It’s almost 4 months since I last wrote on this site, so I figured I should do an update of some sort. Back in the day I might have added 100 posts since my last entry. Despite my best intentions at the start of the year, other things have got in the way and I’ve had little time, and even less reason, to come up with ideas to share on here.

The fact that I haven’t been posting is mainly good news. I’ve taken on a regular job as an editor which, while not full time, is taking up the bulk of my week and leaving me with little appetite to write more in my spare time.

Meanwhile, we moved house in the summer and it turns out I have an almost endless stream of distractions from my window. Here are some of the things which have kept me away from updating this blog. Every photo is taken from our windows or from the back garden.

The view is pretty good at any time,:

It’s particularly impressive at sunset…

and at sunrise, when the fields are sometimes covered by a light blanket of low mist.

Harvest time saw the farmer in the field late into the night.

Sometimes there are aerial distractions (the odd balloon lands at Grafham Water, just beyond the field).

And there are many planes. This is one of the few travelling slow enough for me to snap – I didn’t manage to catch the Vulcan bomber which flew overhead on its final public flight, or the fighter jets which occasionally pass within several hundred feet of the house.

But most of the aerial activity comes from the many birds who keep us entertained. For several weeks in the summer we had hundreds of swallows like this fellow hanging around near the house:

On most days a kestrel sits on the telephone lines, ready to swoop for its prey in the field…

.. although last week he was chased off in a scrap with a magpie:

Our favourites are the woodpeckers, which enjoy doing what they do on the telegraph pole:

We have been encouraging the blue tits and great tits to feel at home too:

And the night skies are fabulous. We had a great view of the Supermoon and the eclipse…

and we MAY have spotted the aurora borealis last night:

Given these distractions, on top of a ‘proper job’, it’s no surprise that the blog has fallen by the wayside. Perhaps the long winter nights will give me more time to update this site. But with the prospect of seeing owls, hedgehogs and who knows what else, I won’t make any promises.

19.10.15 Update: the Vulcan bomber flew past again, less than a week after publishing this post. I was prepared this time round.

Wither the blog… is a post from: 501 Places

Follow the bend in the road, then walk for around 100 metres. If I hadn’t seen the satellite photo a few minutes earlier I’d have had no idea where to look. Beyond the roadside ditch wild flowers were swallowed up by the long grass, and only an occasional car broke the calm of an afternoon stroll in the German countryside.

If I’d been here 26 years ago I’d have had no trouble finding what I was looking for. I was in the north east of Germany, just outside the tiny village of Schlutup on the outskirts of Lübeck. It was just to the east of the village that the final, deadly layers of the inner German border passed as they wound their way south, dividing the country for 45 years before being joyfully overcome in those unforgettable days in November 1989. If I’d been here then and approached from the west, I might have got to within a few metres of the border. From the east, the no-man’s zone began around 5 km away; from there on there was barbed wire; there were dogs and searchlights; there were even landmines. Death was the guaranteed outcome of all escape attempts, or at least that was the clear message given to all who would think about such a terrible act.

I’d had my own brush with East Germany in my teenage years, when I took a train from Copenhagen to West Berlin in 1987. Our train-on-a-ship had docked at Warnemünde, just an hour or so along the Baltic Coast. My backpack was searched by an intimidating official at the port, despite there being no chance of getting off the train before it got to West Berlin; questions were asked about my music cassettes and my notebook; special interest was shown in my address book, which contained the details of several Polish relatives. Notes were taken, grunts were grunted and glares were delivered with maximum contempt before I was given my passport stamp. I remember speeding along a fortified railway line through the East German countryside before stopping for 2 hours in East Berlin. Dogs were sent under the carriages; plastic panelling was stripped from the ceilings of the compartment. More questions. Then finally we were cleared to make the 5-minute crossing to the freedom (and it really did feel like freedom) of West Berlin.

