Trekking in Wadi Rum

This is not the jeep tour. Crossing Wadi Rum on foot means a multi-day traverse with Bedouin guides and camels carrying the water, scrambling through narrow siqs and over sandstone domes, and camping wherever the day happens to end. The desert of red sand and towering sandstone that stood in for Mars in half a dozen films is a very different place when you're walking through it at three kilometres an hour.

What people remember afterwards is the silence at night, closely followed by the sky — with no light for a hundred kilometres, the stars are overwhelming. The days are spent moving between rock massifs, the guides reading a landscape that looks featureless to an outsider and isn't.

A protected-area fee applies and local guides are required, which is no hardship — the Bedouin knowledge is half the trip. Summer is dangerously hot; go in spring or autumn, and pack for winter nights that drop below freezing under that same clear sky.

A protected-area fee applies and local guides are required. Summer is dangerously hot; winter nights drop below freezing.