Duration
2 days / 1 night
Group size
Up to 1
Language
English, Arabic, German
Day one is the water system, which is the actual reason twenty thousand people lived in a desert that gets 150mm of rain a year: the dam and diversion tunnel at the Siq entrance, the ceramic pipe sections still seated in the channel, the cisterns cut under the Street of Facades, the spring line at Ain Musa. Day two is the climb to the Monastery, around 800 steps and an hour up, where the facade is nearly fifty metres wide and the room behind it is essentially empty. That surprises most people. We finish at the viewpoint over Wadi Araba. You sleep in Wadi Musa, not in the site; nobody sleeps in the site legally, whatever you have been told. Two things to know before booking. The two-day ticket is 55 JOD, is not included, and must be used on the same passport both days. And this is roughly 22 kilometres of walking across the two days, most of it on uneven sandstone in full sun. We have watched fit people find day two much harder than day one. If that sounds like too much, take the dawn walk and the High Place separately.
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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