In my previous piece I pointed out that Petra covers a huge area. The main trail starts at the visitor centre, leads you to the Treasury building via the Siq, goes on past the Amphitheatre and the Royal Tombs to the Central City ruins, and – if you feel that way inclined – takes you up to the Monastery. Many of Petra’s key sights are on that route.
However, there are several additional trails and entry points other than the visitor centre. To use the latter, you will need to have a ticket already. On that topic: there are one-day, two-day, and three-day passes on offer. Ours was a two-day ticket, but we could have done with a third day. Unfortunately, we had not built that kind of flexibility into our schedule.
What else is there to see? For a start, there are unusual vistas such as the one at the start of the piece and the one in the photo below. The former shot was taken from the access road at the back of the site, the latter from one of the minor trails back towards the Central City ruins.
Then there are numerous things which the guidebooks only mention in passing, if at all. Quarries, for instance. Most of Petra’s monuments have been cut out of the rocks, but some, of course, have been built rather than carved. The material came from quarries such as the one below.
There are so many interesting monuments, that no guidebook can cover them all. The two photos below were taken when we got lost on one of the routes. I have been unable to find out what these objects actually are, but I like the shots.
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The object in the next photo I am able to name. It is the tomb of Sextius Florentinus, a Roman governor, and apparently dates back to 130 AD. You find it a few hundred metres north of the Royal Tombs.
Further along that route, following a dried-out river bed, lies the Carmine Façade (below). The banding of the sandstone is truly spectacular – as almost everywhere in this area.
The next photo shows the interior of one of the caves, again with beautiful stratifications in the rock, and the one following that is of a set of caves called Dorotheos’ House. This is one of the few instances where my guidebooks explicitly refer to dwellings, rather than tombs.
The other place where the guidebooks seem to agree that the caves and monuments served largely as dwellings is a little-visited site called Little Petra. It lies north of the main site, and it took us only 10 to 15 minutes to drive there. We saw virtually nobody else there – as was the case on many of the smaller trails we followed.
The picture below shows a nicely-preserved building right next to the car park. As you can see, the colour of the rocks here is quite different from the red hues of Petra itself.
A small gorge leads to the even more impressive area depicted in the next photo.
The building carved into the rocks is at a very strange angle, for which I have no reasonable explanation. As you walk along, you encounter the caves depicted in the next two photos.
There is an information board by the second set of caves, drawing your attention to the existence of a ceiling fresco inside. It was the only time we saw artwork like that at Petra. The leaves are clearly vine leaves – perhaps it was the local wine bar (although the information board did not seem to support that conclusion).
Some of the other dwellings (see below) are less grand, but we found the weird rock formations quite charming. You only need about an hour to explore Little Petra, but it is certainly worth a visit.
To be continued with pt. 5: Wadi Rum
For links to the other parts of this series, please click HERE
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