Wadi Rum From Amman: 110 km Past Petra, And Worth The Night

The day-trip version puts Petra and Wadi Rum in the same fourteen hours. About nine of them are driving, two and a half are inside Petra, and roughly an hour and a half is the desert. It works, and nobody who has done it describes it as restful.

The two-day version drives the same road, stops at the same places, and sleeps in a camp between them. It costs more and gives you the thing people actually come to Wadi Rum for, which is the dark.

Two shapes of camp appear on the tours here. The classic or deluxe tent is canvas, in a Bedouin camp, with shared or private bathrooms. The bubble dome is transparent and heated, and you watch the sky from the bed.

Counter-intuitively the bubble-tent loop is the cheaper of the two on this site — $205 against $249 — while the canvas one has 1,529 reviews to the other's 251. Neither of those facts explains the other, and we have not been able to find out why.

Wadi Rum is not dunes to the horizon. It is a valley floor of red sand with granite and sandstone massifs standing out of it, which is more interesting than dunes and photographs differently from how most people expect.

The jeep runs are in the back of a pickup, on tracks, and they are dusty. Summer middays are 32–33 °C with no shade — the same problem Petra has, in a place with even less of it.