Sorry for the delay in posting this. We got back from our camping trip on Wednesday night and have since been recuperating. It was an arduous, though absolutely fantastic trip. The trek took us through the Dana Nature Reserve, Wadi Feinan, Wadi Ghuweir, the Shawbak area, Beidah (Little Petra), and Petra. Many of the people on the expedition had been to one or more of these sites previously, but none had managed the feat of hiking all of the way from Dana to Petra.
Approaching Petra from the North
Well I am glad to report that it can be done! Not only that, I can also tell you that you don’t really need a guide (as I lose the readership of all our dear Bedouin followers). There are some important things that one needs to know before embarking on such an epic expedition though. When I was planning the trip, I lamented the fact that I couldn’t find any good online descriptions of the Dana-Petra trek, so we will frame our account of our recent escapade in the south of Jordan as just such a guide in the hope that it will enable future travelers to enjoy the same wonderful itinerary we did.
Before I get into the details about each of the particular components of the itinerary, there are a couple of introductory notes about the trek that need to be made:
1. Water: As with most hiking trips (particularly trips in arid areas) the single most important requirement for ensuring that the Dana-Petra trek is enjoyable and safe is planning one’s water supply carefully. If one plans on doing the trip without a guide or car (as we did), then obviously at any one time you will only have access to as much water as you can carry. Considering that one liter of water weighs one kg and each person should have at least 4 liters of water on hand for each day of hiking/camping, it was not feasible for us to carry enough water for the whole trip (four days) on our backs. To overcome this challenge, we planned for each of our campsites to be near a village in which we could buy water. This system worked relatively well for us except for a few kinks that we will discuss in an upcoming post.
2. Directions: Some of the routes we took for this itinerary are not self-evident. We benefited from the fact that our team included a number of people who had done portions of our route on prior excursions and the fact that we had an excellent hiking book on hand – Tony Howard and Di Taylor, Jordan: Walks Treks Caves, Climbs and Canyons (Milnthorpe, UK: Cicerone Press Limited, 2008). I recommend you get the 2008 edition (rather than the 2001 edition). The more recent volume includes color maps and photographs as well as GPS coordinates. That brings me to another point. Though we did not use a compass or a GPS device on this trek, I thoroughly recommend both tools for those serious about trekking in Jordan. The GPS device definitely would have helped make our Dana-Petra trek a little smoother. It appears to be quite difficult to get your hands on a trail GPS in Jordan so I recommend bringing one with you from outside the country. When I say “trail GPS,” I mean something like the Garmin GPSMAP 60. Such devices can prove very useful, especially when used in conjunction with Google Earth. If one doesn’t have a GPS device, Google Earth can still prove useful. We used it to map out our Dana-Petra expedition and it really helped us visualize our route so when the time came to actually do the trek, many of the landmarks were already familiar to us.
On that note, I leave you with a Google Earth (.kmz) file with all of our hiking routes from Dana to Petra (located on the sidebar to the right). If you have Google Earth installed on your computer, all you have to do is download this .kmz file and double click it for it to display the routes in Google Earth. Subsequent posts will go into each of the stages of the hike in more detail. To see pictures of the hike (the most notable of which will be highlighted in the posts dealing with the appropriate sections of the hike), click here!
I hope this information proves useful and engaging.
Stay tuned,
David
[...] 2009 by delinfield For those of you just joining us, we’re writing about each stage of our recent hiking trip from Dana-Petra and we’re doing so for a couple of different [...]