Petra By Night - The Illegal Way

Our second day in Jordan was equally as eventful, if such a thing is possible, although the morning began rather badly, with our fancy three star hotel informing us we had to leave as they were fully booked, which we had a sneaking suspicion was not strictly (or at all) true. We took turns in the cold shower and then went down to reception where I asked if we could use the internet while we waited for Everitte to arrive from Amman to which the manager replied ‘It costs 3JD per half an hour’, which was not only not an answer to my question but was also clearly a lie as I don’t believe anywhere in the world can charge six pounds an hour to use the internet. We took the hint and left, only to be called back and informed that the cleaner had found two cokes and a water missing from the ‘mini-bar’ in our room. As the only thing which vaguely resembled a mini-bar in our room was an empty fridge we were naturally a little annoyed and Becka became rather magnificent in her outrage, stormed back inside and said in a voice of death ‘We haven’t taken anything and we ARE NOT paying for anything’. Then we left. So no three star review of the Sela Hotel from us. It may have looked nice but the air-con was broken, the shower was cold and the staff were thoroughly unpleasant.

We were supposed to meet Everitte at our hotel at 11.30 but in the end after much confusion we met him down by the Petra entrance and checked into a new basic but clean hotel, then had some lunch, so that by the time we made it back into Petra for our second day it was after two in the afternoon - quite a difference from the original plan to get up and see the sunrise!

Over lunch I got a text from Attala saying ‘How are you? I can see you’ which was a little odd, especially as when we left the restaurant I heard a car horn and someone shouted my name, and I turned to see his Land Rover waiting for me at the side of the road. I went over and said hi, and he asked if we were going to spend the night in the village, to which I replied that it was very kind of him but unfortunately our friend had just arrived from America and was very tired, so we were planning to get an early night in our hotel. I said goodbye and rejoined the others, only to get a text from Attala saying ‘I like you so much, I have to tell you this’ to which I did not reply. He then proceeded to send me about 10 texts over the course of the day, one every hour or so, telling me how much he wanted us to come to his brothers party. I’ll say one thing for some of the men here - they like their foreign girls, and they do NOT take a hint. I swear I’ve been asked out more times since I got to Syria then ever in the entire rest of my life and Becka even more so!

Once inside the site we managed to make even more of a spectacle of ourselves than usual (taking jumping photos in front of every major landmark tends to attract a certain amount of comment and attention) and when I decided to rock climb up the walls of the Siq I hadn’t anticipated what a stir it would cause. It was only about 20 feet up a gentle incline, but a huge crowd started to gather and some Syrian guys decided I needed help to get down so one of them started trying to climb up and save me, only he got stuck right at the bottom and had to get down again, and in the end I had to sit down and slide down the rock on my bum and everybody clapped!

With the blush still fading from my cheeks we proceeded to the Treasury where Everitte, Becka and I stood in the entrance and jumped in the air - Emlyn was in fact taking a photo, but he was standing so far away that no one could tell, and we got a curious little group staring at us, clearly wondering what the hell we were doing, especially when we asked the soldier stationed nearby wearing what the Lonely Planet describes as ‘probably the most attractive uniform in the Middle East’ to be in our photo. We asked him to jump with us and he said ‘It is not possible’ but offered us his hands instead so that the three of us stood beside him with me and Becka each holding one of his hands, and we jumped in the air while he stood regally in the middle.

After this impromptu performance we decided to head up to the monastery, and set off to walk through the old colonnaded street to the bottom of the hill where the steps up the mountain begin. It took us about an hour and a half to climb the hill, including lots of stops to mess around climbing rocks, and break while we waited for Everitte to climb down into a gorge and back out again with a sunhat he found at the bottom. When we got to the top it was still a couple of hours til sunset, but there weren’t many people about so we amused ourselves climbing into the Monastery itself, taking yet more jumping photos, and doing amateur acrobatics, until a group of Arab guys came along. They saw me climbing on Becka’s legs and were very excited by the whole thing and they climbed up with us and spent ages chatting and making human pyramids and being in our jumping photos with us. It was really nice to see them join in and have so much fun, when we were acting like little kids and they could have been superior about it.

