#30. Petra (Friday, September 27, 2024)

What was your best day…of traveling somewhere exotic?

Just the fact that we went on this epic trip, and made it to the end safely, already puts it in the top fifty.

With my mom retired as of three years earlier and COVID fully behind us, this was the year she went all-in on seeing the world. And while no one else (me, my dad, my brother, or any of her over two dozen friends) had the same inclination or available vacation days to travel to her extent, she did pull each of us on at least one of her trips.

And naturally, a two-week journey in Greece and Jordan, with all their hallowed sites of historical significance, made the most sense for the trivia nerd (#62, #54) that was me.

The itinerary, especially the Jordan part with the eight-day Gate 1 walking tour, was very busy. Adding some intrigue was the ongoing conflict in neighboring Israel and Lebanon, which led to all the notable sites not being overrun with tourists as well as two-thirds of our original tour group canceling.

And a tour group of seven, plus our two guides Ahmed and Jabir¹, turned out to be the perfect number. Besides my mom and I, there was: Nora and Adrian, a couple from Austin (both a few years younger than me); Dawson² and his wife Varana from Maryland; and Sally from Minnesota (almost seventy, with this being her tenth exotic trip this year – more than my mom). As this was a walking tour, each site involved a substantial amount of…walking:

The first day in Amman, we visit the Citadel, an archaeological site on a mountain and one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited places (since the Neolithic period), before a long tour through all the shops and street art-covered walls³.
At the Dana Biosphere Preserve, we do a four-hour hike along the edge of the mountains. If you look at our path from a distance, you’d be like “hell, no”, but there is enough flat terrain that the risk of actually falling to your death is minimal (though slipping on a pile of sharp rocks is a real risk).⁴
Wadi Rum is the giant desert with all the red-colored sand and imposing granite formations⁵. We stay in these individual tent-like structures that feel like they’re in the middle of nowhere. The first day, a four-hour desert hike (not easy in the sand) leads us a narrow, cave-like space for a Bedouin picnic lunch; before we go on a camel ride that evening⁶. The next day, Nora, Adrian, and I get up early to go on a hot-air balloon ride over the mountains as the sun rises. An unforgettable sight.
At the Dead Sea, our luxury hotel has the largest swimming pool I’ve ever been in. On the last day, I get the classic therapeutic experience of submerging myself in the super-salty Dead Sea water, covering myself head to toe in mud, then washing it all off with super-salty water.

All very nice. But all paled to Day 3 of tour. Petra.

Petra

We get up especially early, so we have the whole canyon (part one of the Petra complex) to ourselves, and its emptiness and beauty feels surreal. After an hour, we reach the Treasury, that elaborate building carved into the mountainside (and the first visual everyone associates with Petra). We’re allowed to get surprisingly close to it, so I just stand for an hour admiring the ancient Nabatean architecture as the rising sun illuminates it piece by piece.

But Petra, it turns out, is a lot more than just that building. Walk twenty minutes, and it’s a wide open space that looks like a full city complex – with smaller tombs and excavation sites littering the landscape. (They estimate only a quarter of Petra has been excavated so far.⁷) Two more hours to go through all that.

And now, it’s the final destination. Eight hundred steps up a mountain to the Monastery, another ornate rock-cut tomb just like the Treasury – just much less visited and much more imposing given the slog it takes to get there. While everybody else is dead tired after four hours walking in the sun and heads back to the hotel, Nora, Adrian, and I decide we have to see things through. And make the long trek up.

And the climb up the stone steps one-by-one feels much quicker than it actually is, as the three of us chatter on continuously. I find out Adrian is a gaming entrepreneur who owns a betting site for League of Legends.⁸ At a rest stop, one of the thousands of Bedouin families who live in the area offers us tea and we buy some small trinkets in return.

Finally, we reach the summit, and it’s even better than advertised. It’s mostly Bedouin natives up here, with only a small handful of other tourists. The Monastery stares at us in all its glory on the mountaintop. And a short walk away is a deep mountain valley with the clearest echoes I’ve ever heard.

Now it’s back to the hotel. Down the eight-hundred steps, across the Petra city-like complex, and back through the canyon. But, somehow, the three of us traverse all that in record time (not even three hours), despite this all taking place under the burning desert sun. By the end, we’re really feeling it.

And, fittingly, as we finally step into the hotel restaurant exhausted and starving at two PM, there is a humungous table of lamb meat with fermented yogurt sauce (piled onto a covering of thin pita-like bread) waiting for us. The traditional Jordanian dish, Mansaf, reserved only for special occasions.

And this certainly is a special occasion.

They were both pretty cool. Ahmed was about sixty years old, and had supposedly played for the Jordanian national football team in his youth. Jabir was much younger, and was technically just hanging out since he’d be leading the tour group after ours.
Over sixty but looked around forty, which led Ahmed to call him by the name “young boy” for the entire trip.
For which we have a specific local guide, who was also a professional break-dancer and had been an extra in the ninth Star Wars movie which was filmed in Jordan.
Midway through, our local Bedouin guide starts a fire with some rocks (technically not allowed) and makes us tea with a mix of plants unique to the area that he plucked out during the hike. Super-sweet, and all natural.
Where The Martian, my second-favorite movie, was filmed. Along with others like Dune and Lawrence of Arabia.
There are so many sheets piled on top of the camel’s hump that I’m halfway to doing the splits while sitting, and by the end of the hour I feel like I’m about to tear my groin.
Only a few weeks after the trip, archaeologists discover a new secret tomb in Petra that makes big news.
Adrian also plays Magic, and is excited to read my land destruction primer (#70) for inspiration for his site. Also, he used to be a software engineer at SIG (#75, a well-known trading firm with a deep poker culture) in Philadelphia, where my former business partner Daniel Jing (#89) and sports star colleague Adrian Williams (#90) worked around the same time. Though this Adrian has no recollection of the other Adrian who’s a foot and a half taller.