Sunrise at Petra with a stray dog

It was still dark when the dog found us, just past the ticket scanner at the entrance to Petra. It appeared out of nowhere, decided it was walking with us, and that was that.

The alarm had gone off at 5:45, and we were at the gate by six, where we stood in the cold for half an hour because nobody could scan our Jordan Passes until 6:30. The plan was simple and slightly desperate: reach the Treasury before the sun and before the crowds, because this was our one chance at photos of one of the wonders of the world without a thousand heads in them. Every minute at that gate felt like a minute someone else was using to get there first.

So when the tickets finally beeped, we walked fast. It is about a kilometre from the ticket office to the mouth of the siq, and the dog stuck with us the whole way, keeping a polite distance most of the time, then drifting in close against our legs at points, looking up with what I can only describe as a smile. When we stopped, it stopped, and when we walked on, it kept pace. We never fed it and never pat it, and it did not seem to want anything from us except the walk.

The siq is a canyon that narrows to a couple of metres wide, and at that hour it was properly dark, dark enough that we needed torches to see the path. We could barely make out the sandstone walls above us, and through the gap at the top we could still see stars. There was nobody ahead of us and nobody behind, just us and the dog.

The Treasury stays completely hidden until the last moment. Ten metres from the end of the siq you round one final bend, and suddenly there it is, a carved facade far bigger than any photo had led me to expect, pale in the dawn light. I remember thinking I was in a movie. And, this was the part I could not process, there was nobody there. The plaza in front of the Treasury, the one you see in every picture with hundreds of tourists crammed into it, was empty, and the only other people were one or two locals setting up their shop against the far canyon wall, invisible from where we stood. We took our photos and filmed everything, and for a while we had the Treasury at sunrise entirely to ourselves.

The dog sat down in front of the Treasury like its job was done. After a while another dog trotted out from deeper inside Petra, they greeted each other, and the two of them wandered off together into the city, no goodbye, no lingering look.

The rest of the day stayed just as empty. We hiked up past the theatre and the royal tombs to a lookout and sat there watching the sunlight slowly work its way down the front of the Treasury, almost alone at the top of a place built for enormous crowds. We climbed the long staircase to the monastery, past a dozen offers of donkey rides, and discovered on the way that the donkeys loved our banana peels and apple cores. The monastery turned out to be nearly the Treasury’s twin, just with open sky around it, and there were cats and dogs everywhere, all of them friendly, patted by Bedouins and tourists alike. Petra clearly runs on tourists, and the tourists simply were not there.

By the time we walked back out, the Treasury had finally drawn its crowd, and we got to see the siq in daylight, which is worth the walk on its own. We drove on to Little Petra, completely deserted even at the hour the main site was full, and had its carved tombs, an adorable cat and a ceiling painted with tree leaves entirely to ourselves. A cheap falafel dinner on the way home, and the perfect Petra day was done.

Then we drove to our accommodation, and our accommodation did not exist.

The address took us to a regular Jordanian house that looked like a few families lived in it, with no sign, no reception and no hostel anywhere in sight, even though we had a confirmed booking to what was clearly somebody’s home. We parked and walked around, checking the address against the building and the building against the address, until eventually the locals came out to us and we asked about the hostel. It had been closed for months, they said, they just lived here now, and the address might be wrong.

So we did the only thing left and knocked on a door down the road. Inside was a warm fireplace and a host who seemed more worried about our evening than we were. He had a boss he needed to phone to ask if we could stay, and once the boss said yes, he ran into the next problem: he had no idea what to charge us. We suggested he just charge whatever was listed on booking.com, and he countered that we did not have to pay at all, that it was fine for us simply to stay. Not many tourists come because of the war, he mentioned, matter-of-factly, as if that explained the hospitality. We insisted, and pressed ten dinar in cash on him.