Q: What’s the opposite of actor John Hamm?

A: Me, in my floppy white sun hat.

It cost five dinars! Five dinars seemed more than reasonable to block out the midday Middle Eastern sun. And as a universal symbol of benevolent tourism, only the mighty fanny pack beats the floppy white hat. My hat said, I come in peace. I shall not haggle. Would you take a picture of me and my wife? Properly emasculated, slathered in 90-SPF sunglop, I embarked for Petra.

Petra is a rock city in the Jordanian desert, three hours south of Amman. When I say “rock city,” I mean that literally. It is literally a city hewn from rock. Although the “city” part is not meant literally. It’s only a city in the UNESCO-sanctioned archaeological and historical sense. It’s not a city you can go to and rent a hotel in and visit the convention center of.

While Petra looks several hundred million centuries old, it’s actually relatively young. The ribbon cutting ceremony was only 2,600 years ago. The builders of Petra were a mysterious people called the Nabataeans. I know what you’re thinking: “But Sam, I thought this region was controlled by the Edomites?” It was, until the power vacuum created by the Babylonian Captivity in the early sixth century BC. Then the Edomites abandoned their craggy hidey holes for the fertile farmlands of Judah. The Nabataeans took over the desert that now comprises southern Jordan and the Negev.

For any other ancient peoples, that would have been that. But the Nabataeans used a desolate series of canyons and gorges to collect and channel water, facilitating a building boom. At its height, 20,000 people lived in this stone metropolis, the capital of a trading empire that stretched from Gaza to the Persian Gulf. After the Romans absorbed and dissolved their civilization, the Nabataeans winked out. Petra remained a Bedouin secret for 1,000 years, until a Swiss explorer stumbled into it in 1812.

These days it’s an easy trek. To reach Petra now, simply fly to Amman, pay a cabbie $80 to drive you to the town of Wadi Musa, then walk downhill to the ticket counter. Yes, there is a ticket counter. The Nebateans built Petra over centuries. They had plenty of time to remember the ticket counter. As of this writing, it costs $55 for a two-day pass. That’s less than half the price of Legoland. Don’t gripe.

Past the ticket booth, my wife and I started down the long downhill slope. In the extreme heat and sunshine, we passed a long stretch of vendors offering rides on parched-looking horses (nearby, a large sign advertised the web address for the international animal welfare agency safeguarding Petra’s work animals).

We arrived at Al Siq, the entrance to Petra proper. From here the path dipped, stone walls closed in, and the encroaching rock grew so smooth it seemed concrete. At some points, the passage narrowed to five meters, even while cliff walls rose to 200 meters—twice the height of the Statue of Liberty. Reedy little fig trees sprouted from cracks and crags. We passed barely discernable sculptures—bodies, camel hooves—worn to blobs by time. Waist-high grooves on either side had once provided irrigation water and protection from the flash floods that seemed a very real threat, even on this bone dry summer afternoon.

Here’s where the pain hit. Passing by the Red Sea the day before, I’d felt a needling, jangley little twinge in my ear canal. Within ten minutes, the ache had exploded into a ninja star of despair. We’d been at the lowest elevation on Earth, so my self-diagnosis was to simply avoid that particular spot on the planet for the rest of my life. Although Petra is nearly a mile higher, and the grade of our descent was enough to re-trigger this pain. It felt like a passing tourist had jabbed a twig into my head meat.

With one bright stab of ear pain, I rounded a corner and beheld Al Khazneh. Better known as The Treasury, this otherworldly palace facade has been carved, top down, directly out of a sandstone cliff. Its construction captured Petra’s mix of Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and Byzantine influences. Footholds were still visible on either side of the 150-foot facade, like printer registration marks someone forgot to crop out. On the other side of the wide sandy floor, a gift shop sheltered awestruck tourists. Behind this, one chunk of dumpster-sized column rested next to a dumpster, perhaps for laughs.

