My trip to Jordan ticked quite a few boxes for me. As a kid, I went to Sunday School every week and can remember most of the Bible stories of Jesus and his disciples, Noah and the flood, Moses and the children of Israel and a few more besides.
I was always fascinated by the ‘Holy Land’ and revelled in the delight of watching movies like Ben-Hur and the Ten Commandments.
Add to that movies like Indiana Jones, Star Wars and pretty much any movie or tv series that centres on space, planets and aliens. Given these seemingly disparate interests, which are essentially the same, stories being the lynchpin, my recent trip to Jordan managed to take care of both my sci-fi and biblical fascinations in one trip.
Along with my travel compadres (we nicknamed ourselves the Three Amigos) we spent 5 days and 4 nights in Jordan, hiking, touring and enjoying the sites, sounds and food of Jordan and its people in a trip which left me exhausted but completely thrilled and eager to return.
To tour or not to tour
It’s entirely possible to plan and get around Jordan under your own steam. Lets face it, with the internet you can work out your travel itinery for the whole trip before you go and you have access to a wealth of information on how to get around, where to stay and what to see. We opted to go with a Jordanian travel company1 though, since it was the first time any of us had travelled to Jordan, we thought this would be the easiest thing to do, although it did add extra costs to the trip.
Our tour company sorted out tickets to the attractions at Petra and Wadi Rum, they handled all the transfers from the different locations, and also sorted out our entry visas
Is Jordan Safe
Travel to a new unknown country you can be a daunting task and when you’re travelling to a region of the world where there is strife, either in the country or in the countries that surround it, people will often ask, indeed did ask ‘is it safe to travel to petra jordan’. We found Jordan as safe as houses, we had no issues with anyone or problems at any of the places that we stayed. In my experience, Jordan is a safe place to travel.
Our travel around the country was via a private car for most of the trip. The only time we didn’t was when we were in Wadi Rum. The Bedouin we encountered were so welcoming, friendly and courteous and demostrated a good sense of humour and even as three women travelling, we encountered no issues with people treating us differently because of our gender.
It’s fine to be a complete tourist, let other people take the strain and just enjoy the experience of travelling around in a different country.
Jordan relies on tourism which accounts for 10-13 percent of it’s GDP and talking to our guide we understood that the country like many others took a big hit during the Covid years.
Things are returning to normal, and we encountered groups and trips from many different countries while we were there. It’s a brilliant place to visit, and I am in no doubt that you will enjoy your stay.