Jordan Trail to Petra

For travelers from Oslo, we meet at Gardermoen airport and greet our travel group for the next week and a half. Once we arrive at Amman's international airport, we will be picked up and driven to our hotel in Madaba, half an hour away from the airport. For programs with English language where flight tickets are not included, we set up one shared transport from Amman airport, which we try to adapt to the arrival times of as many group participants as possible. If your flight does not align with this scheduled transfer, you are responsible for arranging transport to the hotel yourself, which is located about 20 minutes from the airport.

After breakfast and group meeting at the hotel, we have a quick sightseeing tour of Madaba. This is a city of about 60,000 inhabitants best known for its Byzantine mosaic map of the Holy Land. From here, we have around two hours' drive to the lowest point on earth, the Dead Sea, which lies 400 meters below sea level. The salts and minerals here is supposed to have a very healing effect, and as we will note, it is so salty that you can lie on your back in the water and read a good book. It is almost impossible to sink! We take our time for a dip here and have lunch before continuing inland again for another two-hour bus journey. We arrive at the village of Dana, which will be our starting point for the next days hike on the Jordan Trail. Dana is located at an altitude of 1,200 metres, on the edge of the large natural gorge Wadi Dana with fantastic views. We eat dinner together and prepare for the coming hardships.

After breakfast, we set off on foot west in the direction of Mansoura for the first leg of the Jordan Trail, a relatively newly opened hike that is already considered one of the world's most beautiful hikes. Here we walk along mountain sides with a glorious view of the valley in the Dana Reserve, Jordan's largest national park, with four different biotopes, which means a surprisingly large variety in both animal life, plant life and bird life. In the late afternoon, we arrive at the first of this weeks wilderness camps, and here a long-awaited dinner also awaits us. In all tent camps, we have both a portable toilet and a "washing tent" where there is access to hot water, soap and privacy.

Today we continue south and have another stage of around one and a half miles ahead of us. We will hike through valleys overlooking Wadi Araba as we head in the direction of Furon. In front of us we have mountains that we wind our way up quite steeply with a brilliant panoramic view at the back, and along the way we eat a packed lunch. At the end of the day, we arrive at the camp that our good, local helpers have already set up for us.

Today's stage continues south into one of Jordan's most remote wilderness areas at the Sharah Mountains, mainly following the old Bedouin herding tracks. The peaks of the black mountains that almost hang over our path, and the view of the gorges and valleys below us, make this perhaps the most spectacular days of the trip. We move higher and higher in the terrain, which in turn leads to an increasingly beautiful view of the desert landscape below us. The last leg is a lot of downhill to our camp for the night, where our local crew is well underway with tonight's dinner.

After breakfast, we slowly begin to move out of the completely deserted areas we walked through yesterday - on today's stage we will increasingly see Bedouin camps, sheep enclosures and patches of cultivated land. In this region between Ba'ja and Little Petra, we also pass ruins of the buildings of the Nabateans - this was a highly developed Arab people who lived in the region and had Petra as their capital - and here we can come across ancient wine and olive presses, aqueducts and other infrastructure. Today we visit Little Petra, which archaeologists assume was a kind of suburb of Petra, where traders could spend the night before continuing on the famous Silk Road that linked Asia to Africa, Europe and Arabia. Here we can see the facades of the homes and other buildings that have been carved straight out of the sandstone mountains. We spend the night in simple cabins where we eat dinner around the campfire under the starry sky.

We get ready for the last leg of the Jordan Trail after breakfast. Today we will leave M'aysrah and arrive at Petra via the little-used "back door" and thus avoid 90% of all other tourists. There are fine roads through Wadi Ghurab between the sandstone mountains that guard the entrance to Petra. This road follows an ancient Nabatean path out of the valley and winds around the last mountain on a natural rock ledge that has been secured in recent years. Nevertheless, it becomes increasingly narrow before reaching a hidden plateau high above the gorge that makes up Wadi Siyyagh. Suddenly we catch sight of the iconic "monastery" carved right into the rock face. We descend here, and from here ancient Nabatean paths lead down to legendary Petra, where we can follow the main path to Wadi Musa and continue to our accommodation for the night.

After breakfast, we have a two-hour drive from Petra to the Wadi Rum desert area, where we will be taken on a 4-hour jeep safari. Here we will explore the amazing desert landscape and its striking rock formations rising from the sand. The silence here is palpable. At each stop there is an opportunity to stroll around on your own and take in the vastness of the desert. We spend the night in small huts in the desert, not far from Jordan's highest mountain Um Al Dami at 1,800 m above sea level. Here a lovely Bedouin dinner awaits us, which we eat under a starry sky you've hardly seen anywhere else - when you're so far away from civilization and the lights of the city, the stars in the night sky shine like sapphires on black velvet.

Today we are going to the top of Jordan's highest mountain. Jebel Um Ad Dami is 1,800 meters above sea level, but we probably don't spend more than three hours up and down. From here, we get a completely new perspective on the desert that surrounds us, and to the south we can see the border with Saudi Arabia, just a couple of kilometers away. Once back down we have a last lunch in the desert before driving to Aqaba, Jordan's only coastal city, where we check into our hotel. In the evening, those who wish can go out and have dinner at a local restaurant. The rest of the evening is at your leisure.

The day is at your disposal with sun, beach, swimming, snorkeling, fishing or whatever you fancy! A shuttle bus and entrance to the beach are included for your convenience. After lunch we say goodbye to each other after a wonderful trip - hopefully with lots of good memories. Again, due to varying international departure times, one group transfer to Aqaba International Airport will be scheduled to accommodate the majority of participants. If your flight does not align with this transfer, you will need to arrange your own transportation to the airport, which is approximately 20 minutes.