Petra’s Treasury
Why this is the first thing I do every time I land in Jordan.
Read MoreWadi Rum overnight camp
A closer look at one of Jordan's most rewarding experiences.
Read MoreFloating in the Dead Sea
Where to go next once you have seen the headline sights of Jordan.
Read MoreJordan gave me Petra, which is reason enough on its own, but the country holds far more than its most famous site. I rode a camel past Wadi Rum’s red dunes and granite outcrops under a sky so clear it looked artificial, and floated, weightless with salt, in the Dead Sea an hour from Amman’s hillside neighbourhoods. Jordanian hospitality has a specific texture — endless cups of sweetened tea, mansaf served communally from a shared platter, genuine curiosity about where I’d come from — that made the country feel welcoming well beyond its monuments. Amman itself, a modern capital layered over Roman ruins, moves at an easier pace than most Middle Eastern capitals, and makes an unhurried base for exploring everything the desert holds further south.
Chapter One
Petra, twice over
Walking the Siq, the narrow rose-walled canyon that leads into Petra, and watching the Treasury’s carved facade emerge in a sliver of framed light, is one of the genuine great arrivals in travel, and no photograph prepares you for the actual scale of it. I stayed two full days rather than the usual rushed single visit, which let me reach the Monastery, an hour’s climb above the main site, in near solitude, and return to the Treasury at night for the candlelit performance held several evenings a week, Bedouin music echoing off the canyon walls. Petra by Night is touristic by nature, but the acoustics of the Siq in darkness make it worth the ticket regardless.
“Petra earns its cliché of a lost city by the simple fact of still being found, again, every single morning.”
Chapter Two
Desert and sea
Wadi Rum’s otherworldly landscape — the same red sand and towering rock that stood in for Mars in more than one film — is best experienced overnight in a Bedouin camp, watching the temperature drop and the stars multiply with no light pollution for miles. A local guide drove me by jeep to Khazali Canyon’s ancient Nabataean inscriptions and up a dune for sunset before dinner cooked in a zarb, an underground oven. From there, the drive down to Aqaba on the Red Sea offers easy coral diving, and the Dead Sea’s northern shore, reachable within a couple of hours of Amman, rounds out a country that moves between desert, mountain, and sea with remarkable speed.
The Short List
Do not miss in Jordan
At a glance
Jordan in numbers
- Capital
- Amman
- Language
- Arabic
- Currency
- Jordanian dinar
- Best time
- March to May and September to November, mild across the desert
Did you know
Petra was carved directly into sandstone cliffs by the Nabataeans over two thousand years ago and remained largely unknown to the Western world until 1812.