Suddenly I was a tourist again.

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 207. 

After we had been about three months in the Lebanon, in autumn 1957, my mother came to stay. She was—as I knew she would be—enchanted by it all. I wangled a few days leave and we took her down to Amman, where as usual the King came to dinner; and she started talking to him about Petra, where none of us had ever been. Instantly he put a palace car at our disposal, with uniformed driver; and at six the following morning off we went—my mother, Anne, and I—on what was then a twelve-hour journey to a flea-pit hotel in the little town of Ma’an, where we spent the night. Early the following morning we reached the police post at Wadi Musa, where we hired horses; and by sunrise we were riding into the city.

Nowadays Petra is part of the tourist beat; among my friends I know hardly anyone who has not been there at least once; on my last visit in 1999 I was astonished (and horrified) to see—though fortunately a safe distance away—what appeared to be a fair-sized town, with a blaze of neon-lit hotels and restaurants. It was very different half a century ago. In Petra itself there was a tented camp, run by the Philadelphia Hotel in Amman; you brought your food down with you, and it was cooked whenever you asked for it. You could have a tent if you wanted one, but most visitors wisely chose one of the countless small tombs hewn out of the rock—some of which were furnished with iron bedsteads and very primitive washstands—looking out on to the central valley of what everybody insisted on calling “the rose-red city.”33 (“A Tomb with a View” was a rather obvious joke, perhaps, but we thought it funny at the time.) I remember the exhilaration of our first early morning ride through the Siq—that extraordinary narrow cleft in the rock that leads into Petra itself. Now at last, I felt, I was no longer a tourist; I was a traveler, right up there with Burckhardt and Doughty, with T.E. Lawrence and Freya Stark. I continued to feel it until, all unsuspectingly, I opened the camp’s visitors’ book, which went back to well before the war—and was brought rapidly down to earth. There before me on the page were the unmistakable signatures: Chips Channon . . . Loelia Westminster . . . Elsa Maxwell. . . . Suddenly I was a tourist again.