passed the Lion Triclinium (1st century AD) on the way. (You can sorta see their little liony feet on either side of the base of the doorway.)
I'll admit that that climb was longer than I expected it to be, but the scenery on the way up was fantastic.
And there were goats for entertainment. (I kid you not [har, har], the leader of this guy's flock was shouting back and forth with the leader of another flock on the other side of the trail. I like to think that they were telling each other where the food was ["Hey! Food! Here! Over here! Food!"], or possibly it was more like, "Is that Alan?". Either way, hilarious.)
And finally, at the top, the massive Monastery, with guy and donkey for scale. Although built in the first century AD, no one can quite seem to agree on its actual purpose. (Tomb? Temple? Site for public gatherings?). It's called the Monastery, though, due to the crosses carved inside (where you're not allowed to go, of course) during its probable reuse as a Christian church during the Byzantine era. The simple columns here are Nabataean in style.
On the way back down from the Monastery, another stunning view of the Royal tombs (left) and early Roman-era Great Temple complex and gate (right).
Headed up to those Royal Tombs next. I'm not kidding about the colors; they are unbelievable. I think this particular tomb is the Silk Tomb, named for the appearance the erosion patterns create on the surface of the rock.
These are so, so much bigger than my photos would have you believe. Especially the one on the left, the Palace Tomb, where, up at the top, the builders determined that the cliff wasn't high enough for their purposes and supplemented with masonry. (These people were intense.)
A few extraordinarily detailed column capitals on the Corinthian Tomb (on the right in the photo above) have somehow managed to survive the elements.
Kept spotting more and more tombs. Everywhere. All over the place. These only became visible when we climbed up to the Royal Tombs.
The Urn Tomb, one of about three in all of Petra inside which you could actually go. Constructed around 70 AD...
...and converted to a Byzantine Christian church in 446.
Natural colors in the stone ceiling of the Urn Tomb. Absolutely breathtaking.
On the way back out, had to stop for a few more photos of the Treasury.
The details on this thing are absolutely stunning, and I love the imprints on the sides, which I'm assuming are remnants from its construction.
Not nearly as colorful as it was in the morning, that's for sure, but just so incredible.
Really, I think you need two days for Petra, and so I'm ashamed to say that we missed entirely the Petra Church, with its remarkable Byzantine mosaics; the tomb of Sextus Florentinius, with its Latin inscription dedicating the tomb to Hadrian's regional administrator; the Greek-and-Nabataean inscription near the Djinn blocks; and the views from both above the Monastery (too tired to keep climbing!) and the High Place of Sacrifice (again, too tired!). But that's ok, really, because we saw plenty of unbelievable mosaics in the days to follow, and I'm quite satisfied with the rest. Petra: ACCOMPLISHED.**
Up next, the remainder of our Jordanian adventures.
*In a rather simplified nutshell, the Nabataeans were a nomadic Arab tribe that spread northward from the Arabian peninsula into modern-day Syria, Jordan, the Sinai, and Israel during the six-ish centuries before the birth of Christ. They were accomplished potters and were skilled in desert agriculture and water conservation engineering, and eventually they settled down and created their capital at Petra (built between the third century BC and roughly 100 AD), from which they developed a rather lucrative control over major east-west trade routes, even securing a monopoly on the spice trade for a time. The Nabataean kingdom was eventually absorbed into the Roman empire--hence the Roman architecture at the site--and Petra was abandoned during the 4th century AD. The people themselves remain rather mysterious, though, as they left behind almost zero written material, despite the fact that they had their own written alphabet.
**Fair warning, though, we found one particular element of Petra utterly unappealing: the constant presence of horses and horse-drawn carriages, which are always forcing you to watch your back, and your feet. (Ew.) The Siq isn't exactly wide, and it's rather irritating to constantly have to get out of the way of the carriages, and more-or-less all of Petra smells, to varying degrees, of animal dung.
I love your blogs of the places you visit! Thanks for putting in the picture of the man and donkey...they helped so much in figuring scale. Massive!
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