We went with Stubborn Mule, a family-travel specialist with Jordan expertise; the managing director, Liddy Pleasants, reassured me that she wouldn’t wait for a Foreign Office travel ban to cancel the trip if she had wind of trouble via their own network of contacts. Israel and Iran exchanging fire across Jordanian airspace in October certainly gave us pause, and BA cancelling our direct flights last-minute was annoying (since other airlines were still flying from the UK I put that down to its spare-parts issues). The uncertainty reminded me a bit of Covid times, when plans were only ever aspirations. But really, once we were rebooked onto new flights, I was more worried that we might feel tension during our trip — our own, or others’ — or that hotels and sights would feel eerily empty.

I’ll spare you the suspense: neither came to pass. Sure, we focused on the touristy bits, but we found a country of generous, open people ready to talk and laugh. And enough visitors — French, Spanish, Italian, American, Lebanese, Brits — to keep us company at the breakfast buffet. On our first day, as we bobbed lazily in the Dead Sea within sight of the West Bank, it was hard to imagine anything but peace for miles on end. Until, of course, a military helicopter flew over — but it was the only one we saw all week. We told ourselves it was soldiers going home for lunch.

We set off the next morning with Ahmad and our driver, Hassan, who’d stay with us most of the week. We had some distances to cover and Ahmad, a sort of shaven-headed Alfred Molina-a-like, had come prepared to enrich the miles with crash courses on Jordanian politics, the monarchy, marriage, exports, water shortages, immigration and history. He talked us through the different styles of keffiyeh (red and white became popular in Jordan because the late King Hussein favoured it; like Yasser Arafat, Palestinians prefer theirs black and white) and explained the surprising prevalence of Saddam Hussein bumper stickers (a close personal friend of the popular late king).

He told us the story of Jacob and Esau, and brought home to us quite casually that we really were travelling through biblical landscapes: north of our Dead Sea hotel was the spot on the River Jordan where John baptised Jesus; that white building on a distant hill was the tomb of Moses’s brother, Aaron; Ruth? Oh yes, she came from that village. It was like Sunday school come to life.

We didn’t have time for the Greco-Roman city of Jerash (sigh of 11-year-old relief there) or Kerak’s Crusader castle but we still managed to fit in at least one astonishing thing each day. Pleasants had told us she thought Jordan was one of the best destinations for families — before October 7, 2023, it was a Stubborn Mule’s top seller — because “it doesn’t just have the big-hitter sites, it has activities too”.

Take the first stop on our way south after the Dead Sea, a hike along a wadi, or riverbed, our feet in the water. The living walls of the gorge stretched up on either side of us, palms and ferns thriving in the most unlikely nooks and crannies. Crabs too. The thrill came from imagining the wadi in spate; oddly wedged boulders were testament to the force of the water, which Ahmad said could become 10m deep after heavy rains. But the joy for us, knee-deep at most, was something more elemental: the magic of prolonged puddle-jumping. My husband and I wondered how we might apply this lesson at home to generate pre-teen enthusiasm for walking.

Perhaps we simply need to focus our family hiking energies on astonishing landscapes and Unesco world heritage sites, because there were no complaints the following day at Petra either, even though we ended up covering about ten miles. The walk to the monastery was just the start; from there it was down steep steps in the rock, past Bedouin women with their souvenir stalls and collections of Nabataean coins (so numerous, one supposes the ancient traders were horribly careless with their loose change).

The site is huge — it could fill days, not hours — so we whisked along the colonnaded street past temples, the Nymphaeum fountain beneath a wild pistachio tree and the royal tombs. Finally we reached the Treasury, where Ahmad encouraged us to approach with eyes closed, all the better to appreciate the big reveal. Then there it was, soaring upwards in its sandstone frame, not just living up to the hype but surpassing it. That only a handful of other people were there — half of them on a Turkish bridalwear shoot — had us counting our blessings again.

If the wonder of Petra was the man-made rock carvings (also, for our son, the shop selling Indiana-style leather whips), the wonder of Wadi Rum, a couple of hours south, was what nature can do on its own (also, games of football and Jenga with local children). It’s a protected desert landscape and most visitors, us included, tour the same key sites, zooming across the sand alfresco in the back of pickup trucks. It was fine following the circuit — there were maybe a dozen other trucks — and it was fun to scale a dune here, climb a rocky mass there, admire an ancient inscription and dare ourselves to stand on top of a natural rock bridge.

But the real thing about Wadi Rum is the size: a huge sandy arena on a scale that’s hard to comprehend. Its massive echoing cliffs have eroded in such a way that they look like melted wax or abstract carvings; I could see where the Nabataeans got their ideas. Sheltering at their feet are 300-odd camps but you’d never know it as the vastness swallows them up. Waking early, I watched the light develop the rock’s palette from tree-bark-brown to rust and fake-tan tangerine, and the shapes shift with the shadows — an eagle became a frowning man in a hat.