Jordan

Jordan is unusually generous for its size. You can be walking a Roman colonnade in the morning and watching the light change on rock the colour of dried blood by the afternoon, and the drive between the two is a couple of hours rather than a day.

Petra is the reason most people come and it does not disappoint, mostly because of how you arrive at it. You walk in through a crack in the rock, the Siq, which is narrow enough in places to touch both walls, and it goes on long enough that you stop expecting anything, and then the Treasury is simply there. Wadi Rum is the opposite kind of impressive: no walls at all, red sand to the horizon, and a night in a desert camp where the sky does the work. The Dead Sea is the one everybody underestimates. It is the lowest land on Earth, the water is thick with mineral salt, and floating in it is a genuinely strange sensation that no photograph has ever managed to convey.

For a Muslim traveller Jordan carries more than scenery. The Tomb of Hazrat Shoaib, the Cave of the Seven Sleepers, Mount Nebo where Prophet Moses is believed to have looked out over the Promised Land, and the baptism site on the Jordan river are all inside an easy radius of Amman. These are not detours added to fill a day. They are part of why this country reads differently from a straightforward sightseeing week.

One honest note on where you sleep. The week runs across three different standards on purpose. Amman is a four star city hotel, the Dead Sea night is a five star resort, and Wadi Rum is a desert camp, which is the point of Wadi Rum and is not a hotel at all. Four star is the floor across the week, not the ceiling.

Jordan is invoiced in US dollars. Any rupee figure is indicative and moves with the exchange rate, so treat the dollar price as the real one.