On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
TKH
In late October to early December I hiked about two thirds of the Jordan Trail, a long-distance trail running the length of Jordan from (near) the Syrian border to Aqaba on the Red Sea. Last year I had hiked in the Sinai peninsula of Egypt (OTR Feb ’24) across the Gulf of Aqaba, liked what I saw and wanted more of it.
Hiking in Jordan is, from an organizational perspective, much easier than hiking in Egypt. Jordan is not a police state and therefore there are none of the veto points that the security apparatus of Egypt likes to employ to mess with you. Also, the Bedouin in Jordan are much more relaxed about strangers running through their backcountry than the Bedouin in Sinai. As a result you can hike the Jordan Trail without a guide, although guided tours are widely advertised and used, maybe not right now post the October 7th unpleasantness.
I hiked solo and therefore was not supported by a vehicle or a camel to carry gear and supplies. Instead it felt much like my hikes in the deserts of the US Southwest. The most significant difference being that water is even scarcer in Jordan than in, say, Utah or Arizona and one has to be able/willing to endure long water carries, e.g. 3L/day for each of three days (~20 lb).
There is a Jordan Trail organization which has published a map of the trail and a guide in the form of a few sentences for each of the sections they have divided the trail into. This guide covers resupply and water sources. There is also a GPS track that one can download from their website. Good topographic paper maps of Jordan are not available to any regular Joe, much as they were not in Egypt last year. They exist, but are essentially confidential/secret. The Jordan Trail GPS track is on a base layer, which is not really all that good, in an Austrian mapping app, but one can download it to one’s phone and annotate to one’s heart content in an appropriate app. I use Gaia GPS for most of my hikes.
During my hike, owing to the current unpleasantness in Gaza (so nothing personal), the Israelis were jamming the GPS quite fiercely. While this does not affect the display of the trail itself on the screen, the beacon that indicates one’s position may be off several tens of kilometers from one’s actual position. So if you entirely on the electronics, you are screwed. I was in the army 50 years ago when GPS was not available at the platoon or company level, so I had been trained in the old-timey methods of dead reckoning, hiking by bearing and figuring out one’s position by triangulation and altimeter. That training stood me in good stead. A paper map on which to place the compass would have been nice, but beggars can’t be choosers.
After studying the GPS track for some time I decided that I would be starting my hike Southwest of Amman in a town called Madaba and would hike South to the Gulf of Aqaba. If time remained, I would hike the Northern third of the trail. This decision was based on how much road walking one would have to do vs how much backcountry hiking one would get to do. I very much prefer the latter over the former. In the end I only made it to Aqaba and I never saw the Northern part of the country.
Having made the decision to go, I booked flights, but got screwed some days later when one airline cancelled the flight to Amman owing to “force majeure”. In their cover message to the cancellation notice they said that surely I’d understand. They clearly don’t know me!
I had to rebook the entire thing in order to connect to an airport serviced by Royal Jordanian, which, I guess, does not get the option of no longer flying to Amman. Owing to the late booking it was expensive but I was determined to go.
I had given myself two days in Amman to get over jet lag and to purchase supplies such as fuel for the stove and food. I had brought some food, snacks in particular, but the information on what was likely going to be available in Amman or, more importantly, in the small towns along the route was less than satisfactory.
I usually try to learn a bunch of hiking and resupply-specific phrases when I hike in a country where I do not speak the language and do not have the expectation that the lingua franca of international travel, fluent broken English, will work. With Arabic there is an additional problem in the form of the writing. This was just too much to get on top of before I left, given that I had been hiking all year and had had only limited downtime between hikes. I put my faith in Google translate, sign language and the few words of Arabic I do know to get through. I am here, so it all worked out, somehow!
The following is in response to a request from frosty to describe what goes into planning a hike: I had brought a gas stove and a multi-fuel stove with me. The former in the hope that I could get propane/isobutane canisters at Decathlon, a French outdoor store chain with a store in Amman. Alas, you could buy exercise clothes there, but nothing that a backpacker would need. So I was going to be cooking with gasoline. Never done that before, but you live and learn. The food situation was similarly dicey, even in Amman, until I found a Carrefour store where the upper crust and the UN, World Bank etc employees shop. They have everything, at Whole Paycheck prices, of course.
The supermarkets, rather “super”markets, in the small towns were the size of a bedroom in a US rental apartment. Half was filled with junk food, much of that of American provenance. The rest of the shelves was filled with an idiosyncratic mix of goods including cleaning supplies, cosmetics, pantry staples such as salt, oil. Alas, very little calorically dense food (>120 cal/oz) of the kind that a hiker would need in order to get to 3000 cal/day. There was rice, pasta, tomato paste, tahini, tuna and sardines, sometimes Egyptian “feta” (fresh cheese from cow milk), crackers, sometimes bread, bottled water. Fruit and vegetables are almost exclusively sold in a separate store and not every village has one of those. When available, though, the freshly harvested oranges were to die for, as were the tomatoes.
To make things slightly worse, my multifuel stove sprang a leak in the pump head after about 10 days. All the dust in the air from the winter winds combined with the lack of tools made a repair of a fine-mechanical gadget difficult. So not only did I run short of calories, but I had to chow down the food cold. Cold-soaked ramen or vermicelli with a tomato sauce from tomato paste with a can of tuna and all of that cold: yumm! Let’s just say I lost some weight.
Enough of that! Here are some pictures from the trip:

A view of the City on the seven hills, the classical moniker of Amman. These days it’s more like 20 hills. The picture is taken through the bug screen, hence the noticeable lattice.
Every morning at 5:30 AM the mosques shown start their call to prayer, LOUDLY. Takes some getting used to.

