Last Updated: May 2026
From Aqaba we traveled north by bus into the desert, and the landscape changed fast. Within an hour the Red Sea coastline was gone and we were moving through a world of rust-red sand, towering sandstone cliffs and open sky in every direction. Wadi Rum — often called the Valley of the Moon — is one of those places that photographs well but photographs insufficiently. The scale of it, the silence, the way the color shifts through the day from burnt orange to deep ochre to purple as the sun moves — none of that comes through until you’re standing in it. This is southern Jordan at its most elemental, and it was unlike anything we’d seen before.
