Nothing of Petra is visible from the road. After working your way through the city streets, with the accompanying crazy traffic and almost-suicidal pedestrians, you pull into an entryway that is fairly unassuming. The price for entry is anything but humble, however, as you shell out 21 JD per person to take the long walk down to the fabulous ruins. I read somewhere that Petra is the most well known Middle Eastern site in the world. Everywhere there were tourists, so I’m guessing that the country rakes in a good profit from everyone coming in at 21 JD a pop.

However, 84 JD (roughly 115 dollars in American coin) for the four of us was worth it. Petra is fabulous and I don’t believe anything I could say or write about it could even begin to convey the grandeur of the experience. It has been written about all over the place, and poets with better vocabularies and imaginations than I possess have found themselves at a loss for words, so I suppose I may be forgiven for falling back on clichés and hackneyed phrases.

First of all, the poet who penned “Rosy Red” in relation to Petra hadn’t visited the place until later, and at that point regretted that his expression was not only inadequate but also accurate only at sunset, when the sun paints the red sandstone a “rose” color, we’re told. The colors are indeed beautiful, no matter how you choose to label them. Rich coffees, mochas, chocolates, bricks, creams, alabasters, slates, and charcoals abound. The path down, where it is paved, is a glaringly bright white that sets off the colors of the walls and the ruins like a ring setting displays a jewel to its best advantage.

It’s very hot down there, no matter what time of day you arrive. We got there around 11 and, while there was a cool breeze in the canyon areas, the sun was blinding and beat down on us like a sledgehammer. (Everything begins to feel heavy when you’re in the light and the only relief is when you can rest in the shade of a column or tomb, or take refuge under the canvas roof of one of the many “cafés” that are sprinkled around the park.)

Men with horses, boys with donkeys, young teens with carts and ponies, women with jewelry, and kids of all kinds running around and asking the tourists to buy something for their wives/daughters/girlfriends create a bit of a distraction from the natural beauty of the canyons. Guys with strings of three and four camels eternally approach you and ask if you want to take a “taxi.” However, if you can ignore the incessant sales pitches (some really rather clever, especially from the more brazen of the young boys), you can lose yourself in the moment. No matter how you may repeat to yourself that you are walking paths and seeing sights that people 3000 years before you created, the mind can’t seem to take it all in. The feast for the senses leaves no room for mental rumination of any consequence. All of the processing must come later, but for the duration of the walk, you can only take in, feel, breathe in the hot, dusty air, and live in the very present experience, which is overwhelming.

We were advised in our Rough Guide to Jordan (a book I would highly recommend) to be careful to drink at least three liters of water every day here, and more when exerting ourselves in the hot sunshine. Carrying that much for four people isn’t feasible, so we stopped occasionally at one or the other of the stands and purchased more water. Taking a break in the breezy shade of the canvas roofs was not an unwelcome thing, either, considering the fact that we eventually left the shady cover of the rock canyons and found ourselves slogging through red sand in the full sunlight of midday. Here, we were once again assaulted by the sales people, men and children with fists full of silver necklaces and bracelets, offering them at a “bargain” for only 20 dinars! We found that being polite definitely does nothing to deter their enthusiasm for the hard sell, so ignoring them became our method of avoiding the constant barrage.

The first really impressive building is, of course, the famed Treasury. You get a tantalizing glimpse of it as you wind your way through a particularly deep and narrow canyon. As you approach, you can see part, but not all, of the façade. Once you emerge from between the high rock walls, it blooms into full glory in front of you. They no longer allow people to walk inside the building but you can walk up the steps and peer into the cool, dark cavern at the lovely striped sandstone and the two doors leading off into deeper rooms.

Leaving the Treasury, you pass countless tombs and living spaces carved into the canyon walls until you at last emerge from the narrow passages and get a broad view of the large theatre (built in the first century AD) and the wider scope of what was once a sizeable city. Colonnaded streets can be seen in the distance and – higher up – more building facades, columns of temples, and countless rectangular doors and windows in the sandstone are visible. While we would have liked to explore them all, to do so would have required much more time and very cooler temperatures, so we restricted ourselves to the main avenue.

The ruins continue on for a long way and it’s easy to overextend your stamina in the sun and heat. There’s always one more fascinating structure, one more great and glorious evidence of the distant past, waiting around another bend in the rock. However, the only way out is back up the way you came in, and this in the full heat of the afternoon, so wise sightseers allow for this. The rest of us do the best we can and repeatedly contemplate paying the exorbitant price for a camel or donkey “taxi” to haul our lazy rear ends back up out of the canyons. Pride prohibited me from doing so, which was foolhardy. There really is little room for pride when dealing with the humbling issues of chronic illness and fairly recent recovery. However, we all survived, straggling finally through the entrance gate and back to the visitor’s center with fierce headaches and very weary bodies.