Yellow grit, the depressing mesh fences of army barracks, and long chains of oil tankers coming in from Saudi Arabia. This was the Middle East as imagined by people who don't know anything about the Middle East, and there had been nothing else in hours.
Road signs said "Iraq ahead". "Don't fall asleep!" laughed our driver, Ahmed. "Maybe I keep going, and you wake up in Baghdad!"
At last, something green. Palm trees. Then houses, a mosque, and a black basalt fortress. We had reached the point of the eastern desert of Jordan where the sands turns black with volcanic basalt rock. A trickle of travellers make it out here – 100km from Amman and well off the tourist trail between Petra, Wadi Rum and the Dead Sea – to see several desert castles, built in the seventh and eighth centuries by the Umayyads, one of those empires no one remembers, although they were once the biggest in the world, governing five million square miles that stretched from Spain to present-day Pakistan.
What brought us to the desert was the same thing that attracted the Umayyads (and before them the Romans, the Nabateans, and neolithic people): an oasis, the desert's only water source.
The Azraq wetland, an area of pools surrounded by tall grasses, bullrushes and reeds, is one of Jordan's six nature parks, established by the country's Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature. A million migratory birds used to stop here every year – filling the sky until they blocked out the sun. But no more. Since the 1980s the site has been in a state of environmental disaster as the Azraq water basin which feeds it has also been pumped to supply the population.
"One in every four glasses of water drunk in Amman comes from Azraq," say the boards in the visitor centre. Diagrams showed how the pools have shrunk to 0.4% of their original area.
Azraq may not be the paradise garden it once was (though the RSCN is fighting to get it back), but it's a fascinating stop-off after the castles. We explored the pools on wooden walkways, and spotted ducks, egrets and a cormorant from an adobe hide.
To encourage visitors to Azraq, the RSCN has turned a 1940s British field hospital into a lodge, decorated with period trunks, black and white photographs of Bedouin, plus a 1956 Land Rover. The barracks contain stylish tiled bedrooms with flagstone floors and cacti-studded desert views.
This forward-thinking way of combining eco-tourism with conservation has been put into practice in all of Jordan's six nature parks, which cover a range of landscapes – forests at Ajloun and Dibeen, the Rift Valley's canyons at Dana biosphere reserve, mountains and rivers at Mujib near the Dead Sea coast, and desert grassland at Shaumari, near Azraq.
Travellers dashing between the country's main attractions typically pay scant attention to these nature parks, but they are one of Jordan's best assets. I made them the focus of a 10-day tour of the country with my mum, but because Jordan's so small it was perfectly viable to include the major historic sites too.
Our first port of call in Amman – before its Roman amphitheatres, souks and modern art gallery – was the HQ of Wild Jordan, the RSCN offshoot responsible for eco-tourism, and for socio-economic projects that support the rural communities living around the reserves.
The architect-designed building on the edge of the capital's starting-to-be-hip district, Rainbow Street, is also a visitor centre, with a sun terrace affording views of the seven hills to which the city clings, a health food cafe and a boutique selling crafts made by people living near the reserves.
Oman has its frankincense, Egypt carpets, Morocco leather, Saudi gold, but Jordan didn't have much in the way of traditional crafts. So Wild Jordan has worked with villagers to develop some, using local, sustainable materials – painted ostrich eggs from Azraq, olive oil soap from Ajloun, Bedouin silverware from Dana.
Wild Jordan's director, British expat Chris Johnson, met us for a cup of herbal tea and had some exciting news. The government had just agreed to establish nine more protected areas, including three in the Rift Valley, plus two near Wadi Rum and one in Burqu, the black basalt desert we had seen near Azraq. There will be one in the limestone hills and deciduous forest on the border with Syria, another in a sub-tropical wetland south of the Rift Valley, and one at Jebel Masuda, an "amazing" mountain near Petra from which you can enter the famous site through a back route.
"We chose the most special and typically Jordanian eco-systems," he said, "but to get nine is exceptional."
It had taken a lot of work to persuade the government of the value of conservation, he explained. "They were always hoping to find a raw material that would change Jordan's fate. Feynan and Dana were almost lost to mining. But the minerals would have soon run out. Eco-tourism is more valuable."
Now the strategy is to keep tourists in Jordan longer, to explore more of the country. It's easy to do. By early afternoon the next day, we'd left Amman, seen Roman Jerash's dusty amphitheatres and chariot racetracks, walked the dark passageways of Ajloun's crusader castle, and were hiking in the fresh sunshine in the Ajloun forest reserve.
It was December, sunny but too cold for the reserve's safari tents, so we holed up in one of its gorgeous wooden cabins with a Calor Gas heater and read under thick blankets until we were called for a delicious dinner of lentil soup, salads and stew. Although sadly there was none of Jordan's lovely red wine, St George – all the eco-lodges are alcohol-free.
