Tending to his camels in Petra, Jordan’s spectacular archeological marvel hidden deep in a desert canyon, Hussein Bdoul is all smiles: The tourists are back.
After years in which the COVID-19 pandemic turned the storied “Rose City” into a ghost town, the father of seven is back at work, offering visitors rides on his decorated animals.
“Tourism has returned and the numbers are even greater,” said Bdoul, 35, wearing Bedouin garb with a red keffiyeh over his long black hair, reflecting on a resurgence last year.
Photo: AFP
“At the time of the coronavirus pandemic, we did not see anyone in Petra,” Bdoul said, adding that it was a disaster for the town where “90 percent of people work in tourism.”
Jordan tourism authorities said that Petra is back in business and drew 900,000 visitors last year, close to the record of one million set in 2019.
Jordan received 4.6 million visitors last year — almost four times the level from 2020 — earning the country US$5.3 billion.
Top draw Petra, famous for its stunning temples hewn out of the rose-pink cliffs, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and was chosen as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World in a 2007 online poll.
It was built in 312 BC as the capital of the ancient Arab kingdom of the Nabataeans, which fell to the Romans in 106 BC.
“This place and the colors are incredible,” marveled French student Alia, 16, taking a break from exploring with her mother to check out a souvenir stand.
About 1,700 people make a living from Petra as tour guides, trinket sellers or by taking visitors through the site on donkeys, horses, camels or electric buggies.
“We breathed a sigh of relief when we saw the return of tourists,” said Muhammad Samahin, 16, selling drinks while sat on woven rugs inside the Moon Cave near the famed Treasury site.
Petra Development and Tourism Regional Authority head Suleiman Farajat said the post-pandemic tourism comeback had exceeded all expectations.
At the height of the pandemic, “there were days when there were no tourists” in Petra, located 230km south of the capital, Amman.
The recovery was helped by official promotional campaigns in new overseas markets, low-cost airline flights and new hotel rooms, Farajat said.
Petra has 4,000 rooms, and permits have been granted for three new five-star hotels, so capacity would soon almost double from 2019, he said.
“If things continue this way, we may reach, during the next three to four years, the threshold of two million tourists in Petra” every year, he added.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS