Wadi Rum

Wadi Rum is the valley of the moon: a desert of red sand between massifs of sandstone and granite that rise sheer for hundreds of metres, in Jordan's far south an hour from Aqaba, where T. E. Lawrence camped in 1917 and named a mountain the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, where the Bedouin of the Zalabieh tribe still keep their goats and now their guests, and where the cinema has come for a century to film another planet. The village of Rum, at the valley's mouth beside the visitor centre and the old Hijaz railway station, is the door; the jeeps and camels go out from it to Lawrence's spring, to the Khazali canyon with its Nabataean inscriptions, to the red dune, to the rock bridges of Burdah and Um Fruth, to the mushroom rock and Lawrence's ruined house; the camps — Bedouin tents around a fire, or the bubble tents of the newer luxury — are scattered under the cliffs; and Um ad Dami, at the Saudi border, is the country's highest point. A UNESCO site since 2011, the whole of it is protected, and the Bedouin run it.

The traveller comes from Aqaba, Petra or Amman, leaves the car at the village and takes the Bedouin's jeep for the afternoon: the spring, the canyon, the dune climbed barefoot for the view and run down, a bridge crossed, tea brewed on a fire in the shade of a rock, and a dune for the sunset; then the camp — the zarb dinner dug out of the sand oven, the fire, the sky, which in the desert's dark is the sky as it was; the dawn from the tent's door; and, with days, a walk between the massifs with a guide, the scramble to Burdah's bridge, a climb on Jebel Rum with a Bedouin who learned the routes from his father, or the long day to Um ad Dami and the view of Arabia.

The Guide's honesty: Wadi Rum is a Bedouin business and the traveller books it as one — a camp and its jeep, chosen with care, because the quality varies and the reviews are honest —; the bubble tents are a comfort and a photograph, and the plain tents are the desert; the nights are cold in every season and the days are the sun; the village is poor and hospitable, and the guides' word on where the jeep goes is final; Petra and Aqaba are an hour and two, and the traveller who gives Rum only a jeep afternoon has seen the picture and missed the place; and the sand going scarlet under the cliffs at the last light, with the fire lit and the first stars, is what the whole desert of Arabia looks like in the mind, which is why the Guide keeps this page in that colour.