How I Blew My "Indiana" Moment, in Petra

Becoming a casualty in the war between tourism and travel

“She was here last year.”

He spoke from the shadows of his souvenir shop/cafe while I looked at a framed photograph of Oprah on the wall.

“Adele too, last month,” he added.

Neither seemed likely. But, this is Petra. So who knows.

I had escaped into his establishment, attracted by the shade and cool drinks amid the crushing heat after the early morning bus trip from Aqaba.

I was sweating bullets, like this dry desert air, the sky, the looming walls of rock, and perhaps the frisson of being in a place I always dreamed I would be, was squeezing all fluid out of me.

This was the land of the Nabataeans, a little understood but demonstrably rich and talented civilisation which built this extraordinary place literally in the desert rocks sometime between the 4th and 6th century BCE.

But, I only had the day here, so while Oprah and Adele and whoever else may have hung out here, and for all the stories this guy was clearly keen to tell, I was pressed for time

Popular culture be damned.

Oprah? Adele?

Seeya, mate.

Maybe the heat kept many away, or perhaps it was because it was near lunchtime, but it seemed quiet as I walked. Small troops of horses carrying those buying an “authentic experience” trotted past, and golf carts transported those even lazier, more gullible or less mobile off to Petra’s many hot spots - pun intended.

I felt held in a fist of the enduring heat. The sounds of my steps in this furnace, in the moments where no one else was around, seemed portentous, like the scorched air was sitting up, paying attention.

This isolated place, its specialness, its sanctity, perhaps enacting a wariness of intruders.

Fine dust clouded around me as my feet scuffed the ancient dirt, becoming an extra layer of clothing, nestling on my sweaty back and shoulders. I squinted through its gauzy veil, and I wondered if again the spirit of the place was guarding itself from my alien presence, shuffling behind the curtain of itself.

I breathed hard through the effort.

The Siq is a 1km channel that winds through towering walls of rock created by shifting tectonic plates, which literally pulled the mountain apart. It’s a kind of epic beginning that makes complete sense here.

The rock walls are smooth in parts like skin, the red, ochre and pink hues emphasising the feeling you are walking through a living, almost fleshy, thing, hard as stone. Feet crunch on the dry stream bed that once hosted water from nearby Wadi Musa which deepened and shaped the platonic shift however long ago, like a living vein through this corpus of rock.

The shade here is consuming. Desert heat is disorienting and relief from it is always a deep and mystical thing, but this was of a power and spirituality that transcended any other escape into coolness I had experienced. The sense of comfort and being, a feeling of living in a living thing was otherworldly.

Even with other people there, it’s meditatively quiet, like you’re inside a womb. People seemed to whisper, even if they didn’t.

I walked past a number of jaw dropping, rock-cut structures chipped, tap by tap, centuries ago deep into the hard, sandstone cliffs and escarpments. I wanted to see them all but I was driven to go on.

Since I was a kid, the Treasury building, that imposing pinnacle of ancient design and construction that sits at the heart of Petra, had been in my sights. I had to see it, whatever that meant. I was obsessed with finding that moment.

In fact, I was becoming annoyed it was taking so long getting there.

This manic anticipation was undermining my ability to enjoy this transcendent moment in the Siq. I justified charging through it by promising myself I would spend more quality time on the way back.

I didn’t think about it at the time, but I was charged by a younger man’s remembered image, from a movie (this one, of course), to disregard the totality and the presence of Petra. I was in search of that single manufactured visual.

The Siq ended, I turned a curve in the rock and The Moment presented as epochal light throwing bolts into the shadowy entry point, highlighting the amber and beige sands, against a backdrop of that statuesque, sculptured, structure, built deep into the mountain of rock. A flurry of noisy humanity - tourists and local Bedouls as hot and shabby as each other - camels and horses, a souvenir shop, and that breath-taking facade of The Treasury, a mighty, looming energy, immoveable yet pulsing with life, was felt viscerally as I walked through that famous rent in the rock.

It was an epiphanous moment. Unforgettable. But, I was stressed as I wanted to record it; how best to do that? Stills or video? People or not? What story did I want to tell? What should I share from this incredible stilling of time and place, the realisation of a dream?...

We live in a time of hyper-reality, whereby popular imagery becomes mythology and supplants actual reality. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard developed the theory of the simulacrum, which is a sign, an image or a simulation of a thing which, as it is represented in such visions, doesn’t actually exist. It is replaced by the version of it we have made in our minds and becomes buried under so many layers of imagining, so many realities, that it shimmers and fades away entirely.

As such, the famous Treasury at Petra is a startling structure, but its iconic presence, its hold on me, is a creation of the imagery that has, in time, over-rode its actuality. It has become a myth and remains so even and I stand before it.

“We live in a world,” wrote Baudrillard, “where there is more and more information and less and less meaning.”

The Eiffel Tower, The Statue of Liberty, The Sydney Opera House or, yes, Petra’s Treasury have become more real than they are, more mental vision than actual 3D things, more imagined than existing.

They are a trap, not in themselves but in how we think about them and see them.

I saw more of Petra on the day. But, I was restless for the touristic dopamine hits and the killer images.

Petra asks for quiet, stillness, respect. It gives its own freely. I failed to reciprocate.

I had to rush back to catch the last bus back to Aqaba, and so didn’t get to see all those places I had vowed I would return to.

All I could think of sitting in the bus was that I had blown it. A one-in-a-lifetime chance self destructed by an expectation derived from an unrealistic sense, an overwhelm based on a starring role in my own tiny little movie; an interlocutor between the imagined self, the imagined place and the imagined audience.

I was more thinking about how to articulate and communicate Petra rather than just experiencing it.

Petra’s vast, complex creations had been conceived by sharpened minds, and built by bare hands chipping at the rock, and the desert had preserved them for two and half thousand years, so they could silently speak to me and to all others who have been here, to the future, to humanity.

I failed to hear it. All I could do was fumble with my phone and rehearse what I was going to tell my friends about Petra.

I had spurned Oprah and Adele and sought in turn another myth, more fakery than even their celebrity could devise, constructed in my own mind, corrupted by modernity.

Those genius Nabataeans may never forgive me for that.

*All Pics © JJ Rose