Week 59: Jordan

A week of beautiful landscapes, incredible desert hikes, gorging myself on Jordanian food, floating in the Dead Sea, and exploring ancient cities.

Posted on by Rowan Manning.
Tagged with HolidayFoodWalking

  • Jordan was amazing, I loved every minute of it.

  • We stayed in Amman briefly at the start of the trip and mostly ate a lot of delicious food. We visited the Citadel and the Roman Amphitheatre and walked around the city a lot.

    The columns of the ruined temple of Hercules

    • Jordanian food is Levantine and so most of what we ate was pretty familiar. It was all delicious, I don’t think I ate a single thing I didn’t like. I’m going to have to wean myself off of eating Hummus as part of all three meals.

    • I no longer want to drink coffee without cardamom.

  • We drove down to the Dead Sea for a night after Amman and relaxed in a fancy hotel. Floating in the sea is a weird sensation, I don’t think descriptions of it do it justice. We floated, we swam, we covered ourselves in mud, we ate and drank a lot.

    Outcrops of salty rock in the Dead Sea
    Salt crystals visible beneath the surface of the Dead Sea
    A view over a small bay with orange rocks on the other side

  • After the Dead Sea, we travelled to Petra. On the first day, we took the slightly less touristy route, starting at Little Petra and hiking through the mountains to reach Ad-Deir before people from the main entrance.

    • Nothing I’d seen online gives you the right sense of scale – Petra just goes on and on through so many different valleys. We spent an entire day wandering around, and I think the highlight was climbing up to the High Place of Sacrifice and being able to see most of Petra.

    • The second day we were pretty tired, we walked in via the main entrance to see The Treasury and walked up past the Royal Tombs which we missed on day one.

    The sun rising over a rock in the desert
    A view over canyons from the top of a mountain
    Ad-Deir, an intricate tomb carved into orange rock
    A view of the Treasury at Petra, through a narrow canyon
    Many houses cut into the sandstone at Petra
    Two people standing in the massive entrance of a tomb

  • After Petra we drove down to Wadi Rum, I didn’t think we’d top Petra but after staying in the desert for a couple of nights I think we did. It’s incredible, and again nothing quite describes the scale of it.

    • We stayed in one of the many Bedouin camps about a 20-minute drive from the closest road. Travelling around the desert was a lot of fun, sitting in the back of a flatbed truck. It would take me a long time to get bored of it.

    • On our only full day, we hired a driver for the day and went on some of the best hikes I’ve ever been on. We started with a tough but fun scramble up to the Burdah rock bridge, then a more gentle walk through Burrah canyon.

    A row of people climbing along a narrow ridge in a desert mountain
    Charlotte standing on a tall rock looking over the desert
    A view across miles of desert from the top of a mountain

  • We spent our last day driving back to Amman, having a few drinks, and chilling before our flight back.

  • We walked over 50 miles and 650 flights of stairs throughout the trip, I feel like all my hummus and flatbread eating was justified.