There are trips you plan carefully and there are trips that unfold one surprising day at a time. This one was firmly in the second category.
Eight days riding across Jordan took us from the depths of the Dead Sea to Crusader castles, Roman roads, Nabataean trade routes and finally down to the Red Sea. Along the way we rode gravel that tried to throw us off, sand that swallowed our wheels, and tarmac that seemed to go on forever.
We also drank a lot of coffee.
Day One – Out of Amman and Into the Chaos
We rolled out of Amman into a storm of movement. Not aggressive, not hostile, just… kinetic. Cars everywhere. Scooters threading through gaps that barely exist. Horns as punctuation, not protest. And somehow, amid the swirl, it all works.
Drivers here are remarkably polite. A nod. A wave. Space given where none appears available. You brace for chaos and instead find choreography.
The streets we passed through felt like open-air workshops. Entire neighbourhoods dedicated to mechanical resurrection. Cars long past their supposed retirement being rebuilt with parts from other cars equally past theirs. Bonnet lids stacked like fallen shields. Engines disassembled on cardboard. Sparks flying. Life happening at pavement level.
It’s lively in a way that refuses to be ignored. Kids sprinting between doorways. Traders calling out. Everyone curious. Everyone smiling. We’re a novelty and they’re delighted by it.
Money stretches surprisingly far here. Tea, snacks, supplies – all easier on the wallet than expected. Except for one loss: a banana. Lifted straight off the bike by a grinning young opportunist. A cheerful scamp rather than a hardened criminal. Fair play. It was a good banana.
The Red Sea Gamble
Mid-morning we made an off-the-cuff decision: head for the Red Sea.
On paper it sounded romantic. In reality, the gravel track that pointed us “almost” toward the Dead Sea was something else entirely. Calling it technical is like calling a sandstorm breezy.
Loose rock. Steep pitches. Lines that vanished just as you committed to them. At points it felt less like riding and more like negotiating terms with gravity. The kind of terrain that forces you to stay present or get acquainted with it face-first.
Then, suddenly, tarmac. Fresh. Immaculate. Someone has spent serious money laying this ribbon across the landscape. And not a single car on it.
We dropped into aero instinctively and shot downhill like schoolboys who’ve just heard the last bell. Fast, empty road. Salt air creeping in. The promise of cold drinks and beach bars shimmering ahead.
Except.
Ramadan.
Every café closed in daylight. Shutters down. No iced bottles waiting in fridges. No shaded beach bar salvation. We’d imagined a lazy camp by the water, toes in sand, bikes resting beside us.
Instead, the Red Sea gave us horizon, silence and the Promised land shimmering beyond the haze.
Dinner & The Lay-By Plan
We finished the day with something resembling Kentucky Fried Chicken, though clearly not Kentucky and not quite chicken as the Colonel intended. It was hot, salty and deeply appreciated.
Tonight’s accommodation may well be a roadside lay-by. Gravel shoulder. Passing lorries. Stars overhead.
Not exactly seaside luxury.
But day one was never going to be tidy.
It was traffic and laughter. Stolen fruit. Terrifying gravel. A road built for speed. Closed cafés. And the reminder that plans are soft things, easily bent by landscape, culture and timing.
We’ll try the seaside camp another day.
For now, we sleep where we land.
Day Two: Below Sea Level to Saladin’s Shadow
Trippin’ Jordan – Field Notes
We rolled away from the Dead Sea at minus 260 metres. Below sea level. Below reason, almost. The air thick, the horizon already tilting upward.
And then we climbed.
Climbed and climbed and climbed.
Jordan does not ease you into elevation. It simply presents a wall and waits.
Somewhere halfway toward Karak Castle we stopped at a petrol station
perched on the hillside. It had a one‑star Google review accusing it of ripping people off.
It was also the only option.
Inside we had our first proper Turkish coffee of the trip. Thick, dark, laced with cardamom and cloves. Strong enough to resurrect a tired cyclist.
Fuel before Crusaders.
The Castle on the Edge
Perched above the valley sits Karak Castle. Not “Correct Castle.” Though after that ascent, it felt spiritually correct.
A local stopped us on the roadside and, with the quiet authority of someone who grew up in its shadow, told us that Saladin besieged it for two years. Two years. Starved everyone inside.
Standing there, you understand why it was worth starving for. The location is absurdly strong. Commanding views in every direction. Wind that seems to report news from miles away. You could see an army coming long before they saw you.
Except it isn’t quite the top.
Because, of course, there’s another hill.
Descent With Consequences
From the higher ridge, the gravel dropped away into a long, technical descent. The kind of track that whispers, go on then… and then immediately punishes overconfidence.
You can’t just let it run. Lines shift. Rocks roll. Corners tighten when you expect them to open. It’s riding that demands negotiation rather than aggression.
Recent rains had taken a bite out of the road entirely. At one point the “trail” simply ended in a suggestion of where it used to be. So we shouldered bikes and embraced serious hike-a-bike. Not the token twenty paces variety. The committed, calf-burning, why-do-we-do-this variety.
Eventually gravity relented and we hit tarmac again. Fresh, smooth, almost decadent after the chaos above.
The Dogs
Now. The dogs.
Not wild dogs exactly. Herd dogs. Guard dogs. Sheep-defending, territory-owning, deeply committed professionals.
You’ll be grinding uphill and suddenly the horizon explodes into barking. Packs of them sprinting toward you from the flock. Dust flying. Teeth visible. Pete absolutely hates dogs. Really hates them. The look on his face could power a small turbine.
The first encounter was mildly alarming.
By the third, we had a system.
You stare them. And you bark back.
Louder than them.
Proper, theatrical barking. Arms out. Big voice. Total nonsense energy.
They bark.
You bark louder.
And then, astonishingly, they back off. Retreating with all the confidence of animals that absolutely did not expect the bicycles to shout.
We have learned that volume is authority.
Pete is still unconvinced.
The Longest Climb in Jordan
Then came the big one.
The longest climb in Jordan.
It goes on in that quiet, relentless way. No drama. Just gradient and time. We settled into rhythm and ticked it off metre by metre.
And for the record, I am currently the sixth fastest person in the world up it.
Take that.
There may have been limited global competition. Details are irrelevant.
Petra… Not Quite
We’d planned to reach Petra by nightfall.
We did not reach Petra.
Light faded, options dwindled, and once again camping proved elusive. So we checked into one of the slightly seedy roadside hotels that dot the highways. The sort with flickering lighting and carpets that have stories.
But it’s warm.
It’s dry.
It’s got a shower that functions with intent.
Tomorrow, Petra. Probably.
Today was altitude, stone fortresses, washed-out roads and an ego briefly inflated by a Strava segment that may never see meaningful traffic.
Jordan continues to offer no easy days.
Which is precisely the point.
Day Three: Goats, Wadis & The Smart Hotel Shock
Another Crusader castle appeared on the horizon.
Jordan seems to scatter them across hilltops like chess pieces. We climbed again, though mercifully not with the savage intent of the previous day. The legs are learning their place now.
The scenery kept widening as we rode. Big skies. Long horizons. That desert palette of ochre, rust and pale green stitched together with stone.
We were riding through serious country — the high ground east of the Dead Sea, the old Mountains of Moab. Even the name sounds like it should come with footnotes in a leather-bound book.
There’s something faintly biblical about the terrain. Wide skies. Stone ridges. Valleys that feel older than language. You half expect a prophet to stride over the horizon carrying instructions.
Dana & The Edge of the Wadi
We skirted Dana Biosphere Reserve, a vast protected wadi system that drops away into something that feels biblical in scale.
The cliffs fall in great folds. Light moves across them like a slow tide. It’s genuinely beautiful. The kind of landscape that makes you stop pedalling without deciding to.
What struck us most, though, wasn’t just the reserve itself.
It was what sat just outside it.
The Sheep Economy
You are never alone in rural Jordan.
No matter how empty the map looks, within 200 yards there will be a small boy and what appears to be two thousand sheep and goats.
The numbers may be exaggerated. The feeling is not.
Herders everywhere. Dogs orbiting the flocks. Goats spread across hillsides that, to the untrained eye, offer absolutely nothing to eat. It’s technically the wet season. The ground is bone dry. Scrub and thorn. A few stubborn tufts of green.
What these goats survive on in the summer is anyone’s guess. Optimism? Minerals? Pure willpower?
The scale of it is extraordinary. Agriculture here isn’t neat rectangles and machinery. It’s movement. It’s shepherds on ridgelines and flocks flowing like water across rock.
We never felt more than a few minutes from human presence, even in terrain that looks empty from a distance.
Petra & The Tourism Portal
And then, as if someone flicked a switch, we rolled into Petra.
The contrast is astonishing.
Rural Jordan fades and global tourism steps forward. Coaches. Guides with flags. Boutique hotels. Wi-Fi passwords that almost work first time.
