Wadi Rum looks like the moon dressed up in rust. Great walls of sandstone and granite rise sheer from a flat desert floor of red sand, cut with canyons and carved with arches, and the whole protected area covers hundreds of square kilometres south of Jordan's King's Highway and east of the Desert Highway. The nearest sizeable town is Quweira, about twenty kilometres away, and Aqaba lies roughly an hour south.
People have lived here for thousands of years. Nabataean inscriptions and carvings are spread among the rocks, along with older petroglyphs, and the water springs, such as the one near Lawrence's Spring, made the valley a stop for caravans. T. E. Lawrence wrote of it in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and the film that made it famous in the 1960s was shot here. Today the local Bedouin run the camps, the jeep tours and the camel rides, and they know the paths and weather better than any visitor.
For riders, the main road to the village is smooth and quick, but the desert tracks beyond are sand, and a heavy road bike is no match for them. The sensible choice is to leave the machine at the visitor centre and join a local driver or guide, perhaps for sunset when the rock goes from orange to deep red and then to purple. Wind can whip up sand, and the midday summer heat is punishing. Spring and autumn are best, winter nights are cold, and the sky at night is full of stars.
Services are basic. There is a visitor centre and an entry fee for the protected area, and camps offer meals, usually chicken, rice, vegetables and flat bread cooked in the sand. Fill the tank in Aqaba or Quweira before heading in, and carry plenty of water. Mobile signal is patchy. If you stay the night in a camp, you will sleep under a roof of stars and wake to cold air and tea.