>>3159134I should say it's fair game outside of the areas of high tourism. I just basically walked off into a random valley for a few hours and wound up on top of an overlook with a great view and then found out there had been a set of stairs on the other side, and my intense scrabble was being watched by Bedouins from above the whole time. Pretty stoked/struck by how stupid I am when they told another guide and he was surprised I made it. "Dude, not even all the Bedouins could figure that one out" Not to say he isn't reading that off a cuecard.
USAID funds a lot of these sorts of places and insists on strict management to prevent extreme degradation due to hyper-tourism. That being said, it is sandstone, and you can literally rub the walls down by hand. Preservation/Prevention of loss was the whole center piece to the story I went there for, I'm not a total idiot, just 50-50.
>>3159165The biggest issue with Petra is not only the tourism, which has exploded since it was named a new World Wonder, but also increasingly detrimental weather patterns. Wind and hard winters do lots of damage, with the cold cracking the hard shell and revealing the inner sandstone to harsh winds.
Palestine was a continuation of my border project in Northern Ireland.