We checked into a distinctly smart hotel. Crisp sheets. Proper lighting. A lobby that smells intentional.
Three days ago we were bargaining for snacks and having bananas stolen. Last night was a roadside room of questionable charm. Tonight is polished stone floors and breakfast buffets.
Jordan does this brilliantly. It lets you travel through raw, working landscapes and then deposits you into one of the most famous archaeological sites on earth without so much as a narrative warning.
From goats and wadis to global tourism in a single afternoon.
Let’s see what tomorrow throws at us.
Day Four: Cloud, Coffee & The End of the World
Rest day. Allegedly.
We woke late in Petra to low cloud and drizzle. The mountains were wrapped in mist. It looked uncannily like Wales. Not a hint of cinematic desert. Just grey folds of rock disappearing into weather.
By mid-morning the clouds lifted as if someone had drawn back a theatre curtain. The sandstone began to glow again. Petra revealed its proper colours.
There’s a bit of bureaucracy at the entrance. Tickets, checks, mild faff. Then you enter the Siq.
The canyon narrows. The air cools. You turn a final bend and the Treasury appears.
The Al-Khazneh is better than the photographs. And I have taken many. Even under shifting cloud it feels theatrical. Carved stone that somehow reads as lace.
We wandered deep into the site. You can clamber almost anywhere. Tombs, temples, façades carved into cliff faces all over the shop. It feels less like a single monument and more like a city half-swallowed by time.
Up to the Monastery
At the far end a sign beckoned: Come to the End of the World.
That is irresistible.
So we climbed. Hundreds of steps. Donkey drivers offering transport. Camels blinking patiently. The drivers themselves looked faintly piratical. Long black hair. Smudged kohl around the eyes. Lean, watchful, a touch of Jack Sparrow about the lot of them.
We walked.
At the top sits the Monastery, vast and improbable.
Nearby, a tea shack perched on the edge of the world. It overlooks the valley westward, across the ridges toward the West Bank. A Bedouin tribesman poured us cardamom coffee and told stories that felt best absorbed slowly, with the coffee and the faint whiff of an illicit cigarette curling into the mountain air.
From there you can see toward Jebel Haroun, linked to the tomb of Aaron. This is Moab country. Old Testament terrain. Landscape with theology embedded in the rock.
Inside the caves, enterprise thrives. One woman had transformed a hollowed chamber into something almost domestic. Carpets layered across the stone floor. A small fire flickering. Bottles of perfume and incense arranged carefully. It brought the caves to life in a way that felt both theatrical and practical.
There are cats everywhere. Lean, self-possessed, utterly at home among the ruins. I liked the cats very much.
The Last Out
Because we began late, we ended late.
By late afternoon the crowds thinned. The light softened. We walked back through the Siq almost alone, stone walls echoing only our footsteps.
Petra in clearing cloud. Petra without the press of tour groups. Petra breathing.
If you are wondering whether to go.
Go.
It does not disappoint.
Day Five: Trade Routes & Stars Over the Desert
Petra does not let you leave gently.
It begins with a sharp slap of tarmac. A steep little wake-up climb straight out of town, followed by a 20 kilometre grind that simply refuses to end. Not savage, just relentless. The sort of uphill that quietly rearranges your mood.
There was a moment of shared gloom. A brief emotional dip somewhere around kilometre twelve. But you keep pedalling.
And then you arrive at what a sign confidently declared to be the Second Best View in the World.
Bold claim.
A large, beaming man appeared with tea, coffee and a heroic quantity of biscuits. Hospitality at altitude. Spirits restored immediately. If it’s the second best view, it’s doing very well.
Back to the Rough Stuff
Up until now it’s been goats and donkeys. Herds spilling over hillsides. Boys and dogs orbiting them.
Somewhere south of Petra, that changed.
The donkeys gave way to camels.
And just like that, it felt as though we’d crossed an invisible line. The landscape altered. Broader. Flatter. More open. The rock changed colour. The air felt drier. The scale increased.
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact kilometre, but we had clearly moved south into a different Jordan. The Mountains of Moab fading behind us, the deeper desert asserting itself.
Following the Caravans
A plateau of sandy tracks and wandering wadis. Wide space. Big silence. We were tracing what was once the Via Nova Traiana, Trajan’s New Road. A Roman artery built in the 2nd century AD to link the Red Sea to Syria. It formalised and paved over what was already a Nabataean trade route. Empire does love upgrading infrastructure.
The fort still shows its bones. Nearby, a Byzantine church. Layers of civilisation stacked neatly in one windswept location. Nabataean trade. Roman road. Byzantine faith. Us, wobbling through on gravel bikes.
