Feynan Ecolodge hires local Bedouins to transport guests to and from the reception center. For our departure, I rode in the back of a rattletrap pick-up, nearly popping out every time we hit a rut in the dirt road. (Decades ago, a similar ride resulted in a broken collarbone.) I tried to snap some farewell photos of the hillsides coming to life in the morning light, but it took most of my strength and balance to stay in the truck. Little did I know this wouldn’t be the most dangerous drive of the day.
Rather than drive from Amman to take us the relatively short distance to Petra, George had contracted with a local driver. When we arrived at the reception area, Ali introduced himself and gestured toward another pick-up. This time, I sat in the back seat; Tony sat up front. Ali’s limited English meant our questions went unanswered, and we could only assume he was the driver sent by George.
“How much minute to Petra?” I asked, using my best ESL.
“One o’clock and 30,” he answered.
Hmmm… did he mean one and a half hours? Or did he mean we would arrive at 1:30? No way to know.
George had told us that the driver would take a beautiful road to Petra through Wadi Namla. “It is bumpy road, but very beautiful,” he had said. So we weren’t too surprised when Ali veered off the paved highway. However, we soon reached a dead end at the base of the mountain, where a sign read, “Danger! Road Closed!” Ali calmly maneuvered around the sign and onto a rocky winding path without a word. Tony and I made nervous eye contact but didn’t speak. At one point, Ali steered off the “road” and onto a clearing of rubble. Trying to circumvent a huge rock, he gunned the engine, but the tires simply spun loudly, shooting rocks and gravel like machine gun fire. After getting out for a quick survey of the situation, he tried a different tack and safely passed the rock. We rocked and bumped and skidded for awhile before joining back up with the main dirt road.
Later, Tony and I laughed about that moment. We both had the same sudden fear: Ali was NOT the driver hired by George but rather some crazy terrorist who was taking us out to the middle of nowhere to hold us for ransom. Funny in retrospect. Not so much at the time.
Anyway, the rest of the trip was ridiculously scary with Ali driving precariously close to the mountain’s edge and often whipping around bends at speeds that would send us flying off the hillside if suddenly faced with oncoming traffic. Yes, the views were spectacular, but we felt too anxious to stop for photos. As we zig-zagged down the backside of the mountain and had nearly reached asphalt, a small rental car pulled up alongside us. A young American guy rolled down his window and asked Ali, “Can I make it in this car?”
Tony and I both yelled, “No way! Don’t do it!”
Ali said, “This car no good. No good.”
The guy laughed and said, “Even if it’s not my car?”
Tony leaned over Ali and told the guy, “It’s not that you’ll destroy the car, which you will, but the car literally won’t be able to get you to the other side.”
“Oh well, there’s another road, so it’s no big deal,” said the guy. “We’ll turn around.” Whew!
Eventually we reached Little Petra (Siq al-Barid). Because I had done woefully little research on this site and Ali couldn’t fill in the blanks, Tony and I didn’t know what we were seeing. We climbed around on some of the rocks, read a couple of the interpretive signs and told Ali we were ready to go.
This ceiling features a painting from the 1st century AD in a space called The Painted Biclinium. The little cave room has benches carved along two of its walls. (I now know “biclinium” is the Latin word for a dining couch for two people.) Imagine painting your dining room ceiling with a fancy design to be discovered by archaeologists 2,000 years later!
Ali delivered us to our hotel in Petra in time for lunch and kindly waited while we checked in. We thanked him profusely for getting us there alive, but he just laughed, waved and drove off.