But that was then. Now there’s a just a rock marking out the old boundary, and the former no-man’s land is now a recognised nature reserve. There’s also a small museum just before the border. The Grenzdokumentations-Stätte Lübeck-Schlutup, or Border Documentation Site as it has been imaginatively named, is home to a collection of old East German memorabilia. There’s plenty of official material (documents, stamps, uniforms) but there are also simple everyday items such as communist-era chocolate wrappers and washing powder boxes; there’s even a Trabant rusting outside. Best of all are the videos which play in a little room downstairs. We saw two on our visit: one showing the different layers of the old border and just how impossible escape was meant to be (it’s incredible to think that a few folks managed it anyway); the other was a far more uplifting film, showing the scene from the road outside on the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when cars streamed westwards, with crowds cheering and waving and people from both sides of the border shedding tears of joy. The museum makes no provision for non-German speakers, but most of the exhibits require little translation.

Back in the sunshine I stared again beyond that bend in the road. How could a country be so forcefully divided? Who would have dared think back in 1989 that a drive or a walk along this stretch of road would now be so inconsequential? And what about other divided cities and countries? If this brutal border could be so dramatically cast aside by the people it was built to separate, then perhaps it can happen elsewhere too.

Across the divide – a visit to the former inner German border is a post from: 501 Places

“Your home away from home” is how many hotels like to market themselves. It’s an easy slogan to use, but for many hotel owners I am fairly sure that if they had to live in the properties which earn them a living, they wouldn’t put up with many of the irritations to which they are happy to subject their paying guests. So what are the most basic things a hotel should include to make a guest feel comfortable?

Of course there’s a complication here, in that every person has different requirements and different opinions on what is most important for them in a hotel room. So my wish list is just about my own preferences. But I think the points that annoy me probably annoy most people who stay in hotels (I would think that, wouldn’t I?)

Anyway, here’s what would make the perfect hotel stay for me. Best of all for hotel owners, none of these things are particularly expensive.

1. Decent pillows. Not the ones which are so flat you could post them home in an envelope. And not those which are full of uneven lumps. And no, I don’t want to phone reception to request a pillow from your menu. Just leave a good quality pair of pillows on the bed, and a slightly harder and softer option in the cupboard. Cheap pillows make you look… cheap.

2. A strong, easy-to-use shower. Fancy hotels can be the biggest culprits here. I want to get in the shower, wash myself and get out. I don’t want to spend 10 minutes trying to work out which lever to pull to make the water hot or strong. If you need to explain to guests how to use a shower, you need to change your interior designer.

3. Showers that don’t flood. In an average year I stay in 30 to 40 different hotel rooms. I reckon in at least 10 of those I’ll step out of the shower onto a soaked bathroom floor. Again, the incidence of flooded bathroom floors is not related to the class of the hotel. It’s all very well saying that the cleaner will take care of it, but there’s no fun using a bathroom and getting your feet soaked as you get ready for the day ahead. It’s usually a simple design fault, caused by a hotel choosing style over practicality.

4. Bathroom amenities which don’t need a magnifying glass to work out. It’s not rocket science. Most people over 45 (and many younger ones too) need glasses to make out small print. Glasses are the last thing you think about before going into the shower. And yet most bottles of shampoo and shower gel include tiny writing, often written in a ridiculous font and in a colour that’s almost certainly been chosen to make deciphering them as hard as possible.  Large, clear print would make life a lot easier for many guests – believe me, they might even stop cursing you while they take a shower.

5. Free WiFi without hassle. Fortunately, the majority of places now offer free WiFi. Too many places however still make the process of logging on a real pain. Again, it’s the posher hotels which are often the worst, with separate passwords for each device which have to be entered every time you reconnect your phone or laptop. Why so many hurdles? Are you really scared of outsiders (or even former guests) returning to the hotel and stealing a few precious MB of your WiFi? Don’t make life unnecessarily difficult. A one-time simple log-in should be all that’s required. Nobody would put up with this at home.

6. Decent lights. Having 24 light switches in a single room is annoying enough, especially when there’s no master switch and you have to try and switch each one off before going to bed. Worse still is when all those lights combined still provide little more than a dull glow in the room. How about a central light which lights up the whole room, along with a few lamps at desks or chairs – you know, like you’d have at home? For some reason I’ve never been able to work out, this appears to be too difficult.