On my way to the citadel, a fortification overlooking all of old town Amman.

The citadel is strategically located Above the city. The hill it is situated on has been used by several civilizations over the millennia. The Romans started to build a large temple that was never finished before they had to leave

Detail on one of the capitels intended to be placed on top of the columns shown above.

I started my hike in Madaba, an ancient town some 30 miles from Amman. In the ruins of a
Greek-Orthodox church there is a floor mosaic with the oldest known map of the Holy Land.
In the top left corner is shown the Jordan river coming from the Dead Sea (top right corner). On the right margin just below mid-point is Jerusalem. Below the wavy Jordan river is Jericho.

At the very top is depicted the town of Karyopolis, built by the crusaders to control the Holy Land until the muslims chased them off after a siege. The contemporary name of the town is Al Karak. I will show some pictures in a later installment.

From Madaba I walked to Mt Nebo. That is Mt. Nebo, Jordan and not the several Mt. Nebo’s in the US. I am standing in the footsteps of Moses who supposedly saw the promised land and is supposedly buried. As a result of the strong Easterly winds characteristic of the Fall season, there was a lot of dust in the air and I did not see the promised land. Palestine, specifically the West Bank,is shrouded by the beige cloud of dust at the left margin of the image.

The large representational panel on the floor of the ruined church

A detail from the right bottom corner of the panel to highlight some of the workmanship.

An example of the non-representational mosaics that one often finds in Islamic art.
Scuffletuffle
Love the floor map and gorgeous tile work. Looking forward to more photos. Also admiring your courage and confidence!
Meyerman
Sounds like a challenging but satisfying trek. A little privation makes the experience more memorable. Thanks for sharing your trip with us.
J.
Wow. I am in awe of your journey and fortitude. And love the photos. My 86-year-old mother is going to Jordan and Egypt at the end of March, but with a luxury tour company.
stinger
Fascinating! Both the photos and the text! Thanks!
oldster
Amazing story. Thanks for sharing it, and the photos.
Trivia Man
The preparation details make w photos even more impressive. Hard won mementos.
RobinS
Wow – Thank you for this.
Betsy
This is amazing. Thank you for sharing your adventure. Greatly enjoyed your trek! I am into vicarious traveling.
MCat
Great pictures. I’m amazed at your sense of direction and physical strength to carry so much weight while hiking on your own. It looks like a beautiful place.
Geminid
I was reading about the Circassians and found that in 1878, the Ottomans settled settled a number of Circassians* in the Amman area. Amman had declined to a village by then, and even with the Circassians it was a very small town at the end of the First World War. Now Amman has a population of 4 million.
* The Circassians are a Muslim people who used to inhabit the Caucusus Mountains overlooking the eastern end of the Black Sea. During the mid-19th century, the Russians drove them out in a bloody, decades-long war. The survivors fled to the Ottoman empire where many were resettled around the Middle East. The Ottomans valued the Circassians’ fighting prowess., but they also made capable civil servants.
pieceofpeace
I have no time to read your text, TKH, and plan on that later. The second picture, really others too, was stunning in its monochrome way. Back later….
CaseyL
An arduous and dangerous undertaking! The photos are delightful, and I look forward to seeing more.
way2blue
Wow. What an astonishing trek. Looking forward to reading about the rest of your adventure.
Stately Plump Buck
My wife and I lived in Jordan for a year, teaching at King’s Academy just outside Madaba. We called Jordan “The Country of Revelation” because there was always something amazing, either natural, historical, or human. I wish we had stayed longer, but it was a stress on my two children, ages 6 and 8 at the time. We did get to Petra, Aqaba, Wadi Rum, Um Khys, Jerash, Mt. Nebo, and elsewhere. Regrets remain, however, for the things we still missed…
BigJimSlade
Hm, guessing at the highlights to come… Dana, Petra, Wadi Rum… but with your task, many smaller, less famous places in between… and we’ll find out if you went north at all for Jerash, Ajloun, Umm Qais (Gadara) :-)
JustRuss
Quite a trip. I have a multifuel stove, gasoline leaves a sooty residue but it gets the job done. Finally gave in and got a butane stove last year.
Traveller
I would also like to thank you for the well written…cleanly written with fine detail is not that easy a task, post on this (stunning) trip of yours. You provided sufficient meaningful detail that many of us felt that we were right there with you…
I accidentally stumbled across this post of yours, I read and re-read it…and I just need to say thank you! I hope there is more to come, and that you travel safely. Very Best Wishes, Traveller
TKH
You are all very kind. To be sure, though, it is not as risky a trip as you may think, as long as it is not your first. I have a couple of thousand miles under my belt and in the course of these have worked through my “Oh, shit!” moments. You learn to live by your wits, which is part of what attracts me to this kind of trip. The GPS failing would have thrown me for a loop in my first few trips, but now I have enough experience to fall back on, for example. The rest is just basic fitness, specifically hiking fitness, not gym fitness, and I spend enough time hiking to have that. Although I notice as I get older that it’s getting incrementally harder to maintain that through the winter months.