I visited Petra in June last year, 2007. It was my first trip to a Middle Eastern country as a tourist and I was en-route to Israel. The tour leader thought it might be a good experience to visit Petra in Jordan and so we made the plan to do that while we were still in Singapore.

Besides wanting to see Petra, there were two other reasons that we did not fly to Israel directly from Singapore. The first reason is money. We could save a few hundred dollars in American currency if we flew to Jordan from Singapore and then travelled by land to Israel. The other reason is time. We have time to visit Jordan in this trip and we thought that it would be exciting to see Petra.

Petra is a city of sandstone rock and granite and sand everywhere. The original inhabitants of Petra made their home in Jordan about 2000 years ago.

Jordan is a hot and dry country, nearly a desert! The day temperature hovers around forty-five degrees Celsius while the night temperature rarely drops below ten. It rarely rains in Jordan except in November and December each year and that is about all the natural water supply they get. The land is hot and usually the first wave of rain water evaporates into the sky as soon as it touches the ground. But after when ground is cooled and soaked, the rain water seeps into the soil and collects underneath the land, very much like the Artesian wells of Australia.

The Jordanians dig deep wells to reach this water source. Water is more important to them for survival than I can imagine because I have never experienced a water shortage in my life. Water is especially important in the Middle East because of the arid climate. A missed rainfall literally means life or death for the people of the land. It is no wonder that their kings in the past often conquered and overcame their enemies who retreated behind walled cities by capturing or poisoning the water supply. A city deprived of drinking water was a fallen city.

Jordan major cities are thriving today thanks to the engineering feats of recent years that have enabled Jordanian engineers to build huge underground reservoirs to hold water and supply the country's water needs. Even though I think the country does not have enough water for everybody beyond their basic needs for drinking and cleanliness, Jordan is still able to prosper and support her people with the little rainfall that they get yearly.

Beyond the needs of survival, water is also needed for agriculture and farming. I think Jordanians live in a constant state of semi-thirst. While I do not see Jordanian deprived of drinking water for days, I observed that use water carefully. Water is not used frivolous in their buildings for swimming pools or water faucets in shopping malls. It is too precious to waste it in luxury. The public toilets have modern pull-and-flush system, but the system often dispensed water grudgingly every time I made use of it. That made me think that at home our pull-and-flush system looks and feels like a fountain each time I use it.

While travelling across the land to Israel I saw small hills of phosphate, yellow and pungent. Our Jordanian guide, Omar, said that this chemical was a major export of their country. They mined it from the sand around. The phosphate miners of Jordan do not have to dig deep to reach the phosphate as much of it deposited on the surface soil. They just need to 'wash' the phosphate out of the sand. But herein lays the problem because washing needs water. To conserver water, the washing process makes use of discarded, recycled water collected from towns and cities. Not all dirty water is recyclable but much that is not too sallied will return into usage as second hand water. It is this second-hand water that is used to wash the phosphate from the sand.

Phosphate miners farm the phosphate through evaporation. A phosphate farm is a simple mining setup. These farms are usually located on the outskirt of towns with a sufficient supply of second hand water. The farms consist mainly of ponds where the recycled water is mixed with fresh sand. The sand in the mixture sinks to the bottom while the phosphate dissolves in the water. Each pond is usually circular shape and about four meters across the diameter. The water that covers the pond is usually blackish. I did not have the chance to measure the depth of a pond.

When a pond is filled up with water, workers will dump sand in. I didn't investigate what proportion of water and sand goes into the mix. When enough sand and water have been mixed, the pond of mixture is left exposed in the sun for days to evaporate the water to let it thickens into mud with phosphate deposit. The mud is allowed to dry further until its texture hardens to the point when the miners are able to cut it into bricks for transporting to the factories for purifying the phosphate. In the factories the phosphate is separated and purified of impurities. The phosphate is then dumped aside, forming little phosphate hill along road sides along factories that lie around the country. The miners are not concern about rain as the weather is dry enough throughout many months each year. The whole process does not need a lot of electrical power except during purification.

The Jordanians are clever people. They harvest the sand and sun abundantly available in their country to create a phosphate industry in the world to supply to countries for fertilizer production. This mode of mineral extraction by evaporation is an ancient method, but it is still interesting to see the process for myself.