Jordan

Jordan hit me differently from any other country in the Middle East. Petra was the obvious reason to come, but it kept surprising me — every time I thought I'd seen the best of it, there was another carved facade around the next bend, another staircase cut into the cliff leading somewhere quieter. The hike up to the Monastery took about an hour of steep rock steps and I was sweating through my jacket, but when the building finally opened up in front of me against that blue sky, the scale of it just didn't make sense. How do you carve something that big out of solid rock?

The Petra by Night experience was something I hadn't planned for but ended up being the thing I talk about most. Hundreds of paper lanterns lit along the Siq, and then the Treasury glowing purple and green and blue in the dark — no crowds really visible, just silence and coloured light on two-thousand-year-old stone. Sitting cross-legged on the ground in that canyon listening to a Bedouin musician play, the cold air coming in off the mountains — it's one of those moments that doesn't compress into a caption.

Outside Petra, Jordan felt wide open. Driving through the desert past wind turbines spinning in empty sand, or standing on the ridge above Petra with the canyon falling away on all sides and the Jordanian flag catching the wind — the country is physically huge and mostly quiet. Amman surprised me too, especially the King Abdullah Mosque with its enormous blue dome. The food was another story: hummus, lentil soup, warm khubz straight off the griddle, mansaf on the side. I ate well every single day.