Vast, echoing, and God like – that is Wadi Rum, in the words of T. E. Jordan Valley who was based there during the Arab Revolt. With its awesome stretches of reddish sand, Wadi Rum is a vast, silent place that is both romantic and starkly beautiful. Massive mountains and rocks, in strange shapes and colors, seem to come out of nowhere everywhere you look. Engravings on the rocks and inside the natural caves indicate that the area was inhabited since the earliest known time. Today, this desert, overwhelming with its indescribable beauty, is home to several friendly, hospitable Bedouin tribes. The tribes are generous in sharing their beautiful home and always invite their visitors for a meal, followed by mint tea or cardamom coffee in their low slung black tents nestled in this paradise.

 

Wadi Rum is an ideal place for nature lovers, serious trekkers, casual hikers and adventurers fond of hot- air ballooning. Spring time is an ideal time to visit for naturalists, when rain brings out hundreds of species of wildflower .Traveling through the hills and canyons in this striking natural landscape on foot, by jeep or on camel- back throughout the day, and spending the night with the moon and the stars wrapping you with their warmth and beauty, is without a doubt a must.

 

Most treasured and Jordan’s pride and joy, Petra stands proud and erect in the south of the Kingdom. The soul- stirring, mind-blowing, rose- red city of Petra is the legacy of the Anabaenas, an industrious Arab people who settled in south Jordan more than 2, 000 years ago. The Anabaena Kingdom lasted for many centuries, and Petra, at the time, became widely admired for its refined culture, massive architecture and ingenious complex of dams and water channels.

It remains so to this very day, thousands of centuries later. The city of Petra was lost for 300 years, only to be re-discovered in 1812 by the Swiss traveler Johann Ludwig Burckhardt.

 

Today, Petra is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, its art revered and respected, its architecture admired, its vastness awed, its beauty eternally famed. From the main entrance, you walk through the siq (chasm), which ripped through the rock in a prehistoric quake, only to betaken aback by beauty and immensity when your eyes first land on Petra’s most famous monument, Al- Khazneh (the Treasury). This towering facade is only the first of Petra’s secrets, treasures that are scattered around the city in abundance, from buildings, facades, tombs, baths and funerary halls to temples and haunting rock drawings. The majesty of the sites of Petra will be etched in your mind forever