Out here, history isn’t behind glass. It’s scattered across the ground.
From there we pushed across open desert until the modern world reappeared in the form of the Desert Highway. Vast. Engineered. Unsubtle.
At its edge sat a rather grim town.
And it was Ramadan.
Finding food became a minor expedition. Shuttered cafés. Closed doors. That creeping combination of hunger and frustration. Eventually, though, salvation arrived in the form of a Ramadan meal: chicken and rice, simple and excellent. Worth the search.
Sleeping Under Rock & Sky
We left the town and slipped back into the quiet.
Tonight’s accommodation: a patch of desert beneath a protective rock outcrop overlooking the valley. No walls. No ceiling. Just stars, sharp and bright above us.
The wind low. The bikes resting on their sides. The desert finally still.
Remove the mild pre-dinner despair and it has been another exceptional day.
Climbs, biscuits, ancient trade routes, Roman ruins, Ramadan meals, and a bed under a sky full of light.
The shift from goats to camels feels symbolic somehow. As if we’ve crossed not just geography but atmosphere. North to south. Hill country to deep desert.
Jordan continues to deliver.
Day Six: Railways, Sand & Wadi Rum
We began by following what could generously be described as paths. Barely decipherable tracks threading between rock and scrub. At some point the road simply became suggestion. It drifted through abandoned fields, old stone boundaries, hints that something once grew here.
Then it just… stopped.
No drama. No sign. Just absence.
In the distance we spotted a truck. Civilisation by way of diesel. We aimed for it and eventually popped out onto a completely deserted multi-lane highway slicing across the desert. Four lanes. street lights. Proper infrastructure.
And almost no traffic.
Sand was already reclaiming sections of it. The wind drawing pale drifts across immaculate tarmac. A road built for a future that hasn’t fully arrived yet.
Lawrence Territory
Not far along we reached a small railway station and there it was: a steam train sitting in the desert.
This is Hejaz Railway country. Lawrence of Arabia territory. Twice a week they stage a re-enactment of the famous ambush. Explosions. Bedouin riders. Drama in the dunes.
Employment, spectacle, a bit of legend kept warm.
At the café next door the owner explained with a smile:
His son sits on the train with a machine gun.
His brother rides the horse.
The son shoots at the uncle.
He told this with complete normality. Practical desert economics. Everyone gets a job. Everyone participates in the legend. It made me laugh more than it probably should have.
From Trajan’s road to Lawrence’s railway in twenty-four hours. The desert does continuity very well.
Motorway to Mars
From there we found ourselves on a brand-new motorway, complete with a cycle lane, in the middle of nowhere.
It felt faintly absurd.
After days of barely-there tracks and ancient corridors, we were pedalling down pristine asphalt with painted lines and signage. Progress in fluorescent paint.
Eventually the tarmac delivered us to Wadi Rum.
Wadi Rum is extraordinary. Sandstone towers rising out of red desert like something sketched by a bored deity.
And yet it’s busy. Really busy. Coaches, jeeps, tourists in flowing garments for photographs. We had to show passports to enter, which felt oddly formal for a desert.
Cafés were open in the middle of the day despite Ramadan. By now we’ve learned that tourist gravity bends certain rules.
Learning to Read Sand
When the road finally ended, we were in proper sand.
Not gravel. Not rocky desert. Sand.
We discovered that riding sand is less about strength and more about literacy. You learn to read it. Some sections hold you. Some swallow you whole. The colour shifts slightly. The texture changes. If you pick right, you glide. If you pick wrong, you dismount abruptly.
There were moments of elegance.
There were moments of pushing.
Fabric & Fire
Tonight we are not under a rock.
We’re in a faux Bedouin tent. Heavy fabric. Carpets layered thick. Cushions everywhere. It’s theatrical and comfortable in equal measure.
Dinner was traditional and generous. Afterwards we played parlour games with a loose coalition of international tourists who seemed equally delighted and bewildered by the setting.
It is also absolutely freezing.
The desert does that. Heat by day, teeth-chatter by night.
For once, I am very grateful not to be sleeping outside.
From abandoned paths to steam trains, motorways to sand literacy.
Day six has range.
Day Seven: From Sand to Sea
Trippin’ Jordan – Field Notes
Still reading? Good.
We woke to a grey desert. Low cloud again. Cold. Proper cold. The sort that creeps into your fingers while you’re packing bags.