7. Painless check-in and check-out. When I arrive at a hotel I want to be in my room as quickly as possible. I don’t want anyone to come up and show me how the lights work, and I don’t want to wait for a welcome drink. 5 minutes should be the absolute maximum time between entering the hotel lobby and being left alone in my room, with all my luggage. And that thing when I’m made to wait at check-out while someone goes into the room to check I wasn’t lying when I said I hadn’t taken anything from the minibar? Not a good way to end things. If a hotel is going to adopt that approach, better to do without the minibar altogether.

Enough of a rant for now. There’s plenty more to add to this list, but I reckon if I stayed in a comfortable hotel that managed to adopt these simple steps (along with great service of course, the definition of which is another topic entirely), I would be singing its praises to all who would listen.

Comfortable hotels – why are they so rare? is a post from: 501 Places

This was not our rental car. Obviously.

I loathe every aspect of renting a car abroad.

Even the process of booking a car for our recent Sicily trip took far too long; every time I was about to book a car I made the mistake of checking a review site and ended up getting distracted by a stream of one-star ratings from angry customers. In the end I was hooked in by a price of £65 for 8 days rental, and booked a car with Sicily by Car through Holiday Autos, who appeared to have a slightly more favourable (or less terrible) review profile than their competitors.

With such an attractive price I shouldn’t have been surprised by the queue at the Sicily by Car desk in Catania airport. Still, 40 minutes later we were in our Citroen C3 and leaving the car park, ready to set off on our trip. And it was then, before we’d even reached the exit, that I ran into trouble. The gate in front of me was blocked, and I was instructed by waving staff to reverse and turn down an alternative and far too narrow lane, marked out by yellow bollards. Sure enough, I didn’t make the turn cleanly and my rear door brushed against the bollard, leaving a 5mm scratch and a skim of yellow paint. The paint didn’t shift with water or soap, and despite the gallant efforts of a very helpful hotel owner who took me to his friend’s garage to see if he could help, I returned 8 days later to the airport with a small but noticeable scratch.

The Sicily by Car staff were practically salivating when they saw the mark. Within minutes the calculator was getting hammered, seemingly random numbers being entered before a figure of €405 was presented to me with what I remember to be a sneering grin. During our time at the office, we saw 5 or 6 people return their cars and to my knowledge, only one got away without getting clobbered with some sort of charge. Being late for an onward bus and unable to argue my corner, I paid up and left, loudly cursing Sicily by Car and my own stupidity in choosing them for my rental ahead of a less cheap but more reputable firm.

And so the story should end as a lesson about the folly of going for the cheapest car rental. But as I said, there is a happy ending. I had chosen not to pay the £49 fee charged by Sicily by Car and their agents Holiday Autos to take the excess liability from €900 to zero. While the guy at the desk was tapping into his calculator working out how much he was going to extract from my credit card he mocked me with the question, “Why didn’t you take our insurance?”

Instead I’d taken out a rental car excess insurance policy with Direct Car Excess Insurance. It had cost me £17, and I would soon discover whether it was money well spent. I emailed them that day to ask for a claim form, as directed on the policy document. I got the form back immediately from a claims handler at AIG, and having been notified that a claim would be coming they were happy for me to wait until I returned home before submitting the necessary documents.

And so on the day after we returned to the UK, I emailed them with scans of rental contracts, driving licences and credit card statements. Within 2 hours I had a call from the claims handler to check the details, and by the end of that day, the full €405 was sitting in my bank account. Not only had the claim been settled at lightning speed, but they’d also applied the exchange rate at the time of the claim – the pound had strengthened in the subsequent 2 weeks, and I would have lost out by £10 if they’d applied that day’s rate.

I can’t speak highly enough of my interaction with Direct Car Excess Insurance, and would recommend them for anyone renting a car abroad who wants to eliminate their excess without paying the high fees charged by the rental companies.