We wanted to wait and watch the sunset from the top of the mountain, so walked up the last little slope following the signs that said ‘View’ until we came to a little hut with a sign that said ‘View - End of the World’, perched on a rock next to perhaps the most spectacular view I’ve ever seen. We spent about two hours just messing about on the rocks, rock climbing down the side of the mountain and back up and jumping around on all the peaks, while the boys had hours of fun throwing rocks down the mountain (why do all boys do this?) and Becka and I clambered around exploring and taking panoramic pictures. In the end as the sun set we were all watching from different parts of the mountain. Becka was talking to a Bedouin guy on a nearby peak, silhouetted against the sky, while Emlyn climbed a little way down the mountain to sit on a rocky outcrop, and Everitte and I ended up back at the highest point ‘The End of the World’, watching the sun sink down behind the mountains. By this point all the other tourists had long gone, and as the sun disappeared behind the mountains, so quickly you could actually see it moving, it occurred to me that the time between sunset and darkness in the Middle East is considerably shorter than dusk in Britain and that we still had to climb down an entire mountain on the opposite side to where the sun had just disappeared.

I think we all had pretty much the same thought at the same time as we all gathered together quickly and started the walk back down past the monastery while the Bedouin guy, who lives up the mountain, watched us go and serenaded us with music on his flute, silhouetted against the red sky. Before we’d gone down even the first hundred steps in was too dark to see more than a few yards ahead of us, and we were walking as quickly as possible in the gathering dark, with Becka and I barefoot to avoid slipping on the sand and falling all the way down. We passed a group of Bedouin guys who called out and offered to let us stay the night with them in their tent, but we were leaving for Wadi Rum in the morning and had left all our stuff at the hotel so we thanked them and carried on, only able to see the vague outline of the steps beneath our feet in the darkness. Two Bedouin guys on donkeys came riding down behind us and I think they took pity on us because they passed us but then slowed right down and lead the way down the mountain in front of us, so we were guided by where the donkeys stepped and could concentrate on going down the steps safely instead of having to work out where the right path was. One of them had a little portable music player, and was playing ‘Hotel California’ as we walked along in the dark, with all the stars appearing above us and the rocks towering about us, black against the sky. It was an amazing experience, and he started talking to us about the Bedouins, telling us that he was proud to be a Bedouin and that ‘You don’t have freedom like we do in Europe, the Bedouins are the most free people in the world’. I said under my breath ‘What about the women?’ and Everitte repeated to the guy ‘What about women?’. At first the Bedouin didn’t understand what he meant, and said ‘In our culture it is forbidden to be with women unless we are married’ but when he grasped that we meant what about women and freedom he responded with beautiful candour ‘Ahhh, no, in our culture the women have no freedom. …But the men, the men are free!’. He sounded so matter of fact it was brilliant, Becka and I couldn’t help but laugh, and it was interesting that because it was Everitte that had asked, not one of us, he was able to be so casual about it with no sense of defensiveness.

