#Petra smith tower crack

The trail can be hiked using GPS co-ordinates but tour operators, group hikes and local guides are available. Jordan Trail: 600-kilometre north-south route across the country of Jordan, from Um Qais to Aqaba. What remains are ruins attracting tourists, roads used by hikers and locals, and cisterns still catching rain. With this water-wealth, the Nabateans securely straddled trade routes until Romans conquered the area. They once carved channels and cisterns into the cliffs to catch and collect the arid region’s scant rainfall, “so that life was possible here,” he said. Kinkaid said the rain revealed the Nabateans’ long-lost secret. Article content Sam Mcneil/The Associated Press This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

“A lot of people never see it like this,” said Ian Weir, standing out of the rain inside one of the Nabatean temples next to friend Graeme Kinkead. The only warmth was the smoky hearth of Aouath Amarin’s hot mint tea served at his trinket shop atop a slick staircase at the end of the canyon. An elderly woman from Milan plodded down the canyon in shoes wrapped in plastic bags.

#Petra smith tower crack

White mist poured over the mountains, obscuring the temples inside “the cold canyon,” Little Petra’s name in Arabic, Siq al-Barid.Ī thin, submerged footpath through a crack in the rock was the only way in.Ī French family gingerly waded across a gurgling gully swollen with mud. Now, tourists travel the world to see the temples and hike the Nabatean routes recently connected to a 600-kilometre path called the Jordan Trail.Īt Little Petra’s entrance, locals sold plastic ponchos and umbrellas to bands of shivering tourists. Once, these sites were watering holes on the punishing desert route of traders laden with goods to the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Manage Print Subscription / Tax ReceiptĪrticle content Sam Mcneil/The Associated Press.