Nothing fully prepares you for Petra. You’ve seen the photographs — the rose-red Treasury façade framed at the end of a narrow canyon — and you think you know what to expect. Then you walk through the Siq, the walls rising 80 meters on either side and narrowing to a whisper, and when it opens you understand immediately why this is one of the most visited archaeological sites on earth. Carved into the living rock of southern Jordan’s desert mountains by the Nabataean people over two thousand years ago, Petra is vast, impeccably strange, and genuinely moving in a way that few ancient places manage to be. We arrived from Wadi Rum by bus through the desert, and the anticipation built the entire way.
