Day 182: Petra By Day (29/07/2011)

Petra by day is a totally different experience to the night time.

Most people know it as the setting for the climax of the third installment of the Indianna Jones franchise.

The tunnel of blackness is replaced by amazing views of the Siq. The canyon yawns above, in places seeming to meet overhead. Great cracks have appeared over time from which trees grow three storeys above. Huge sheets of stone have fallen away from the rock face and more seems about to follow at any moment.

As the light of the day changes, so do the colours of the rock. The canyon in all its winding routes is as colourful as an artist’s pallet. During the day the rock displays a startling array of vibrant reds, yellows, blues, whites and purples. As the dusk falls the colours become more muted until they glow a deep and uniform pink as the rays of the setting sun ricochet off every surface.

The artist, David Roberts captured the scene in water colour in the late nineteenth century, shortly after Petra was ‘discovered’ by a roaming European explorer - who also stumbled upon the temple at Abu Simbel at Aswan in Egypt in an improbable series of archaeological finds that Dr Jones would have been proud of.

Unable to resist the chance, we rode in on horseback, Clare playing the icy blonde and I double handing both the redoubtable Dr Joneses. The tag line of The Last Crusade was that ’the man with the hat is back and this time he’s brought his dad’.

Sadly, I only had my hat.

The triumphal arch that Roberts painted at the mouth of the Siq, fell in 1893 but the rest remains unchanged. Even the Nabatean soldiers still stand at the gateway, rifling the Petra Amateur-Dramatics wardrobe every Friday for the pointy spears, crested helmets and shiny breastplates in return for a donation ‘to preserve the heritage’.

As we discovered, armed robbery is alive and well even if it comes in the most unexpected guises.

The canyon weaves for 2km, providing endless reveals, each more beautiful than the last. Horse and trap career across the antique paving stones, lifting the dusts with hooves clattering and sending tourists scattering for cover. Smart mounted police patrol periodically. Although sometimes crowded, the twists and turns of the canyon provide solitude in which to wonder at the timelessness of it all and examine the votive niches and carvings that line the wind worn walls.

The Siq opens into wide ravine of deep red stone and in the far wall is carved the Treasury. At night the eye strains to make out the detail but the enormity of the achievement is fully apparent in the day time. The eye fools you in to thinking that it has been constructed but there are no joints and nothing to support the gaping spans but the rock its self. Huge columns rise, decorated with finials and filigree. The pediment is lined with carving and the doorways are guarded by mounted kings whose detail is sadly fading after twenty three centuries of erosion. The diadem stands above two giant storeys, nearly forty metres high.

Constructed as a tomb, it is now merely a magnificent façade.

The ravine continues to the right along the Aveneue of Tombs, simpler but of equal proportions. Beyond this is the Necropolis of rough-hewn caves rising high up the rock face. Beside it is the amphitheatre and on the opposite side, the Royal Tombs, that almost surpass the Treasury in both scale and intricacy. Sadly, they are less protected from the prevailing winds that funnel up the canyons and so are wearing away more quickly that their more sheltered cousins.

After a long walk down the Roman colonnaded street to the ominously name ‘where the torrents meet’, we passed the Grand Temple, now a forest of partially re-erected columns, their cylindrical slabs strewn where they fell like a toppled stack of over-sized coins.

After a long and hot climb up the 900 steps we reached the Monastery. Similar in design to the Treasury, except on a larger scale, it was also a tomb but was later adopted by the Byzantine and Coptic faiths as a church. The diadem is accessible by a steep climb but tourists and guides have died recently after falling from it.

Amazingly, sure footed donkies carry the fat and infirm up the steps but the trade is not without its costs. The burnt out wrecks of many a donk lie mangled in the ravines below and tourists are lefting clinging to the rock face for weeks before rescue arrives.

The donkeys have a hard time of it as do the horses and camels. The young riders whip them mercilessly, often for the thrill of a buck. Camels are whipped about the face by five year olds brandishing knotted ropes. Horses are made to gallop endlessly in the midday sun for longer than is good for them. There is no water and no food. The dust and flies plague them.

But that is not to say that their adolescent charges do not value them. They work hard for every fare and even the five year olds aggressively protect their intellectual property rights, screaming at tourists who pause for the occasional donk snap.

At a similar elevation is the High Place of Sacrifice where the remains of substantial buildings have toppled into the ravine below after earthquakes that brought Petra to ruin. Two giant obelisks remain on the stone plateau which stand like sentinels. All that moves up here are the shadows that trace the passing sun. From the plateau there are perfect views of Little Petra further up the valley, and the plunging sides of the main canyon into which the Royal Tombs are carved.

Leaving as the daylight was failing, we had a refreshing drink at the gate side Cave Bar.

More used to a high street where bars and cafes have a life span measured in weeks and months, the Cave Bar claims to be the oldest in the world. The claim is a little disingenuous; the building is a tomb from the first century BC.

The bar is not but does a manful job of facilitating discrete rendezvous in the darkened niches that once housed the dead.