On our way to the next reserve, we stayed a night in Madaba to see its famous sixth century mosaic map of the Holy Land on the floor of St George's church, and stood the next day on nearby Mount Nebo, where Moses is said to have looked across the Dead Sea to Jericho.
"Just close your eyes for 15 seconds now," said Ahmed from the driver's seat as we headed south across flat, barren land on the King's Highway. "One, two..." he counted slowly. We hoped he was keeping his own eyes open. "15! OK!" Before us was the most incredible scene, an immense gaping canyon stretching into the distance. I was dumbstruck. The Mujib is Jordan's answer to the Grand Canyon, but I'd never even heard of it. Here Wild Jordan offers stays in eco-chalets, with swimming and canyoning trips along river trails, but in winter the water is too dangerous, so we had to give it a miss.
Instead we spent the next day at the impressive Karak crusader castle, then by the afternoon were at Petra. You don't need to read again about how incredible the rose-red city is, but what I'd underestimated was the staggering beauty of the landscape around it. We did a steep hike up to the Sacred High Place, where rock chasms run off in all directions. You'd need weeks of hard hiking to see all of it.
Afterwards we wanted to wash off the dust at a traditional hammam. "There is only a mixed one, if that is OK for you," said Ahmed. We thought it was. But then his mates turned up, and they all unexpectedly joined us in the marble steam rooms, larking about, and then kept "accidentally" bursting in on us while we got changed and had massages. They overstepped the mark, but I read later that Jordanian women would never go to a mixed hammam, so perhaps we were partly to blame.
As foreign females we were generally treated with respect, but in Jordan, strict boundaries are maintained between the sexes. Few women work, and they are not expected to make eye contact with male strangers.
But Jordan wants to modernise. Queen Rania is pushing for female social development through various charity projects, and Wild Jordan is doing its bit, employing women to make crafts and as lodge staff. But this has to be sensitively managed.
"At Ajloun, we developed a calligraphy workshop," Chris Johnson had told me back in Amman. "I visited and had a try, rather clumsily, so one of the female workers guided my hand with hers. The village found out and her family were angry – it was a scandal. She was made to quit her job."
But there are success stories, too. The Dana biosphere reserve – a canyon home to 800 plant varieties, 214 species of bird and 45 types of mammal – runs along the Rift Valley to the desert of Wadi Araba. The Bedouin who lived there were no longer allowed to hunt when it was made a nature park, but many were retrained as hotel staff at Dana Guesthouse at the top of the canyon and Feynan Ecolodge, at the bottom, or as nature guides leading insightful treks between them. Our guide, Mohammed showed us caves he'd lived in, wolf tracks, and plants for shampoo, but said he was happy to have left behind the hard Bedouin life.
Dana's lovely lodge had simple rooms with polished stone floors, iron beds with thick cream bedspreads, and Bedouin rugs, but the canyon views are its big attraction. In contrast, the dry desert setting of Feynan Ecolodge on the western edge of the reserve wasn't so beautiful, but the lodge itself was magical – lit by candles, and resembling a sandcastle. It is eco to the extreme – solar-powered and vegetarian, with clever water and cooling systems. And it is surrounded by archaeological sites dating back 10,000 years – Nabatean ruins, Roman copper mines, Byzantine churches, neolithic villages. Winter meant we couldn't try the canyoning, but we mountain-biked between the sites, and took tea in Bedouin tents.
We also took a tour of Dana village with Hamed, an RSCN guide. "Since the 1980s, tourism has changed life here," he said. "Before, there was no school, no TV, and women had to ask permission to leave the house. Now they go to university."
The village had been deserted when people moved to modern homes close to a new road, and its old stone and juniper wood buildings were crumbling. But the RSCN plans to restore them, and is offering free homes, plus jobs in the restaurants, museum and music venue it hopes to create there to entice villagers back.
We met Nabil, owner of a third of the village buildings, at his decades-old Dana Tower hotel, a low-cost backpackers' place, and a rival to the RSCN's Dana lodge. Though he was all for the restoration, he wasn't a big fan of the RSCN, wanting more decision-making to be in the villagers' hands: "They take money from tourists and spend it on many things. Not enough money goes to local people."
But what Wild Jordan is doing seems far better than other options. Our last stop was the Hammamet Ma'In hotsprings, where King Herod once bathed. Wild Jordan has a Dead Sea visitor centre nearby but no lodge, so we stayed at the posh Evason spa hotel, and swam in pools of 40C under steaming waterfalls.
I asked the manager if they employed local women. "No, women do not work in Jordan," he answered, assuring me that the towering hotel – with its $1,600 suites, Thai masseurs, western food, shuttle buses and luxury Sri Lankan fabrics – was eco-friendly. Sure, it had its own spring water, and an organic vegetable patch, but I am certain the lodges in the new Wild Jordan will offer a more authentic experience.