A tale of car rental woe with a happy ending is a post from: 501 Places

‘It’s just a pile of rocks’. Take a look through the comments on Tripadvisor (or any review site) and you’ll find many visitors who were spellbound by the ancient stones at Stonehenge, and plenty of others for whom it was an overpriced and underwhelming attraction. Just how do different people experience the same place in such a different way, and what factors determine the effect that a place such as Stonehenge has on its visitors?

It had been almost 10 years since I’d last driven along the A303 and passed the famous stone circle. I must admit that it did seem a lot smaller than I remembered it to be as we got our first glimpse this time, slowing down with the other traffic on our way past. The road layout had changed since my last visit, so perhaps my memory was influenced by the fact that it’s no longer possible to drive so close to the stones; but I did wonder what someone who’d travelled from the other side of the world and made a special effort to get to this corner of rural Wiltshire would think. As a pile of rocks, I don’t think it’s particularly impressive.

Along with other speakers and delegates at the Social Travel Britain conference in Salisbury, we woke at a silly hour on a Sunday morning for a hosted private tour inside Stonehenge. We met our guide Pat Shelley at the newly built Visitor Centre and jumped on the shuttle bus for the 1-mile transfer which is now the only way (apart from walking) to access the site. In the following hour, Pat took us inside the stone circle, explaining (with the help of a children’s pop-up book) how Stonehenge would have looked when it was an active site, over 4,000 years ago. He presented us with a few of the theories about the possible purpose of the stone circle, as well as the various ideas about how the structure was built. We explored the rocks not only from the perspective of giant lumps of rock about which so little is known, but also on a micro level as hosts to various rare lichen, and as fragile objects which bear the long-term effects of pollution and of human contact. Despite the bitter dawn temperatures, Pat succeeded in having us go beyond just thinking of Stonehenge as a pile of rocks, and rather considering it as a window into an ancient world about which we know almost nothing.

It had me thinking about other historical sites I’ve visited, and how I’ve ‘consumed’ them. I was indifferent to the Colosseum in Rome, which I remember visiting with a bad audio guide which I soon abandoned. My first visit to Petra was a blur, with the day spent rushing from place to place trying to see everything and absorbing nothing. And yet sites such as Nan Madol in Micronesia stick in the memory, because we had a guide who tried to make sense of what we were looking at, and because the nature of the site meant that it was best explored by kayak; an adventure in itself.

Of course some places in the world are more visually memorable than others, and as such they don’t rely on any commentary to wow their visitors. The Grand Canyon is an obvious example, although even then my memories of spending several days there back in 2000 are largely shaped by the geologist who led the two of us on a full day of hiking inside the rim. And then there are times, particularly at the end of a long trip, when the appetite for absorbing information tails off sharply. So how we experience a place can be determined by internal factors as much as external ones; tough luck for those who invest millions in creating memorable visitor experiences. But as a rule, the visits to famous historical attractions (and travel experiences in general) which I remember most strongly are those for which a particularly good guide has managed to provide some context, and for which we’ve managed to see the place beyond merely something which needs to be photographed and ticked off a list.

A note on Stonehenge – while our special access tour was arranged for us, anyone can book a private visit which goes right into Stonehenge (although touching of stones is strictly forbidden). It does involve a very early or very late visit, as during normal opening hours all visitors must stick to a path which stays several metres from the stones. Details of the Stone Circle Access tours are here.

Seeing Stonehenge beyond a pile of rocks is a post from: 501 Places

This is the final post of the Digital Nomad series with National Geographic Traveller.

Our two weeks in Jordan flew by in a highly enjoyable blur. Our Digital Nomad trip was hosted by the Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority (ASEZA), and through our experiences they wanted to communicate three main messages to an international audience: that Jordan is a safe destination to visit; that Aqaba is a city which offers a variety of attractions which can appeal to many types of traveller; and that Aqaba’s position in the south of Jordan makes it a good base to use for exploring the country’s most famous sites: Petra, Wadi Rum and the Dead Sea.

So let’s take these in turn. All I can say is that Jordan felt very safe to us, and the security concerns we heard time and time again before we left the UK disappeared to the back of our minds pretty much as soon as we arrived, and never resurfaced during our two-week stay.

