The Perfect Jordan Trip

Travel Onion · 2:31

Five stops down one road. Jordan is about five hours end to end, and the whole trip runs north to south: Jerash, a Roman city flattened by an earthquake in 749 and left buried under sand until a German traveller walked into it in 1806 — the Dead Sea, the lowest exposed land on Earth at ~430m below sea level, still falling about a metre a year — Petra, reached through the Siq, a 1.2km crack in the rock that opens on the Treasury (which was never a treasury; it's a tomb, and the bullet marks on the urn are from people trying to shoot open a pharaoh's gold that was never there) — Wadi Rum, which has played Mars in The Martian and Arrakis in Dune — and Aqaba on the Red Sea, where you can be over coral by mid-morning. The people who carved Petra were desert traders who got rich on water: rock-cut cisterns, clay pipelines and flood dams, enough to keep forty thousand people alive somewhere it barely rains. Save this for the day you go. Follow for more places worth the trip. 📍 PLAN YOUR VISIT — JORDAN ✈️ Getting there: fly into Amman (Queen Alia), drive or hire a driver south, fly home from Aqaba so you don't backtrack — about a week