Breakfast was described as traditional Bedouin. Flatbread, eggs, olives. And, slightly incongruously, dairy cheese triangles. I am not entirely certain where processed foil-wrapped cheese sits in ancient nomadic culture, but there it was, glowing softly in the morning gloom.
Back Into the Sand
We rolled back out into Wadi Rum under heavy sky.
The sand was harder work today. The further we pushed away from the tourist core and back into the wilderness, the softer and more punishing it became. We followed the line of a wadi, effectively riding down what becomes a river when rain remembers this place.
Sand riding is charming for about an hour.
After several, it becomes negotiation. Momentum management. Front wheel diplomacy. By the time we turned toward a rather bleak little town, both of us were quietly relieved to see tarmac reappear.
The desert had won enough small victories for one week.
Quarry & Motorway
We officially left the Wadi Rum Protected Area and rolled past an enormous industrial quarry gouged into the landscape. A reminder that even dramatic scenery has a supply chain.
Then we hit the motorway.
Not busy, but busy enough. The trucks were… educational. Large, fast, and close enough to rearrange your perspective. After days of solitude, the scale and speed felt like a shock to the nervous system.
But the road tilted down.
And it stayed down.
A long, fabulous descent that carried us all the way to the sea.
Aqaba: Four Borders, One Horizon
We rolled into Aqaba by the Red Sea.
It’s one of the strangest geographical corners on earth. In this small sweep of coastline you have Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Egypt, each with a town clustered around the same water. Borders layered into a single horizon.
After a week of castles, wadis and caravan routes, civilisation reasserted itself with force.
Lunch was at McDonald’s. The only place open. Western arches glowing in the Middle East. It felt absurd and entirely practical at the same time.
Dinner was Chinese.
The contrast with the week behind us could not have been sharper.
Day Eight — Philadelphia and the Journey Home
Our final day began back in Amman, legs tired and bags half-packed.
Before heading to the airport we rode up to the Citadel to stretch the legs one last time. The ruins sit high above the city — columns of the Temple of Hercules standing against the skyline while modern Amman spills across the surrounding hills.
In Roman times the city was called Philadelphia, which felt oddly appropriate after a week riding through so many layers of civilisation. Nabataeans, Romans, Crusaders, Ottomans, modern Jordan — history here stacks itself one era on top of another.
Earlier that morning we’d briefly entertained the idea of a symbolic final spin, riding from the Israeli border to the Saudi border. It seemed a neat geographical full stop to the trip.
Then we found a hill.
The hill found us back.
Instead we settled for a large breakfast in a mostly empty hotel dining room — eggs, flatbread and strong coffee — and waited for the van I’d booked to take us to the airport.
The driver arrived in a smart van, though he seemed distinctly unhappy. As we pulled away he told us that Israel had just attacked Iran.
Amman sits inconveniently between those two ideas.
For the next four hours we drove north with Al Jazeera playing continuously on the screen in the dashboard. Studio panels, maps, commentary, clips of politicians speaking about escalation and consequences.
It lends a certain edge to an airport transfer.
The driver was not angry, just deeply resigned. In conversation he explained that the already fragile tourism industry — the one he depends on — would likely collapse again for the next four to six months. Visitors would cancel. Bookings would vanish. Work would dry up.
After a week of extraordinary hospitality — tea on windswept ridges, coffee in roadside stations, Bedouin tents and family-run cafés — it was sobering to hear.
We had experienced Jordan as adventure.
For him, it is livelihood.
At the airport we drank one last Turkish coffee — thick, dark and heavy with cardamom — while flights around the region began to cancel.
Fortunately we were booked with Royal Jordanian, the flag carrier, and they were still flying.
In truth we escaped the current war by the skin of our teeth.
Eight days earlier we had started below sea level at the Dead Sea. Since then we had ridden past Crusader castles, across Roman roads, along Nabataean trade routes, through Petra and the red sands of Wadi Rum, before descending to the Red Sea at Aqaba.
Gravel, rock, sand, tarmac and tracks that barely existed.
Hard riding, technical riding, beautiful riding.
And remarkably, not a single mechanical between us.
Jordan is extraordinary.
When peace returns, I cannot recommend visiting strongly enough. And if the idea of riding ancient trade routes through desert landscapes appeals, let me know, I’d be very happy to arrange a tour.
My thanks to Pete Noble, who rode with good humour with me through out the week, the best photo's are his.
I must mention Charlie Harper, currently stationed in Amman, it was all his idea - he's to blame, thank you Charlie for the concept, and for putting up with us during this unexpectly busy time.