At 18, I was swept away by a wave of existential fear. I was afraid I'd look back on my life in 50 years and regret all the chances I didn't take. So I started taking my chances, shouting YES whenever I got the opportunity to see or do something unique. This is why I didn't hesitate, not even a second, when my tour guide in Jordan offered our group the chance to visit Petra by night. It would set me back about $20, but I couldn't care less about that money. For days, I dreamed of seeing Petra's world-famous Treasury in the moonlight. I couldn't wait to see that dream come true.

By the time we arrived at Wadi Musa, near Petra, I wasn't very excited about my plans for a nightly visit to the rose-red city anymore. I was extremely carsick, on the verge of throwing up. Normally I don't get carsick all that easily, but the bus ride down the King's Highway from Madaba to Wadi Musa had seriously messed with me. I was white as a cloth. My friends had to carry my luggage to my room for me, and had I been on that bus any longer, they would have had to carry me too.
In the hours that followed, I did nothing but stare at the ceiling. I had to recover quickly, or I wouldn't be able to visit Petra that night. That thought almost made me cry. From a very young age, I had been told about how special the place was. My dad was - and still is - fascinated by the place. He hasn't been there yet though, which made me realize just how lucky I was to get the chance to see that capital of the Nabatean Kingdom by night. Petra is open to the public every day, but only three nights a week: every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Had we arrived a day later, a nightly visit would have been impossible. So I laid down and waited for the carsickness to pass.

Three hours and a chocolate bar later, I got up to my feet and walked down to the lobby as if nothing had ever happened. It was time to visit Petra.
I met up with my friends outside the hotel and we followed the tour guide to the Visitor Center. I'd mentally prepared myself for a long walk, but the Center and entrance to Petra Archeological Park turned out to be a five-minute walk away from the hotel.
Waiting in front of the iron gates of the park made me restless. More and more people joined the crowd, along with a few stray dogs. Now I'm very much afraid of dogs, especially stray dogs, so I was extremely jumpy by the time the gates were opened. I guess that jumpiness had a positive side as well, because I shot forward and was among the first to enter the route to Petra.
My friends and I walked quickly. Petra by Night is quite the mass event and we did not want to get locked in by the crowd, not being able to see anything. We walked past a lot of people on the path toward the Siq, the small 2-kilometer long gorge that leads to Petra's Treasury. Our path was lit by hundreds of candle in brown paper bags, which looked like tiny lanterns. It looked amazing. I wanted to take at least a hundred pictures of the path, but the sun had already set and my camera could capture neither the image, not the atmosphere the candles created. I put the camera back in my bag and decided to just take it all in without electronic devices to distract me. There was so much to see, yet so much was also cast in shadows. I tried to make something out, tried to find the outlines of ancient ruins in this landscape that made me feel like I was in a Star Wars movie. I tried to imagine what this path had been like 2000 years ago, when Petra was the capital of a thriving kingdom. This was the entrance route for caravans two millennia ago. Now I was walking down that very same path in 2018, but the present had never felt so far away.

After a couple of minutes, we entered the Siq. The moonlight didn't reach us down in the small gorge, but here too our path was bathing in candlelight. There was a mysterious feeling radiating from the Siq, which made me giddy and excited. By then, very few tourists were ahead of us, so we walked a little more slowly down the ancient path. I'd expected it to be all soft and sandy, but here and there it actually resembled a modern pavement. I almost twisted my ankle once when a stray dog popped up out of nowhere, and I stopped paying attention to where I was putting my feet. Lucky for me, the stray dogs in the Siq are so used to awkward tourists like me that they didn't do much more than walk alongside us (though that still made me jumpy).
The Siq's many twist and turns made me lose all sense of direction and time. After a while, I expected the Treasury to be behind every corner we turned. Each time we were greeted by another stretch of candle-lit Siq. Then we rounded yet another corner, walked straight ahead for about 15 meters and all of a sudden we were out in the open again, right in front of the enormous facade of Al Khazneh, Petra's Treasury. I almost choked on the air in my lungs when I saw its columns, friezes and statues all lit-up by dozens upon dozens of candles.


A local came up to us and invited us to take a seat on one of the mats at the edge of the sea of candles in front of the Treasury. Walking fast had resulted in front-row seats, just a bit to the right of the very middle of the place. Since we were so early, we had to wait until all the other tourists had come out of the Siq. This time was spent trying to take the perfect picture of Al Khazneh. I received a crash course in ISO, but still managed to ruin a fair amount of pictures by picking my camera up way too soon. I was so focused on my camera that I barely noticed that one of the lanterns went up in flames less than a foot away from me. When I eventually did notice, I panicked for all of 30 seconds, then returned to capturing the mysterious world of Petra on camera.

Music started playing as the last tourists scuttled out of the gorge. The air felt thick with wonder. The music and singing that followed were majorly off-key every now and then, but it didn't bother me. When the music stopped, a man stepped forward and welcomed us to his rose-red city of Petra. Cups of tea were handed out. The whole thing reminded me of Middle Eastern fairy tales, which had always interested me more than their European cousins. I felt like I was living in one of those stories for a brief moment.
Then the spotlights were turned on. The Treasury lit up in blue, purple, green and red. Especially the red light made everything look magical. That special moment didn't last very long though, as tourists rushed up to Al Khazneh for that one picture to share on Facebook to make friends and family jealous. But who am I to judge? Soon I stood there too, posing for a picture that would forever remind me of one of the most magical moments of my life.


At the end of the night, my friends and I were among the last to walk back through the Siq. We let as many people as possible enter the gorge before us, then walked very slowly behind one of the last groups. At this point a lot of people were using their phones as flashlights, ruining the mysterious atmosphere inside the Siq. We tried to stay away from them and took our time soaking up every little detail of our nightly visit. It was getting close to midnight when I finally got back to my room, but sleep was the last thing on my mind. My head was spinning with images and experiences. I couldn't quite believe yet that I'd seen Petra's Treasury. I went through the pictures a thousand times, wondering what the place would look like by day. I was only a few hours of sleep away from my daytime visit to the legendary Nabatean city. I set my alarm, praying to hear it go off soon so I could pay another visit to Petra.