We enjoyed exploring Aqaba as a city, and while its attractions (for now) may be modest in comparison with those of major beach resorts on the Mediterranean, there’s enough on offer to entice visitors to get away from the hotel pool or beach and explore something different on every day of a typical holiday. The coral reef off the shore is easily accessible and offers good diving opportunities, as we discovered on our beginners’ diving lesson; snorkelling is also possible over the reef just by swimming from the beach. There is a mini-fleet of glass-bottomed boats around Aqaba waiting for customers to roll up, and at the upmarket Tala Bay to the south of the city we took a ride in a ‘submarine’ boat, which allows you to see a submerged military tank and a scuttled ship without the trouble of getting wet.

We enjoyed strolling through the centre of Aqaba, especially in the cooler evenings. On Friday evening we spent a hour or so at the Souk by the Sea, where there’s live music, food and handicrafts. The main streets in the downtown area have a lively, easy-going vibe, and there’s plenty of very affordable, traditional Middle Eastern food in the town’s cafes and restaurants.

Aqaba is due to expand dramatically in the next few years, along with a massive boost in its range of tourism facilities . The Saraya, Ayla and Maabar mega-projects currently under construction will bring luxury hotels and swanky seafront apartment blocks aimed at affluent foreign buyers, as well as a golf course, a water park and a convention centre. The aim is to transform Aqaba into a major international destination for all budgets and for all types of visitor. These hugely ambitious developments will almost certainly attract a new breed of visitor to come to the Jordanian Red Sea coast. I hope that in doing so, they don’t diminish Aqaba’s current more traditional appeal, even if this is not quite as glamorous or lucrative as that offered by the grand new plans.

As for Aqaba serving as a gateway to Jordan’s major attractions, the coast offers a more convenient base than Amman for exploring Wadi Rum and Petra, with both places an easily doable day trip away. That said, I would strongly recommend visitors to Jordan to stay overnight and experience the magic of the desert in Wadi Rum, and to book a night or two near Petra too, so that they can explore the site over at least 2 days; there’s the thrice-weekly Petra by Night, as well as several great hikes to do in and around Petra.

We ventured up as far as the Dead Sea, and while it’s possible to visit the Dead Sea from Aqaba in a day, it’s a long 3-hour drive, leaving just about enough time for a swim and a natural mud bath before heading back south; again, an overnight trip would mean two relatively easy days on the road and more time to relax at the lowest point on Earth.

Throw in a spot of diving, other water sports, or just some time lazing on the beach, and Aqaba provides an attractive base for a Jordan holiday. At the moment the most convenient way to fly in is via Istanbul on Turkish Airlines, who offer the only international scheduled flights to Aqaba. I found the flights pretty comfortable, although the late-night flight times aren’t ideal. The food is ok and having a movies on-demand service for a European flight is a definite bonus. A major advantage of flying into Aqaba rather than into Amman is that the Jordanian visa fee, currently 40 JD (£38), is waived.

Wadi Rum and Petra are Jordan’s two best-known attractions, and there’s plenty to experience beyond these headline acts. Our 3-day hike from Dana to Petra was a personal highlight, with an ever-changing series of dramatic landscapes more than compensating for the sore limbs along the way. We tried our hand at abseiling for the first time and lived to tell the tale. And our various encounters with Jordanian food, sometimes cooking but always eating, were always a pleasure.

Above all else, the single factor running through all of our encounters in Jordan was the warm hospitality we experienced. Thankfully we’ve been to Jordan before so we knew it wasn’t just because we were there as guests of ASEZA, or on a project which involved the National Geographic name; we had enjoyed exactly the same welcome and friendliness on our previous visit, back in the days when I had ‘a real job’ and we were ordinary tourists. From the Bedouin who called us over for tea as we were hiking, to the strangers who would call out to us to let us know how welcome we were, to those we dealt with directly as part of our project who left a lasting impression on us with their kindness, it is the people in Jordan that would give us the greatest reason to return. Genuine hospitality is perhaps the easiest ingredient to market; and the hardest.

