Saturday 7 March 2020

Petra off the beaten track

The Treasury is what everyone comes to see. Its red stone, its broken pediments, its delicate ornamentation: everyone knows it from photographs, it's the one thing you have to see even if you spend only an hour in Petra (though at 50 JD a ticket, it's an expensive hour).

And that's a bit of a problem. There is one way in, the narrow Siq, a kilometre of walking in a narrow defile. In mid-morning the deep opening containing the Treasury is loud with the shouts of vendors, the buzz of conversation, tour guides talking at the tops of their voices, carriage wheels on the stone-paved road.

But Petra is huge. To walk from the Siq to the Monastery (Al-Deir, another Nabatean tomb on the same roughly Hellenistic lines as the Treasury) is about 8km; and the corrugated, mountainous terrain forces trails to wind and snake around wadis and over cols. For the more adventurous traveller with a good head for heights (or the determination to ignore their increasing uneasiness and vertigo) there are a number of alternatives to the cauldron of the Treasury.


  • First of all, get up early. The site opens at six. One morning I found myself walking the Siq in complete solitude. The quiet won't last long, but you will never forget the hushed gloom of the Siq, the serenity of the Treasury in dawn light.
  • Secondly, take the trail to the High Place of Sacrifice and then come down Wadi Farasa. The steps leading up from near the Theatre are steep enough to deter most from making the effort; the track winds up the side of a narrow wadi, then crosses to the neighbouring peak and climbs again towards the High Place with its amazing views. From there, the trail descends the side of Wadi Farasa, with almost unvisited rock-cut tombs - a wadi that has a gentleness and charm absent from some of the more spectacular sites. 
  • Another trail ('Al-Khutba') leads from the end of the Royal Tombs up to another High Place, and then to a tea tent with a superb view over the Treasury. From here, the din of the crowds shrinks to a low hum, as if the hollow place has become a Tibetan singing bowl. When I was there, about ten people had made it this far, and we were being entertained by two very cute kittens.
(By the way, on the Al-Khutba trail, when you encounter an official brown sign giving the direction as straight on, ignore it - go left instead. There's an arrow painted on the ground a bit later on; you descend broad steps to a valley floor and then take a right turn down the valley. It's a much easier way to get to the Treasury viewpoint.)

I didn't take the third marvellous trail, but I wish I had. The problem is that you need to get your Petra ticket first, and you have to go into the visitor centre in Wadi Musa first. 'Petra through the Back Door' starts at Siq el Barid, 'Cold Siq' or 'Little Petra', and then takes a relatively easy track through desert and rocks to the Monastery - from where you can walk down to the centre of Petra, and out past the Treasury to the town of Wadi Musa. (It's part of the Jordan Trail, which runs all the way from Umm Qais in the north to Aqaba in the south.)

I am sometimes disappointed by the reality when I go somewhere I know from photos. The Taj Mahal I found underwhelming; likewise Abu Simbel. But Petra is far, far more than the classic photo of the Treasury, and the more I wandered its trails, the more I loved it.

No comments:

Post a Comment