🇯🇴
Jordan
Let's explore one of the world's most fascinating countries — packed with surprises, stories, and pen pal potential.
The Basics
3 Things That Will Blow Your Mind
Genuinely. You'll want to tell someone immediately.
The ancient city of Petra was completely unknown to the outside world until 1812
Petra is a city carved directly into rose-red sandstone cliffs by the Nabataean people over 2,000 years ago and it sits inside a narrow canyon that you can only enter on foot. It was so well hidden that the Western world did not know it existed until a Swiss explorer disguised himself as a local, bribed a Bedouin guide, and squeezed through the canyon to find an entire city of temples and tombs carved into the pink rock walls.
The Dead Sea is the lowest point on the surface of the Earth and you cannot sink in it
Sitting 430 metres below sea level, the Dead Sea is about ten times saltier than a normal ocean and so dense that the human body floats on the surface without any effort at all. You can lie on your back, hold a book above your head, and read comfortably. Nothing can live in the water because of the salt concentration, which is how it got its name.
Jordan's red desert looks so much like Mars that film crews use it instead
Wadi Rum is a vast desert of red sandstone mountains, sandy valleys, and ancient rock formations in southern Jordan that resembles the surface of Mars so closely it has been used as a Mars setting in multiple major films and NASA has tested rover equipment there. Bedouin families have lived in this landscape for centuries and still guide travellers through it on camels.
Famous For
Petra
One of the ancient wonders of the world and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. You enter through a narrow canyon called the Siq that winds for almost a kilometre between rock walls until you turn a corner and the Treasury building suddenly appears, carved directly into a cliff face in perfect detail. An entire city of thousands of people once lived here and most of it is still unexcavated.
The Dead Sea
The lowest point on the surface of the Earth and the saltiest large body of water anywhere. You float without trying, the mineral-rich mud is considered good for skin, and the experience of floating on water like a rubber duck while reading a book is one of the more surreal things a person can do.
Wadi Rum
A desert landscape of extraordinary beauty that has been home to Bedouin people for centuries and has been used as a film location for everything from Lawrence of Arabia to science fiction films set on other planets. Some visitors sleep in transparent bubble tents and watch the stars, which in the desert with no light pollution are overwhelming.
Hospitality
Jordanian culture places extraordinary importance on welcoming guests and looking after anyone who enters your home or asks for help. A stranger asking for directions might find themselves invited in for tea, offered a meal, and introduced to the whole family. This is not politeness so much as a deeply held value.
Did You Know?
Jordan has been continuously inhabited for over 10,000 years and Amman, the capital, has layers of history going back through Ottoman, Roman, Greek, and Bronze Age settlement all the way to the Stone Age. You can see Roman columns and a 6,000-seat Roman theatre from the window of a modern coffee shop in the city centre. Wherever construction workers in Amman dig, they tend to find something ancient.
Pen Pal Connection
A child in Jordan might write to you about a trip to Petra where you walk through a narrow canyon for almost a kilometre before the Treasury building carved from pink rock appears suddenly in front of you, the experience of floating in the Dead Sea without being able to sink no matter what you try, the elaborate meal their family prepared when guests came to visit because hospitality in Jordan is not optional, the call to prayer echoing from the mosque near their home, or why the red desert near their country genuinely looks like photographs of another planet.