You can find six other posts from the Digital Nomad project on the National Geographic Traveller website.

Reflections on Aqaba and Jordan is a post from: 501 Places

This post is part of the Digital Nomad project with National Geographic Traveller.

The greeting was warm and unfussy. After a long drive back to Aqaba it was a pleasure to stretch out, sit in the shaded courtyard and do nothing more energetic than sip tea while our host busied herself with preparing lunch.

We were at the home of Ghada Al Fayoumi, and were about to enjoy home-cooked bukhari – a traditional Aqaba dish made with rice and lamb, mixed with spices and beans. An initiative is being developed in Aqaba to offer visitors the chance to have a meal in a typical family home. The benefits extend beyond merely sampling some great food; there’s also the chance to venture beyond the city centre and to encounter people in their own homes, a sharp contrast from the tourist activity along the beach front.

Ghada called us in from the courtyard and into her cool living/dining room. Seeing the mounds of food on the table my immediate reaction was to ask how many were going to join us. “Just us,” she said with a smile, as her teenage daughter joined our small group. “This is the Arab way.” A large plate was filled with meat and rice, and around this were a green salad and over a dozen pickles, including chillies, pickled lemons, radishes, carrots, spring onions, and and a mixed green salad.

My plate was piled particularly high, and I had barely made a modest dent in the mound before Ghada was on her feet and piling more on my plate. As the only male around the table, my protests were always doomed: “Arab men always eat very well” she told us, and a third plateful was soon added.

We retired back to the courtyard for dessert. Ghada had prepared hooh – a sweet pastry with nuts, drizzled with a mixture of sugar and lemon juice. Ghada chatted with us in her faltering English, proudly pointing out her plants: “I talk to them every morning – that’s why they do so well”. At the back of the courtyard was an enormous air-conditioning unit (around the size of a typical bank safe), which appeared to be a fully-functioning relic of the 1970s.

Topped up with more tea and some of the juiciest dates I’ve tasted, Ghada took out her phone and showed us photos of her father’s recent fishing trip, where he took a video of himself reeling in a giant tuna; not for the first time on this trip, a mobile phone provided a source of communal entertainment without any constraints of language.

Before we left, Ghada told us about the book of traditional Aqabawi recipes on which she’s currently working; it has been a long project which she has had to squeeze in while taking care of her children and grandchildren, but is now nearing completion.

We enjoyed our afternoon visiting Ghada, chatting with her and eating way too much of another traditional Aqabawi dish. A serious post-trip diet is most certainly on the cards.

Lunch at a local home in Aqaba can be arranged on request via the Tourist Information Centre in the city centre.

You can find other posts from the Digital Nomad project on the National Geographic Traveller website.

An oversized lunch in an Aqaba home is a post from: 501 Places

This post is part of the Digital Nomad project with National Geographic Traveller.

I try not to look down. The only thing between me and a 20 metre drop into the gorge below is the rope to which I’m attached; but thinking about that isn’t going to help. Instead I focus on trying to move slowly backwards and making my way down the wall as if I was back-stepping along the beach; but the dangers posed by my natural clumsiness are never far away.

We are in Wadi Mukheiris, a narrow canyon which starts at around 200 metres above sea level and empties some 600 metres below into the Dead Sea, the lowest place on Earth. Our guide Atef Hababseh from Terhaal Adventures dishes out the harnesses and helmets, and we start our walk on a gentle downhill slope which provides no indication of what is yet to come.

Soon we are scrambling over and jumping off rocks; from time to time our guides help us across gaps between boulders. As the tallest in the group I have a definite advantage, as so much of the descent requires finding a steady lower rock on which to place an outstretched foot.

There are three abseiling episodes in total, with the final one being a frightening 20-metre drop. Even though Atef does his best to give us the confidence to step out over the edge of the drops, it stills feels like the most unnatural thing to do.