This was that rarest of attractions. A world famous monument that actually looked larger and more majestic in real life. It was as if the Nabataeans were saying, you know what, all subsequent humans who will walk the Earth? Shove it. The Grand Canyon? We blew our noses with that. Moon landing? Yawn. LAME. We carved these cliffs using a few plumb lines and pickaxes. Which, FYI, we also fashioned out of rock. And when it was time for lunch? A guy pulled a string on a bird’s tail and we all screamed “Yabba Dabba Doo!” Yeah—our shit was real.

I stood and watched sparrows flit in and out of chinks in the facade, 30 or 40 feet up. For a dead city, Petra certainly sheltered a lot of life. Animals were everywhere. Feral cats treated every visitor as a vending machine. Dejected donkeys trudged through the canyon, eyes averted. Every minute or so, several tough-as-shit horses raced by with stern gazes and pendulous junk, hauling tourists in buggies shaded by faded cloth canopies. Closer still, a fleet of camels parked themselves in the vast clearing before Al Khazneh, chewing with slow, showy indifference. Nearby, eager young men offered up their animal’s humps for 25 dinars a ride.

The Arab approach to retail required some diplomacy. As of summer 2011, Jordan sat trapped in the soft center of the Arab Spring, neither the triumph of Egypt nor the horror of Syria. But while the political yearning of the locals remained veiled, their daily economic humiliations were not. The vendor who sold me my hat exclaimed that I was his “brother from another mother.” His laugh had been too quick, his smile too forced. For the time it took me to buy an accessory, I was, to him, the imperialist outsider—the boss with one boot eternally at his throat.

This displaced aggression popped up every 50 feet or so with every animal wrangler or postcard seller who refused to take no for an answer. I heard the word “friend” repeated endlessly and without a trace of kinship, used as an ironic mantra of face-saving frustration. It was the slogan of grown adults forced by economics to sit in the hot sun, waiting for a westerner to buy a postcard or a Sprite. As we set out from the Treasury, a fresh wave of camel / horse managers besieged us. “My friend, my friend,” they called out, shaming us for the rudeness of refusal.

“I wonder what time of day these guys finally give up,” my wife said.

“At a certain point every day they start badgering each other for rides, and you wind up with donkeys on top of camels,” I said. “It’s actually really fucked up.” My wife wasn’t listening. She seemed more interested in my pained winces.

“You know, walking pneumonia is what killed Jim Henson.”

I grimaced and the pain radiated down my jaw. I wondered what would happen if I were to have a heart attack here. It certainly would be a lovely place to die.

The path led us down, down, down past the Outer Siq, and the colossal Roman amphitheater. My eyes watered from the pain. The bray of donkeys reverberated off canyon walls, indistinguishable from the mournful cry of Star Wars‘ Sand People. The road opened up and jogged left, towards the vista of the Colonnaded street. We walked the length of an average city block, then turned to behold the tombs.

They were behemoths, a city neighborhood carved into a mountain. Even through my pain, I had difficultly processing that this wasn’t a dream. Here the Nabataeans also seemed to speak:

The Treasury? That’s nice, I guess, if you’re a one-year old. Honestly, you haven’t seen anything yet. Wait’ll you behold the Monastery. You have to climb a mile of stairs on a fucking donkey. Your eyes will think they’ve just freebased a rainbow. It’s seriously insane.

I felt weak. “I can’t,” I whispered. “My ear.”

Your ear? So what? Show some stamina. We certainly did. You think this place was easy to build? When will you ever be anywhere like this ever again? Look around. Catch any KFCs or Walmarts here? This is IT, chief. Suck it the fuck up.

I did look around. The path sloped downward into the far distance. I’d reached my pain threshold. I had a long, long journey back up to the ticket counter, and Wadi Musa, and hours upon hours of a Jordanian emergency room. There were no painkillers or antibiotics in the world of the Nabataeans. I steeled myself for their ghostly reply, but the buildings were silent.

They’d seen my type before. No stamina.

For more of Sam’s Middle Eastern shenanigans, give “Messiah Hunt” a look-see.