In the first instalment, we visited somewhere I’d been. This time, I invite you to join me in a land of pure imagination about another location which remains unchecked, and very high up my Bucket List.

Frankly, if you saw the Indiana Jones films as a kid then the likelihood is that you too want to go to Petra. Or at least, you want to go to the ‘Canyon of the Crescent Moon’ which features so prominently in the Last Crusade.  I simply cannot believe that you wouldn’t. It is a beautiful Hellenistic temple, carved into a sheer cliff face, to which Indi rides in order to defend the Holy Grail from Nazis. To be fair, one thing no one should expect of those films is even an ounce of historical accuracy. And the real city is so much cooler. 

Not Harrison Ford, but Johann Ludwig Burckhardt was the first European to lay eyes on Petra. At the beginning of the 19th century, he was on a mission with the backing of Sir Joseph Banks to find the source of the River Niger. He became distracted in Malta when he heard of a Dr Seetzen, who’d been murdered in his search for the Lost City. In Aleppo, an Arabic man helped him consolidate the Arabic that he’d learnt at Cambridge, and he studied the Koran, as well as Muslim law. Burckhardt then travelled under an alias through Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. On the way from Nazareth to Cairo in 1812, he heard about local ruins believed to be the tomb of Aaron, brother of Moses. Saying he wanted to sacrifice a goat there, Burckhardt hired a local guide and at last laid eyes upon the city. He proceeded to discover the temple of Rameses the Great, and died of dysentery in Cairo at the age of 32. He did not find the Niger.

Petra is cool. Its golden age lasted while it was the capital of the Nabataean Empire, between 400 BC and AD 106. In 1985, it was officially named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is widely considered to be one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It’s one of the largest, richest archaeological sites there is, and around 85 per cent of it remains undiscovered. It’s a city dug into the cliffs themselves: its rises up and down the rock face, and was supplied with so ingenious a water system that, even in the red desert where it lies, its inhabitants were able to not only farm crops but keep gardens. After the Nabateans took advantage of infighting between the Seleucids and Ptolemies (Hellenistic emperors), they had control of the caravan routes between Arabia and Syria, and thus Petra became an international centre for the spice trade. It wasn’t just a market town either – as the capital city of a flourishing empire, Petra was a fusion of religions, peoples and artistic culture, as can easily be seen in the architecture of its dramatic facades. One striking example is its theatre in the Roman style that could seat 8500 people. Dug deep into the desert, Petra was paradoxically the epitome of the proverbial beaten track during its efflorescence, whose thriving heart thudded with the feet of at one point around 20,000 people. 

Just imagine it: the soft whisper of water, kept in dams and diverted around tunnel-riddled cliff faces and the Sharah mountains, markets and gardens and Hellenistic architecture, mixed up with spice and dust and gold. With nearly 3000 rock-cut tombs, banquet halls, altars and dwellings: Petra today is what we grew up thinking about Ancient Egyptian archaeology. It’s half discovered and full of treasures. It’s packed to its cavernous, ingenious rafters with a who’s who trophy collection of the great, ancient empires – the Romans were here, the Greeks, the Egyptians. It has a triumphal arch and was at one point a Byzantine bishopric. Described by John William Burgon in his poem, Petra, as ‘a rose-red city half as old as time’, it stands looming and quiet in the silence left behind by the departure of its markets a thousand years ago, and is a must visit for any wanderer worth their dead sea salt.