Here’s a video of my less than elegant descent:

After our group of 4 and the other guides had carefully managed to descend the last waterfall, Atef shot down the rope making it look all too easy; so much so that he allowed himself a bit of showboating at the end:

Perhaps harder still than the abseiling was the final 2-hour stretch after the final waterfall. Tired feet and aching muscles meant that the constant scrambles over boulders, plunges into pools and slides down rocks on our backsides became ever harder.

My knees ached for the next two days and the bruises will take a while longer to fade. We were promised an adventure and we certainly had one. I’m not sure when I’ll have the chance or the inclination to abseil again, but when I next look at a waterfall and see someone dangling from a rope against the rock face, I will at least be able to offer sympathy based on my own experience.

A full-day abseiling trip in Wadi Mukheiris with Terhaal Adventures costs around £75, and includes transfers to and from Amman or Madaba, lunch and water.

You can find other posts from the Digital Nomad project on the National Geographic Traveller website.

Over the edge: our first abseiling adventure is a post from: 501 Places

This post is part of the Digital Nomad project with National Geographic Traveller.

When we came to Petra for the first time in 2009, we spent the few hours we had at the site rushing to see the most famous parts of the site before making a premature exit and returning to Amman. We had more time to spend on our second visit, and although we visited most of the same sites that we’d previously seen, it proved a far more rewarding experience.

The first thing I noticed as a repeat visitor to Petra is just how quiet the place was. We came on the trail from Little Petra which enters the site at the Monastery, and even in mid-afternoon when the light makes it arguably the best time to make the climb to the site, there were around 15 tourists there. I asked around and the common consensus I heard was that visitor numbers are less than 10% of what they were in 2010.

The lack of crowds is great news for those wanting to visit Petra and have much of the place to themselves; it’s tragic though for the many people who rely on a high number of visitors from whom they can make a living. Men with camels and donkeys were standing around trying to sell rides, stall holders were packing up early or hadn’t showed up at all, and cafe owners reported barely a handful of visitors on a typical day.

The relative emptiness gave us the chance to stop and talk to people working at the site, who were happy to chat if only to relieve their boredom. Led by a young boy called Mohammed and his mule, we climbed the steps to the High Place which overlooks the Treasury. It’s a 40-minute ascent which eventually leads around to a look-out point directly above and opposite Petra’s most recognisable landmark. There’s a makeshift tea shop there, and we stopped and chatted with the owner, a charismatic Johnny Depp lookalike. With him was a young Japanese lady; she is the fiancée of his uncle, and came to Petra as a visitor, finding a lot more than she’d expected. She now lives in the nearby Bedouin village of Umm Sayhoun, built to rehouse those who for many generations had lived in Petra’s caves.

The story of New-Zealander Marguerite van Geldermalsen is even more unusual. She arrived as a tourist in 1978, also fell for a Bedouin man, and moved into one of Petra’s caves with him, raising a family and spending several years living in Petra, before moving to the new settlement. I read her book ‘Married to a Bedouin’ just before coming to Jordan, and I was delighted to meet Marguerite in Petra. She was standing by the stall where she sells jewellery made by local women according to her own unique Petra-themed designs.

She also sells signed copies of her book, which has now been translated into 12 languages. I asked Marguerite if the visitor numbers now are similar to those when she first moved into Petra, over 35 years ago. She explained that in the 1970s and early 1980s, the Bedouin who worked in Petra also had animals, and money from tourism was a welcome extra. Now this is their only source of income, so it’s really hurting them. She told me that writing the book was an important project for her to do, as with the Bedouin moving out of Petra, she wanted to create a written record of what it was like to live within Petra’s ancient caves.

A short walk away, a woman at a stall started chatting to us and in traditional Bedouin style we were soon sharing photos on our phones. She laughed at our Bedouin wedding story, and told us that people no longer have this sort of wedding in Umm Sayhoun, but it would have been typical in her parents’ time in Petra. I asked when the last Bedouin moved out of the caves, and she pointed over the hillside opposite and said that a few families still live here, albeit illegally.

Petra’s monuments are of course it’s most recognisable asset, but the people who have lived in and around its caves, tombs and carved façades, and who are still around and willing to share their stories, are every much as part of its fascination.

