The Departure
Amman's noise hit me like a slap the moment I stepped off the plane—traffic singing in Arabic, call to prayer folding over the hills, the smell of za'atar and diesel fuel mixing in the thermal soup of a September afternoon. I'd booked a room in Jabal Amman, the kind of place where backpackers talk too loud and the wi-fi works whenever it feels like it. But I didn't come here for the backpacker hostel circuit. I came because I was forty-two and my marriage had ended quietly, the way most things do—not with fury but with the slow, inexorable realisation that we'd become strangers who still knew each other's coffee orders.
I came to disappear into somewhere old.
Jordan, I'd read, specialised in old. And ghosts. And the particular kind of solitude you can only find when you're surrounded by thousands of years of human footprints.
The first decision, the sensible one, was to get out of the capital. My friend Roo had done this the year before—she'd booked the Private Two Day Tour To Petra, Wadi Rum and Dead Sea from Amman Private Two Day Tour To Petra, Wadi Rum and Dead Sea from Amman and come back transformed, or at least convinced that transformation was possible. She'd spent day one driving three hours south to Petra, where she'd walked the Siq on foot—that miraculous slot canyon where the light bends pink and gold and the Nabatean ruins emerge like a promise carved into stone. Then the Dead Sea, that drowsy, salty nowhere. Then Wadi Rum.
But I wasn't Roo. I've never been good at schedules, even ones designed for people like me—people who want to see everything and feel nothing in particular.
So I hired a car instead. Private Flexible Transportation from Amman to Jordan's Cities Private Flexible Transportation from Amman to Jordan’s Cities . sounds corporate and it sort of is, but that was the point. A driver, a door, the ability to stop whenever something caught my eye. I packed a canvas bag with more water than clothes, a notebook I wouldn't use, and the kind of hope that comes from running away.
My driver was called Hassan. He was fifty-something, with the kind of weathered face that suggested he'd spent half his life squinting at horizons. He asked where I was from, and when I said France but also London but actually nowhere, he nodded like this made perfect sense.
The North Country
I should have gone straight south to Petra like everyone else. Instead, I asked Hassan to take me north first—to the edges, the forgotten margins. Finn from the office had done the Trip to Jerash, Ajloun and Umm Qais Trip to Jerash, Ajloun and Umm Qais, covering serious historical ground in a single loop through northern Jordan. He'd come back talking about Jerash, the one-time Gerasa, where the Roman columns still stand in their columned streets and the Temple of Artemis watches over everything with the kind of indifference only ancient ruins can manage.
Jerash undid me in ways I wasn't expecting.
It wasn't the archaeology—though the archaeology was breathtaking, genuinely. It was walking through those ruins alone at golden hour, watching groups of school children and tour buses gradually thin out, until I was standing in a theatre that once held thousands and was now just me and the wind and the echo of Latin prayers nobody remembered anymore. I sat on a stone step, the kind that thousands of people sat on two thousand years ago, and I cried a little. Not dramatically. Just the kind of crying you do when you realise you've been holding your breath for months.
Ajloun was cooler—literally, it's higher—and Umm Qais was the kind of place that reminded me why I love the Levant: a town built on the ruins of a city built on the bones of another city, where a nineteenth-century Ottoman house shares a parking lot with a second-century Greek settlement and nobody seems bothered by the temporal vertigo.
Hassan bought me coffee at a roadside café and asked, without asking, if I was alright. I told him I was fine. He didn't believe me, but he didn't push.
The Red Desert
Wadi Rum was supposed to be the destination. What it became was a reckoning.
I'd hired a 5-hours Jeep Tours + Free sunset 5-hours Jeep Tours + Free sunset through the rust-coloured dunes, the slot canyons that narrow until you swear the Jeep's shoulders will scrape the rock, the towering formations that look like they've been standing there since the planet cooled. My driver was a Bedouin man called Saleh, who spoke English with the careful precision of someone who'd learned it by listening rather than studying. He showed me ancient carvings—petroglyphs left by people who were already ancient when Rome was building its theatres.
"People come here to find themselves," Saleh said, not unkindly, as we watched the sunset paint the dunes the colour of dried blood. "I think sometimes they find themselves and don't like what they find. That's why they cry."
"Do I look like I'm about to cry?" I asked.
"Everyone cries in Wadi Rum," he said. "Eventually."
He was right, of course. As the sun dropped below the horizon and the sky went the colour of a bruise, I did cry—or laugh, or something in between. The desert stretched out in every direction, indifferent to me, and for the first time in months I felt properly small. Properly temporary. Which somehow made everything feel lighter.
The Underwater Country
Aqaba is where Jordan meets the sea, and it's weirdly, stubbornly hopeful. The Red Sea here is warm and stuffed with history—not the kind written in books but the kind scattered across the seabed like a graveyard of human ambition.
Priya from the Global Hobo crew had done the 2-Hour Private Scuba Experience in Aqaba 2-Hour Private Scuba Experience in Aqaba, and she'd come back talking about shipwrecks and plane wreckage and tank debris scattered across the seabed, all of it colonised by coral and fish and the kind of life that moves on regardless of human drama.
I'm not a diver—never have been—but I put on a snorkel and mask and decided to fail gracefully at the shallows. And there it was: the wreckage of a small plane, covered in soft corals, fish darting in and out of the cockpit like office workers going about their day. A tank, half-buried in sand. An anchor chain leading somewhere I couldn't see. All of it held by the water, held by time, held by the indifference of the sea.
I floated there for an hour, watching the ruins of someone else's story, and I thought about the ruins I'd seen in the north—the columns and the temples and the theatres—and how everything ends up underwater eventually, or at least under something. And how that's not as sad as it sounds.
Hassan was waiting when I came out, with a towel and mint tea and no questions. We drove back to Amman as the sun set, the desert fading from rust to purple to black, and I realised that I hadn't thought about my marriage in three days.
That felt like progress.
The Return
I spent my last night in Amman in a café in downtown, drinking coffee so strong it tasted like iron, watching the city lights multiply as the evening fell. A woman next to me was reading poetry in French—Baudelaire—and we started talking. She was a translator, based in Brussels, and she'd left a good job because the commute made her feel like a ghost.
We didn't solve anything. But we sat there for three hours, two middle-aged women running from half-different versions of the same problem, and the coffee kept coming and the night kept deepening and for the first time in a long time, I didn't feel like I needed to be somewhere else.
Jordan gave me what I came for, I think. Not answers—the desert doesn't deal in answers—but a kind of clarification. A sense that ghosts can move on, that ruins aren't failures, that being small and temporary in the face of something vast is actually the whole point.
I boarded the flight home with a pocket full of sand and no plans to get married again. Both seemed like wins.
