Cyber Ethiopia

The Museum The little museum past the temple (entrance is free!) has only a few artifacts, but they illustrate the importance of the trade. The Nabataeans thrived before Islam was established and the later routes for the pilgrimage to Mecca. In these early times, much of the trade northward was in the incenses of Yemen, Somalia and Ethiopia, Frankincense and Myrrh, which are given due recognition in the museum. Other than the trade route map and artifacts, the little museum has a generally uninteresting (for me anyway) collection of pottery shards and ruined statues (why do they always have their heads knocked off?). There are a few exceptions – the elephant embroidered pillar tops and the large urn with the lions clinging awkwardly and desperately to the

edges to act as handles. One nice piece depicts the square headed ‘Goddess of Hayyam' from the Temple of the Winged Lions. We decided to eat our picnic lunch perched on a cliff side path above the main thoroughfare of Petra. From here we could see most of the town and – when we weren't calling in horror at our son and friend scaling precipitous cliffs – ponder the impression of Petra. The wonder of Petra is that it existed at all in this desolate land – that so many generations lived and left their artistic architectural mark on this landscape. The Monastery There are many sites to climb to at Petra, but we settled for just one- perhaps the hardest to get to and certainly the most wonderful. This is Jebel Al Deir – the Monastery. There are 821 steps to get up to the Monastery I'm told (I didn't count), with plenty of non-step walking too, so we allocated 2 hours to the trek. Fortunately the April weather was moderate and the breezes cool, although we still perspired copiously and consumed a lot of water. We were not the only climbers, some walked like us while others elected to use the donkeys available. Wonderful views presented themselves as we looked behind us towards the valley of Petra, and we could even see across the valley to the new town beyond. All of this was nothing compared to the wonderful sight that greeted us a respectable 38 minutes after departure as we reached the top and turned the corner. Ahead of us was an unexpectedly marvellous hewn façade, larger and just as ornate as the ‘Treasury'. After my own astonishment subsided a bit I positioned myself on a rock to observe the next group coming up. I was rewarded with cries and an enthusiastic ‘Ohh, il est pleut grand!' from the French coming up behind. Although the rock is white and grey, unlike the pink of the Treasury, the hew is quite similar. There are three sections divided by huge pillars – the triclinium. The porticoes were similar to the Treasury and the whole was surmounted by a large cylinder, but it didn't have the hewn statues that give the Treasury a distinct Greco-Roman look. The inside was predictably large and square, but could only be accessed by climbing some fairly treacherous balance rocks at the front. I enjoyed resting on an alcove inside the Monastery at the back, watching other tourists clamber awkwardly up into the church, accompanied by the guttural noise of a German reading a guidebook aloud to his girlfriend. Graffiti adorned the walls, including a poem in Arabic which my friend roughly translated as ‘these words will soon like all the older words be buried by time.' Cheered by this humbling thought we climbed up to a cave – predictably square – across the way, and gazed impressed down the valley – Wadi Araba – towards the Gulf of Aqaba. We could also watch the women who tended the rather pathetic little souvenir tables tearing some of the last bits of wood off the scanty junipers, no doubt to make a cup of tea for the old men leading the donkeys. After 50 minutes we began the descent, jostled by the occasional passers-by – including a group of serious looking middle aged men in disconcertingly tiny running shorts. Near the top there is a testicle shriveling drop off the side which I chose to keep my eyes away from. Our return took only 26 minutes, but I could feel my shins ache for two days afterwards from the jarring experience of descending down 821 steps. Petra versus Lalibela So, as an Ethiopian resident I return to the original question – how does Petra compare to Lalibela? Petra is certainly larger, and has the advantage of many layers of influence, and the façades are wonderful. There is however, no reason why the churches of Lalibela shouldn't be equally if not more popular. Lalibela has the advantage of being large, but manageable for a visit in a day; of being historical, but still a living church; and of not only having ornate outsides, but intricately carved and painted insides. The Petra monuments often host 5000 foreign visitors a day – Lalibela receives that many in a year. This shows the tourism potential that Lalibela has. The Footsteps of Moses Petra cannot be left without a brief description of the spring of Moses, a few kilometers along the road to the south of Petra. The biblical story goes that the children of Israel were in the wilderness, complaining about their misery and the lack of water. Moses took his famous rod and struck a rock, which immediately gave forth water to appease the whining Israelites. The spring is now in the middle of a small town and is actually in the foyer of a hotel. A steady stream of locals go into the hotel to procure the water, which is free and available, for holy purposes or more practical immediate needs such as watering fruit trees. Moses is a holy figure in all three major Middle Eastern religions – Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, with similar stories told of him in both the Old Testament and the Koran. The spring is known locally as the Wadi Musa, using the Arabic name for Moses. Another nearby shrine is the mountaintop memorial for Aaron, the brother of Moses who passed away in the wilderness before reaching the ‘promised land'. A white building marks the spot – clearly visible not only from the road into Petra, but from the road on the other side of the mountains on the road south from the Dead Sea. I didn't climb the mountain myself, but I was assured that it is a nice site to visit. Whether this is where the legendary Aaron died or not I will leave for the more knowledgeable to decide. MADABA The Desert Highway that takes you to Petra then on North to Amman is a wonderful feat of engineering. It is a modern and fast superhighway. The old King's Highway runs through the mountains further west, following a trade route dating from biblical times (the ‘Kings' are the kings of Edom and other ancient lands). This mountainous road keeps you down to an average of 60-70 km per hour, while the Desert Highway is easily navigated at 100-120 km per hour, and some BMWs' choose to go much faster. It is therefore pssible to do as we did – leave from Aqaba early in the morning, spend many hours enjoying Petra, and still arrive in Amman the same evening (although we almost killed our driver!) It meant we had to drive by the town of Madaba, but we came back to look at it later. Madaba is famous as a centre of Byzantine Christianity, and the site of one of the most famous mosaics of the prolific Byzantine period. Madaba is only 50 km South of Amman. We got there so fast that I thought we were just stopping to get our hungry boys a snack, something they had been demanding from the time we got in the van. While I helped them collect a sandwich, everyone else piled out to look at the church across the road, which turned out to be the repository of the famous mosaic. The mosaic is very nice. It is a map of the ancient world, showing the Christian pilgrimage points popular in the 500's AD in the Holy Land – stretching from Egypt to Iran. The mosaic is on the floor, and has been badly damaged over the centuries. Although some parts of the map are very clear like the Dead Sea and the Nile Delta, other parts have been completely wiped out. There are little figures mosaiced in, such as the two boatloads of pilgrims rowing themselves down the Dead Sea. The church is Greek Orthodox, and I found a certain similiarity with Ethiopian churches. There were plenty of paintings on the walls from different eras, several of them of St. George killing the dragon, after whom the church is named. Despite the high quality of the mosaic, I have to admit to a bit of disappointment. The propaganda on the mosaic called it ‘the biggest map of the world', so I expected something which stretched across most of the town, not a section of a church floor. It was also the place in Jordan where I most felt the crush of tourism and the conflict between visitors and people getting on with their worship. It felt intrusive.