It took us a lot longer than we had bargained for to walk down in the dark, and we began to realise how lucky we were to have met the Bedouin men, and why it says on the back of the Petra ticket ‘All guests are kindly requested to leave the site before sunset for safety reasons’. As we neared the bottom of the mountain a light appeared behind us and a man wearing a head torch appeared out of the dark. He was called Lazar, and was a Swiss-Macedonian photographer living and working in Ramallah who told us he was staying with a Bedouin family up in the Bedouin village, but took pity on us when the two Bedouins left us at the bottom of the steps to go back to the Bedouin village, and offered to walk us back through Petra and out of the Siq as we had no light and it was pitch dark by this point. Again I had forgotten how far it was from the bottom of the mountain back through Petra to the Treasury and the entrance to the Siq, and it took us a good half an hour to walk it, even with his head torch to guide us all. When we finally arrived at the Treasury it was about 8.30, and the sun had set over an hour before. We were a little dazed by the lights set up around the Treasury, and saw that there were hundreds of paper bags arranged on the ground in rows, and people in uniform milling around, and just as we realised the bags contained candles and they men were setting up for the ‘Petra by Night’ show a security man came up and started shouting at us saying ‘You are unlawful here, what are you doing in Petra at this time of night?’. Again at this point it was pure luck that we got out of what could have been a nasty situation, as our weak explanation: ‘we got lost on the mountain’ only served to make him more angry until Lazar was able to explain that he’d found us ‘lost’ on the mountain and lead us here, and when he told the man he was staying in the Bedouin village and mentioned the name of the guide he was staying with the man relaxed a little bit, but was still very angry, largely because I think it happened to be the night show that day, and he thought we were trying to get in for free. He was threatening to call the police and we just kept saying we were sorry, we were lost and we just wanted to leave, we weren’t trying to stay over night, and eventually he said to us ‘You have 15 minutes to get out of Petra or I’m calling security’. We thanked him and started out into the Siq, contemplating the fact that 15 minutes is not long to walk 2km in the dark. Despite our somewhat hurried pace as we walked back up the Siq, which was pitch black except for Lazar’s torch, as the walls are too high to allow any light in even from the moon, we couldn’t help but appreciate the beauty of the black rock walls and the millions of stars directly overhead. When we got halfway up the Siq we passed two men going the opposite way lighting all the candles in the paper bags, so for the last half kilometre the five of us walked through the candle lit Siq alone with the stars and the flickering candle light. It was absolutely beautiful, and far more atmospheric than it would have been as part of the official show surrounded by hundreds of other people. By the time we made it out of the Siq and half jogged up the path to the main gates we were totally knackered; all the excitement, not to mention climbing 850 steps, as well as two hours of rock climbing and jumping around like lunatics had finally caught up with us, and as soon as we made it out of Petra we collapsed on a wall and considered in retrospect just how stupid we had actually been, and how lucky. Having nearly died falling down a mountain in the dark and then almost been arrested we decided we probably classified as the most stupid tourists ever - but also that it had been totally worth it!

We ended up going for dinner with Lazar, who told us about his work in Ramallah, and said that he was couch surfing and had ended up staying in the Bedouin village. I told him I wanted to write my dissertation on the Bedouins and that I’d love to stay in the village but that I supposed as a girl it might be a little different and he said ‘It would never work’. It made me feel really sad that I was a woman for a moment or two, as it makes everything so much harder. So many things which are possible for men travelling alone just don’t work the same for women, like building genuine friendships with local people, especially in countries where local women don’t mix with strangers, and I though about my brother travelling around South America and going drinking and spending time with local Peruvian and Cuban guys, and how I just couldn’t do that, because even if they ever invited me it would be totally inappropriate and misleading for me to go. Lazar was saying he’d spent several nights out in the desert with the Bedouin men, cooking and sleeping outside under the stars, and I just wish it was possible for me to have the same kind of experiences without having to worry about any unfortunate misunderstandings. Then again I suppose that’s just the way it goes, women have less freedom in some areas, but there are great things about being a woman too. Occasionally I just wish I had the freedom men have when travelling, but I suppose compared to even 50 years ago I have travelled a lot and had some pretty amazing experiences. Becka and I spent a while debating whether or not we could get away with disguising ourselves as men when we go travelling together after university, but in the end we decided that that sort of things works far better in Shakespeare plays than it does in real life!


By the time we’d eaten what was the first fulfilling meal we’d had in days we were absolutely exhausted, and ended up back at the hotel by 10.30, too tired to even ask to watch Indianna Jones, which we had been planning to request ever since reading in the Lonely Planet on our first day that every hotel in Petra keeps a copy of Indianna Jonesa and the Last Crusade specially for the tourists to watch in the evenings.

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