Petra

Petra is entered the way a secret should be: through the Siq, a kilometer-long crack in the mountain barely wide enough for two camels, its rose walls rising eighty meters while a carved water channel — the Nabataeans' quiet genius — runs at your elbow. Then the crack opens and the Treasury stands there, forty meters of columned facade carved out of the living cliff, and every traveller since Burckhardt in 1812 has made the same involuntary sound.

The traveller gives Petra two days, because the Treasury is the doorway, not the city: beyond run the Street of Facades, the theater cut into rock, the Royal Tombs glowing at four in the afternoon, and — up eight hundred steps of canyon staircase — the Monastery, bigger than the Treasury and shared mostly with wind and tea sellers. The Bedul bedouin, whose families lived in these caves within living memory, still pour sweet tea along the trails; accept, and sit a while in the world's most patient city.

The Guide's practical counsel: enter at first light or after three, when the stone turns honey and the crowds thin; wear real shoes and carry real water — distances inside are honest kilometers —; ride the donkeys and camels only with sound operators, gently chosen; Petra by Night fills the Siq and Treasury plaza with candles on set evenings, worth the pause; and pair the visit with Wadi Rum's desert one hour south, where this Guide will sail on Jordan's next pages.