I rise before dawn to arrive at the gates to Jordan’s Lost City before 6am. Horses are only allowed into the historic site before 7:30, so we have to get in early and get out. Even so, it's more complicated than that. Permission is only granted to certain guides on certain days, and never guaranteed. Though we got permission yesterday, there are still hoops to jump through. I wait in line at the ticket office, even though I have a Jordan Pass, I need a physical ticket, but the ticket man is still asleep when he is supposed to open the window at 6. Sameeh, my guide, wakes him up, but this upsets him so he decides not to open the ticket window until 6:30 out of spite, even though there are now a couple dozen visitors waiting. Instead we go to the gate itself, where Sameeh shows the attendant my Jordan Pass. The attendant shakes his head; he can't let us in without the ticket. All of this transpires in Arabic, but I get the gist. Sameeh persists, and the gate attendant continues to shake his head, but I can see a small starting to play at the corner of his lips and I know Sameeh has won him over. Sameeh knows it too, but knows it's the attendant’s job to put on a show of not making an exception for us, so Sameeh lets him think he's putting up a good fight. Finally he waves us through. We are Petra’s first visitors today, and the horses are waiting.
I ride a chestnut stallion named Sultan who is still half-asleep. The path into Petra, paved in recent years, is steep and a little slippery for the shod horses so we take it nice and slow. We are still a step ahead of even the earliest tourists but a few ambitious visitors are trickling in behind us, everyone trying to be the first to arrive, to see the dawn sunlight descend over the façade of the Treasury, and to get the perfect photo without anyone in it. As we descend deeper into the canyon, the walls on either side close in, narrowing above our heads. The horses’ hoofbeats on the pavement and Sameeh’s soft singing echo back at us. Signs of the ancient inhabitants start to become visible; steps carved into the sandstone, then images, then caves, hollowed out into geometric rooms in the rocks. The pathway between the cliffs is a natural main street lined with small canals, carved into the stone to bring water into the city from stone dams, built to catch the rainfall that trickles down the red rocks.
Sameeh and I rocking the Indiana Jones look as we ride in his footsteps
We round a final corner and emerge in front of the Khazneh - the Treasury - ancient monument to a long-forgotten king. The red sandstone seems to glow from within, although the morning sun barely enters the deep canyon. We share the moment only with a handful of early-rising tourists and local Bedouin vendors setting up their wares to sell. The ancient Nabataean city is at the heart of a labyrinth of gorges and passageways, nestled deep in the mountains of the Jordanian desert. We are walking in the footsteps of the ancients; first the Nabataeans, then the Romans, whose influence and architecture is reflected alongside that of the Byzantine, Christians, and later Muslims who ruled the Arabian peninsula. Petra was lost to the Western world for many years, inhabited by the Bedouin tribes of the desert, until a Swiss traveler stumbled upon it in 1812. The Bedouins were removed to the local town of Wadi Musa, but among them they still know whose families occupied which homes and caves and still think of this as their ancestral home.
Architectural styles from different empires across the ages mark the facades of multi-colored stone, changing color as the sun begins to hit it.
We ride along the Siq, the gorge and main road leading from the treasury to the rest of the ancient city, lined with elaborate royal tombs, half-built, half-carved into the stone cliffs. Because we’re on horseback and on a time limit, we can’t stop to hike to the monastery or climb to the High Place of Sacrifice at the top of Jebel Madbah Mountain. Instead, we get the Siq to ourselves, watching the sunlight slowly crawl across the valley that opens up at the end of the gorge. We take the back way out, climbing through the rocky hills and traversing sandy dry riverbeds, passing the occasional Bedouin riding a donkey to work in the ancient city until we weave our way back to the city of Wadi Musa and get the horses ready to depart for Wadi Rum - our next adventure.