Jordan

Arrive at Queen Alia International and transfer into Amman, a city built across nineteen hills in pale limestone. The afternoon starts at the top: the Citadel on Jebel al-Qala'a, where the Temple of Hercules, an Umayyad palace and a Byzantine church stand on the same hill above the whole city, and where the Jordan Archaeological Museum holds the Ain Ghazal statues, among the oldest human figures ever made. Down to the Roman theatre in the old downtown, then Rainbow Street for dinner, and a first plate of mansaf or a very good mezze.

North through the olive hills of Gilead to Jerash, and a long morning in one of the most complete Roman cities in the world. Through Hadrian's Arch, past the hippodrome, into the oval forum with its ring of columns, then the length of the colonnaded cardo, chariot ruts and all, to the Temple of Artemis and the north theatre. In the afternoon, Ajloun Castle, the Ayyubid fortress Saladin's commanders built to watch the iron mines and the road to Damascus, with a view that on a clear day reaches the Jordan valley. Back to Amman for the night.

South to Madaba for the sixth-century mosaic map in the floor of St George's, the oldest surviving map of the Holy Land and still legible enough to find Jerusalem's cardo on. Then Mount Nebo, where Moses is said to have looked out over a land he would not enter, and the view still runs to the Dead Sea and beyond. In the afternoon the road drops, and keeps dropping, to four hundred and thirty metres below sea level: the rest of the day is the Dead Sea itself, the float, the black mud, and the sun going down behind the hills of the West Bank.

The old road south instead of the fast one, and worth every extra hour. Wadi Mujib first, a gorge of Grand Canyon proportions that the highway crosses on a long descent and climb. Then Kerak, the great Crusader castle on its ridge, with vaulted galleries and a keep looking out over the country Reynald of Châtillon terrorised until Saladin took it. In the late afternoon you reach Dana, a stone village on the edge of a cliff above a reserve that drops fifteen hundred metres to the Rift Valley, and stay there, with the whole gorge below the terrace at sunset.

Into Petra early, before the buses. The Siq takes twenty minutes on foot, a kilometre of gorge narrowing between two-hundred-metre walls with the Nabataean water channel still cut along the side, and then the Treasury appears in the gap the way it is supposed to. Beyond it the city opens: the Street of Facades, the theatre carved out of the rock, the Royal Tombs on the eastern cliff in the late morning light. In the afternoon, the eight hundred rock-cut steps up to Ad Deir, the Monastery, a facade fifty metres across on an empty summit.

The second day is the one most itineraries never have. It starts at Siq al-Barid, Little Petra, a miniature Nabataean suburb up the valley with a painted ceiling still visible in one of its biclinia. From there a walking route drops over the hills into the main site from behind, arriving above the Monastery in the morning cool with the ordinary crowd still an hour away below. Back down through the city, and for those who want it the climb to the High Place of Sacrifice, the best single view over the whole bowl. Evening free in Wadi Musa.

An hour south, the highlands stop and Wadi Rum begins. You transfer into open Bedouin 4WDs at the village and spend the afternoon crossing the valley: Lawrence's Spring on the flank of Jebel Rum, the Khazali canyon with Nabataean and Thamudic inscriptions cut into its walls, the red dunes below Jebel Umm Ulaydiyya, and the rock bridge at Umm Fruth for anyone who wants to climb it. Sunset is taken from high on a sandstone shoulder, and the night is at a Bedouin camp under the cliffs, with zarb out of the ground and a sky with nothing in the way of it.

Sunrise on the desert from camp, when the rock goes from grey to orange in about ten minutes, then breakfast and the drive north. The Desert Highway returns to Amman in about four hours, and we time it to your flight; if there is room in the day we stop at Shobak, the first Crusader castle in Jordan and the least visited, standing alone on its hill. Transfer to Queen Alia. Jordan pairs naturally with our Oman, Lebanon and Syria expeditions, and we are glad to sequence them.