We meet at the main gate at 5:45am, which is the unglamorous part of this. The gate opens at six, and for roughly forty minutes you get the Siq more or less to yourself: 1.2km of sandstone corridor narrowing to two metres, with the Nabataean water channel still cut into the rock at shoulder height on your left. We stop at the votive niches everyone walks straight past. Then the Treasury, in the twenty minutes before the first buses reach it, when the light is still bouncing off the cliff opposite rather than hitting the facade directly. It photographs badly at that hour and looks extraordinary in person. Those are not the same thing. From there we take the Street of Facades and the theatre and finish at the Royal Tombs around ten, before the heat sets in properly. The caveat: in December and January the Siq is genuinely cold at six, and the Treasury sits in shadow until nearly nine, so the light payoff is thinner. Shoulder season is better if you have the choice. You will be back at your hotel in time for a late breakfast.
Three of us, all ex-excavation. Rana logged pottery for six seasons on a Department of Antiquities dig on Petra's north ridge and can still date a sherd faster than she can parallel-park. We walk Petra slowly and we point at things: the channel cut into the Siq wall that made the whole city possible, the Roman soldier's graffiti above the theatre, the Neolithic house plans at Beidha that look like nothing and matter enormously. We don't sell camel rides, we don't do drone packages, and we cap groups at a size where everyone can actually hear the answer to a question. Wear real shoes. Petra is eight kilometres of sandstone before you climb anything, and the site does not care about your itinerary.
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