What can I say? It’s amazing.
The main entrance is from a town called Wadi Musa (The Valley of Moses) and it’s then about a 1/2 hour walk into a canyon to reach the Siq – which is a very narrow, (3-4 mtr wide) steep sided ‘crack’ through the mountains, another 45 mins and it opens onto the Treasury building. The most iconic one. The Nabateans, who built the city had water piped through the Siq – one side with water for the camels and horses and the other side with fresh spring water for travellers. No water now. The story is it was ‘discovered’ by a German adventurer in 1812 – but of course the local people had been living there continuously. The city was mostly abandoned after a huge earthquake in 360AD, but people have always lived there. Nabateans, Arabs, Romans, Crusaders, Ottomans, Beduions … its like a train station.
We left at 7am, no tourists (thanks Syria!), no heat (yet) and rode horses in. Fantastic.
It would take years to see the whole place. There’s miles of valleys and ruins. Roman market places, crusader castles, a byzantine church, and the Nabatean facades which it’s most famous for.
We spent 6 hours looking around until it got too hot. We saw photos of it in the snow, in December which would be breath taking. I think you should go and see it. But you should go in Spring or Autumn – not the middle of Summer. And definitely ride horses in – not scabby old camels or donkeys.
We spent 4 nights in Wadi Musa in total – amazing food – but the machine gun fire outside the hotel window for hours, at the same time the sarin gas was dropped in Syria / US evacuated their embassies / Israels fired rockets into Lebanon … kind of took some of the fun out of it.
The hotel said the gunfire was for ‘religious’ reasons and they were ‘happy’ guns not bad guns. I now know that I am not ‘happy’ with the sound of close machine gun fire – another new experience.