Jordan: Petra, Wadi Rum and the Dead Sea

Jordan is a country you walk through in colours. It starts ochre and grey in Amman, turns the impossible rose of carved sandstone in Petra, deepens to burnt red in the dunes of Wadi Rum, and finally goes a pale, mineral turquoise at the lowest point on Earth. I came for the desert and the old stones, and I left with sand in my boots, salt in my hair, and the strange memory of having floated, alone, on water that wouldn't let me sink.

My route was a straight line south and down: a day or two in Amman to find my feet, then Petra, then a night under the stars in Wadi Rum, and finally a slow descent to the Dead Sea before doubling back. A Jordan Pass in my phone covered the visa and the entry to Petra in one go, the dinars came out of an Amman cash machine, and the rest I figured out as I went — which, in a country this kind to travellers, turned out to be easy.

Amman, and the long walk into Petra

Amman is a city of hills and pale stone, and it doesn't hand you its sights on a plate — you climb to them. Up on the Citadel I stood among Roman columns with the whole white sprawl of the city below, and that evening I sat in the great Roman theatre carved into the hillside, listening to the call to prayer roll across the rooftops. The connection here was honestly excellent: I booked my onward transport, read up on Jerash — the astonishingly intact Greco-Roman city an hour north, all colonnaded streets and a hippodrome — and pinned my Petra hotel without a single dropped signal.

But Petra is the heart of it, and Petra makes you earn the reveal. You enter through the Siq, a crack in the mountains barely wide enough for a chariot, walls rising some eighty metres on either side, twisting and narrowing until you're sure it can't go on. And then it does the thing it has done to every traveller for two thousand years: the rock parts, and through the gap you catch a sliver of rose-pink columns. Another step, and the Treasury — Al-Khazneh — stands there whole, an entire temple facade carved straight into the cliff by the Nabataeans, glowing in the morning light. I'd seen a hundred photos. None of them prepared me.

« You walk through a crack in the world, and a temple is waiting on the other side. That's Petra. »

Practically, Petra is a place where you'll want your phone working, and mostly it is. I'd booked Petra by Night online the evening before — the Siq and the Treasury lit by hundreds of candles, which is worth every dinar — and used data inside the site to find the path up to the Monastery, Ad-Deir, eight hundred-odd steps above the valley floor. Coverage held across the main trails; it thinned in the deepest, highest corners of the ruins, but never long enough to leave me stranded. Having an eSIM live from the moment I landed meant the Jordan Pass, the booking, and the maps were all just there.

A night in Wadi Rum

From Petra the land empties out, and Wadi Rum begins — a desert of red sand and towering sandstone islands that rise straight out of the flat like the bones of something enormous. This is Lawrence of Arabia country, and it's where half the films set on Mars come to be shot, because nowhere on Earth looks more like another planet. I climbed into the back of a battered pickup with a Bedouin driver who knew every dune by name, and we spent the afternoon bouncing between rock arches and canyons while the light turned everything to copper.

Here is where the honesty comes in, because this is the part of the trip where the phone goes quiet. In the deep desert there are wide white zones, and you should plan for them. The Bedouin camps usually have a pocket of signal — enough to send a photo or a goodnight message — but between them you're often offline, and that's exactly as it should be. The crucial thing is to tell your camp when you're arriving while you still have bars, so someone is expecting you when the road runs out. I did, then I let the desert take the phone out of my hands. That night, lying on a mattress dragged outside the tent, I watched more stars come out than I knew the sky could hold, with nothing to do but look.

Floating at the bottom of the world

Then the long drop to the Dead Sea — and it really is a drop, down to roughly 430 metres below sea level, the lowest dry land on the planet. The air gets thick and warm, the sea sits flat and silver, and you wade in not quite believing what's about to happen. You can't sink. You lie back and the water simply holds you, bobbing you like a cork, so buoyant it feels faintly absurd to fight it. People coat themselves in the dark mineral mud and stand on the shore drying into grey statues, laughing. I floated on my back, arms out, the salt stinging every small cut I didn't know I had, and grinned at the sky like an idiot.

What I take away

Jordan gave me a country I could read like a story, beginning to end: the patient ruins of Amman and Jerash, the gasp of the Treasury at the end of the Siq, a starlit night in the reddest desert I've ever seen, and finally that weightless, salt-bright hour on the Dead Sea. It's a place that is genuinely safe and genuinely warm to strangers, where the signal carries you between the sites and then steps politely aside the moment the desert asks for your full attention. I'd go back tomorrow, and I'd still tell my camp what time I'm coming.

— Malik, salt on my skin and red dust in my boots, looking up.