Nothing had prepared Lawrence of Arabia for the stunning view that unfolded in front of his eyes as he slowly emerged from the cool shadows of As-Siq, an eight hundred meter-long narrow gorge in a rock two hundred meters deep, into the blinding sunshine. In front of him rose the majestic Al-Khazeneh, the Hellenistic royal tomb of the Nabataean king Aretas III.

A modern traveler may well feel like Lawrence of Arabia, T. E. Lawrence, who visited Petra, the Lost City of Stone, during the First Word War, or a latter day Indiana Jones in the 1989 feature film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade that was filmed on location there. The sight of Al-Khazeneh framed between the walls of As-Siq is breathtakingly beautiful.

This magnificent spell is abruptly shattered when you emerge from the rock cleft to an opening in front of the royal tomb. On the left is a ramshackle bazaar selling dust-covered knickknacks, crisps, and ice-cold soft drinks. Young Bedouin boys implore you to take a ride in an 'air-conditioned taxi', a poor donkey, for a negotiable five dinars, or about three pounds, while their sisters try selling you pink rock chippings for one dinar a bag.

Located near the Jordan Rift Valley at the crossroads of ancient trade routes, Petra was once an influential and prosperous commercial centre of antiquity. The Nabataens, Arabs who dominated the Trans-Jordan area and controlled the frankincense trade routes in pre-Roman times, chose their city as a place concealed from the outside world and made it has since become one of the Middle East's most memorable architectural sites.

The forbidding mountain range in the desert was transformed by the Nabataens into a bustling metropolis of antiquity with monumental tombs carved directly into red, iron-rich sandstone and 800 other structures including temples, burial chambers, funerary banquet halls and amphitheatres. Petra prospered from the first century B.C. through the third century A.D. A massive earthquake in 363 A.D. destroyed much of the city's infrastructure and gradually, combined with the political and religious changes in the ancient world, Petra was abandoned in the seventh century A.D. The city remained hidden to the world until 1812, when Johan Ludwig Burckhardt, a Swiss explorer, rediscovered it. The mystery and splendour of the rock-carved architectural ruins and the beautiful pink coloured cliffs have fascinated pilgrims, artists and travelers ever since.

Today, Petra is the most important and well-known tourist attraction in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. In 2005, over 390,000 tourists, 80 percent of them foreigners, visited Petra. According to David Syms of the Jordanian Tourist Bureau in London, the number of visitors is expected to reach 500,000 annually.

Wadi Musa, the nearest town to the site is wholly dependent on the tourist trade. The town and the surrounding area of the Petra National Park has 60 hotels and guest houses including luxury resorts and international chains such as Movenpick and Marriott.

Concerned about the influx of tourists and the uncontrolled growth of Wadi Musa, Queen Noor of Jordan, sounded the alarm as early as the 1990's. With appeals to UNESCO, which had included Petra on its World Heritage List in 1985, a management plan for the 900 square-kilometer Petra National Park was developed. The plan, overseen by the Petra Regional Planning Council, included a number of measures and initiatives covering the conservation and restoration of monuments, site development, infrastructure improvement, charting a future for the area's 30,000 inhabitants, and protection of the environment.

Jordan is not rich in natural resources and tourism is a vital source of foreign currency and employment. Tourism accounts for earnings of nearly one billion dollars a year, and in 2005 it directly employed over 29,000 people, in a country of 5.6 million inhabitants. It is not surprising, therefore, that restoration and conservation efforts often clash with pressure from tourism. It is bad for the tourism business to have scaffolding up for protracted periods at key sites such as Petra.

Commercial pressures for quick fixes have resulted in the undertaking of some controversial projects such as the excavation of the ancient pavement in As-Siq with a bulldozer and without archeological supervision, the coating of unpaved surfaces in the gorge with a powdery substance that has spread to the walls of As-Siq, masking the rock's colours, a botched drainage system, and the application of sprays onto the monuments that prevent the stone from breathing.

Another headache for conservationists is what to do with the Bduls, Bedouin who lived in the ruins of Petra until 1985. They were expelled and rehoused in the village of Oum Seyhoun on the edge of the archeological park. They earn a living from tourism renting horses, camels, and donkeys and selling souvenir trinkets within the Petra site. The tribe has continued to grow as the tourism boom has attracted newcomers from the Aqaba region in the south. In a country where 30% of the population lives under poverty line, it is said that a donkey can feed a family. It is therefore not surprising that donkeys are a prominent feature in Petra!

Efforts have been made to group souvenir sellers to the more open and wider parts of the site. Restrictions have also been imposed on horses and donkeys traveling through the congested gorge. Despite their best efforts to control the business activities of the Bduls, a recent visit to Petra confirmed that this battle, at least, is being lost. The Bduls are friendly and hospitable, and they will not disappear, so you might as well enjoy a ride on one of the family breadwinners.

The inevitable fact is that in today's world of global tourism, commercial interest groups and proponents of conservation and preservation will always end up with conflicting aims. To Jordan's credit, a country that did not have a local tradition in site preservation until recently has made a real effort to put conservation on the agenda, even though Petra is a major attraction for tourism. Petra has been cleaned up, all new building activity has to be approved by the Petra Regional Planning Council and there is very indication that hard lessons have been learned from quick archeological fixes.

Lawrence of Arabia in his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom calls Petra the 'Brilliant Petra'. And it is brilliant, a glorious ancient city of pink stone with its own fleet of 'air-conditioned taxis'.