02 Apr 2023
I am so pleased we chose this tour as the way to visit Jordan. We are not normally people who like the constraints that a tour can put on a trip but this was absolutely the best way of visiting a country we really did not know enough about to go to on our own.
The organisation of the tour was excellent and very professional throughout. Our driver Ahmad was brilliant. He is a calm person with superb English. He is clearly very experienced at what he does. He was on top of all the details you would hope for in terms of sorting out all the check ins at the various hotels, knowing how long we would likely need at each place we visited, knowing what we needed to by tickets for and what was included on the “Jordan Pass” (definitely get this if you go – pays for the visa on landing and gets you in to nearly every tourist site).
He was very calm and flexible at addressing problems as and when they came up. Due to some terrible weather overnight before our day at Petra, we needed to modify our itinerary and times on that day as we went along. Ahmad dealt with all this very calmly and had all the knowledge of what the best thing to do was.
He was also a very skilled driver. Jordan is clearly a country that you need to drive around (a. it is small enough and b. there are no trains or reliable buses) but I think it would be a very daunting place for a westerner to drive around if you were not used to it. I sat in the front passenger seat as I tend to get travel sick and from that vantage point I could see how his driving was really excellent.
He was also really pleasant company and very patient with the questions we asked that I am sure he has answered many times before.
For the tour itself, this 7 day / 6 night tour seemed like an excellent itinerary and I would thoroughly recommend doing it in this order (I think they do lots of different permutations) as the interest level of the places builds over the trip.
Ahmad talked about the “Golden Triangle” or the Dead Sea, Petra and Wadi Rum. These were clearly the star attractions but I very much enjoyed the Ajloun Castle, Jerash Roman City, the Madaba Mosaic Map, Mount Nebo and the Baptism Site of Jesus. The history, either literal or theological of these places is amazing. The Dead Sea was a strange one as whilst the whole floating thing is intriguing and it’s so still that the shoreline is really peaceful, the impact of the Dead Sea drying 1m depth every year has created a strange “no-man’s land” between the hotels than used to be on its shores and the current shoreline. Between that and the apparent associated lack of investment near the Sea, means it has quite a strange eerie atmosphere. We could maybe have done with 1 less night there.
Beyond that Petra is absolutely as extraordinary as you would hope. It is very, very touristy but it is one of the few places where it is such an extraordinary place that it just does not matter. I am sure you could spend way more than a day doing every inch of the place but for either a first or, more likely, only time the day we spent there is enough. We paid for the golf cart down to the main site following the advice from our guide provided for that day (who was also excellent) then walked from the “Treasury” up to the “Monastery”. The walk up to the Monastery is a fairly tough one but our guide said it was worth it and he was right. It is not easy though, with 850 steps uphill and a lot of them very uneven.
Wadi Rum was also really amazing. The landscape with these massive rock formations and this pancake flat desert in between is that other worldly place it is sold as. There are lots of camps all over the place but again I was pleased to have the tour having picked a good one with good accommodation, food and entertainment. There were definitely other camps we could see on the desert drive around that were clearly rubbish.
We chose the 4* tour, with the 2 hrs in Wadi Rum and I think that was the right decision. The extra for going up to 5* did not feel worth it to me both before and definitely after the trip. The key difference in the price seemed to be better hotels generally (4 Star Jordanian seems to be mor like 3 Star Western), bubble type pods in Wadi Rum (that do not seem to be worth it given you can only see out of one side and there are so many camps about it is not like you are looking out at nothing) and more time on the desert trip (the 2 hrs we had seemed perfect to me).
Overall, an excellent well balanced tour, really well run by Creative Limo Jordan.