When you can’t go
It was August 2020. Borders were closed or complicated, flights were minimal, and the question of “when can we go back to Jordan?” had no reliable answer. We’d started this site specifically because we wanted to write about a place we loved, and suddenly writing about a place you couldn’t visit felt oddly pointed.
The solution, eventually, was to go there differently. Books, films, music — the other routes into a landscape that physical travel usually provides. This list is what we discovered or returned to during those locked-down months. It’s organized not by medium but by the part of Jordan each work illuminates best.
For Wadi Rum: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
The most important thing to know about Lawrence of Arabia — the David Lean epic with Peter O’Toole as T.E. Lawrence — is that most of it was actually filmed in Wadi Rum. Not a studio recreation of Wadi Rum. The actual desert, the actual sandstone formations, the actual light.
Watch the film (it won seven Academy Awards; it holds up; four hours is not too long) and then watch the scenes knowing what you’re seeing: Jebel Khazali, the red dunes around the Seven Pillars of Wisdom formation, the flat sand plains that Lawrence himself crossed. The cinematography by Freddie Young was built around the specific quality of light in that desert in the late afternoon, when everything turns amber and the rock shadows go blue-black.
If you’ve been to Wadi Rum, you’ll recognize every frame. If you haven’t, you’ll understand why people who have been to Wadi Rum keep going back.
T.E. Lawrence himself is more complicated than the film suggests — the real history of the Arab Revolt and Britain’s role in it is murky, contested, and considerably less heroic than the O’Toole version. But as an introduction to the landscape, the film is irreplaceable.
For Petra: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
You know the scene. The one where Indiana Jones emerges from a narrow canyon and suddenly faces the facade of a massive temple carved into a cliff face, and the music swells, and you think: where on earth is that?
It’s Petra. Al-Khazneh — the Treasury. The canyon approach is the Siq. The scene was filmed in Petra in 1988, making it arguably the moment when Petra entered the mainstream global imagination as something more than a footnote in history books.
The film calls the location “the Canyon of the Crescent Moon” and repurposes the Treasury as the location of the Holy Grail. The actual interior of the Treasury is, in reality, a single undecorated chamber — whatever the Nabataeans put in there is long gone. But the exterior remains exactly as Harrison Ford and Sean Connery encountered it.
The Last Crusade is the most Jordan-specific of the Indiana Jones films, though it also uses sites in Venice, Germany, and Egypt. Watch it with the sound up and notice that Peter O’Toole’s desert light is roughly the same golden quality that Spielberg’s crew captured, forty years later, in the same geography.
For Amman and urban Jordan: The English Patient (1996)
The English Patient is set primarily in the North African Sahara and a Tuscan villa, but the Almásy story — the Hungarian explorer who mapped the Libyan Desert in the 1930s, whose affair with a British diplomat’s wife ended in catastrophe — intersects with Jordan at several points. The desert geography of the film, the Saharan cave paintings, the archaeology of a landscape that predates nations: all of this resonates with Jordan’s own desert east.
More usefully: the film is based on Michael Ondaatje’s novel of the same name, and the novel is significantly better than the film, more fragmented and more interested in the way people are shaped by landscapes they can’t fully belong to. If you want to understand the psychology of a certain kind of traveler in the Arab world — the Western intellectual drawn to a landscape that refuses to be possessed — The English Patient is the key text.
The essential book: Married to a Bedouin by Marguerite van Geldermalsen
This is, without qualification, our first recommendation for anyone going to Petra.
Marguerite van Geldermalsen was a New Zealand nurse who visited Petra in the late 1970s and, in a sequence of events that defies easy summary, married a Bedouin man named Mohammad and spent the following years living in one of Petra’s rock-cut tombs while the Nabataean ruins that surrounded her were gradually turned into the archaeological park they are today.
The Bdoul Bedouin community had lived in Petra’s caves for generations; they were relocated to a purpose-built village (Umm Sayhoun) by the Jordanian government in 1985 when Petra was being developed for mass tourism. Van Geldermalsen’s account of the transition — from an inside perspective, as a member of the community being displaced — is unlike anything else written about the site. It’s funny, specific, and occasionally devastating.
She covers: cooking on the fire in a cave; the sound the Treasury makes in a desert rainstorm; what the Nabataean cisterns look like from the inside; the politics of the tourist economy before Jordan became a bucket-list destination; her husband’s knowledge of the desert that she gradually began to learn. It’s a domestic memoir set against one of the world’s great archaeological sites, and it changes how you see Petra when you visit.
Travels with a Tangerine by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s book follows the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta, arguably the greatest traveler in Islamic history, who journeyed over 75,000 miles in a lifetime of movement across the entire known world. The book — the first volume of a trilogy — covers the early stages of Ibn Battuta’s journey, which passes through North Africa and the Levant, including Jordan.
What’s valuable here for the Jordan-curious reader is the historical depth. Mackintosh-Smith writes about Jordan’s landscape and towns with the knowledge of someone who has spent years in the Arab world, and he understands how the geography that Ibn Battuta moved through in the 1320s is still, in many ways, the geography you move through today. The same mountain passes, the same trade routes, the same springs. History is very thin here.
It’s also an excellent reminder that Jordan was a crossroads for centuries before the idea of Jordan as a nation existed.
Music: Macadi Nahhas
For the audio portion of your armchair journey: Macadi Nahhas is a Jordanian singer whose work sits at the intersection of classical Arabic music and contemporary arrangement. Her voice is extraordinary — clear, technically demanding, with the kind of ornamentation (the microtonal embellishments that characterize classical Arabic singing) that takes years to learn and a lifetime to perfect.
Start with “Bini W Beinak” or her interpretations of classic Um Kulthum songs. Play it while looking at photographs of the Jordan Valley or the Dead Sea at sunset. It’s the closest thing to being there that audio can provide.
What to watch on streaming right now (2024 update)
Since we originally wrote this in 2020, a few more relevant options have appeared:
Dune Part One (2021) and Dune Part Two (2024): Filmed substantially in Wadi Rum, the Arrakis desert sequences use the same locations — and the same quality of light — as Lawrence of Arabia. See our dedicated article on where Aladdin and Dune were filmed in Jordan for location specifics.
Aladdin (2019, Disney live-action): The exterior sequences are Wadi Rum. The production design team needed a landscape that read as “mythological ancient Arabia” and went to the obvious location.
When travel is possible again — and it is possible now, Jordan is fully open — the Amman destination guide and Wadi Rum guide are the practical starting points. The armchair journey is useful preparation, but the real thing is better.