You can find other posts from the Digital Nomad project on the National Geographic Traveller website.

Petra beyond the façades is a post from: 501 Places

This post is part of the Digital Nomad project with National Geographic Traveller.

No pain, no gain.

My feet and my calves were letting me know in no uncertain terms that I’d far exceeded my normal level of physical activity. By the end of the second day I’d covered around 40 kilometres on uneven paths, climbing up to over 1,000 metres above sea level on at least 3 occasions before dropping to valley floors and walking along dried river beds and through narrow canyons.

It was the promise of the reward at the end which motivated me to keep walking and scrambling for the three days of our 60-km trek. We were walking from Dana to Petra, considered one of the best hikes in the Middle East and part of the Abraham Trail which runs for 1,000 km across Israel, Jordan and Turkey (the Syrian section is sadly off limits for now). Although our route was a slightly truncated version of the classic 6-day trek, we were pretty much squeezing 5 days of hiking into 3 long days.

From the moment I knew that the trek was part of our itinerary in Jordan, I was excited at the prospect of entering Petra by walking through its back door. What I hadn’t anticipated were the rewards we’d also experience along the way.

Led by our guide Murad Arslan from Terhaal Adventures, we started what was a relatively simple first day at the head of the Dana Valley, surrounded by the mostly abandoned, Ottoman-era stone houses of Dana village. We were walking to Feynan Eco Lodge, 14 km away at the bottom of the valley. Our trail followed the contours of the river valley, dropping steeply at first before winding alongside the dried water course, with the descent of almost 1,000 metres reflected in the transformation in vegetation, from the arid Eastern Desert landscape to the juniper and oleander trees of the lower Sudanese terrain.

If our first day was a gentle introduction, the second day was altogether more challenging. We started from Abu Sakakeen and climbed twice from the valley floors to mountain peaks, on largely unmarked paths which would have proved very hard to find by ourselves. We started later than Murad had hoped and as we walked he pushed us on, increasingly conscious of the distance we still had to cover before sunset.

The views across Wadi Araba, part of the Great Rift Valley, were an irresistible distraction, and I kept stopping to look back and admire the panorama which stretched for many miles westwards, well beyond the Israeli border. Murad pointed out the dark areas on the far side of the valley, irrigated land on Israeli kibbutzim; we watched as first a group of starlings then a pair of migrating falcons passed overhead and circled the sandstone cliffs.

During the whole 10 hours of walking on that day we met only 4 people: a group of hunters who greeted us warmly before disappearing into the shrubs with their rifles. We were still some way from our camp spot at sunset, and we walked the final 2 km in pitch darkness, arriving far later than planned at the basic camp set up at the remote Shkaret Umseid by our Bedouin host. The lentil soup and grilled chicken he had prepared was particularly well deserved that night.

The final day was considerably easier, although by now our aching legs and feet were making each kilometre feel like a mile. Little Petra was our lunch stop. This Nabatean settlement may lack the size and splendour of the main Petra site, but the site is every bit as important a part of the Petra story. It was here that visitors to the ancient city were accommodated (few were allowed into the Nabatean capital), and it was in Little Petra that most of the city’s trade was done. There are several impressive carved façades, and despite being free to visit, we saw no more than 10 visitors in the hour or so we were there.

From Little Petra to Petra is around an 8 km walk, first along a dusty road and then up and down a series of steep steps. We were met by a strong wind for this final stretch, particularly ill-timed as some stretches pass along a narrow ledge carved into the sandstone mountain, with a sheer drop which I tried as hard as possible to block out of my mind. Murad showed us just how much more precarious the path had been until it was improved in 2013; we were grateful we hadn’t heard of the trek before our previous visit.

Our path entered the Petra site at the Monastery, and we were very excited to glimpse our first view of the famous façade. I sat with Murad enjoying a glass of juice before we descended towards the centre of Petra, feeling quietly smug from our efforts as we let the handful of other visitors pass us by on their mules.

You can find other posts from the Digital Nomad project on the National Geographic Traveller website.

Hiking from Dana to Petra is a post from: 501 Places