One Day in Jordan: Lost Luggage, the Rose City, and a Donkey Who Definitely Knew Something We Didn’t
This was the final leg of our girls’ trip through Egypt and Jordan, and somehow the shortest stop packed in the most chaos, the most walking, and the most “wait, is that Indiana Jones’s fault?” energy of the entire two weeks.
Getting There Was Its Own Adventure
We had to transit in Cairo since there was no direct flight from Luxor to Jordan. We landed in Amman around 1pm with plans to see the Amman ruins and the Roman wall the next morning. Except my friend’s suitcase never showed up. Cue extra time at the airport filing a report, standing in a line with several other passengers whose bags had also gone missing. Our taxi driver later told us this was a very common problem on flights into Jordan — and honestly, that tracks. Queen Alia International Airport still shows up in travel forums and local news for lost-luggage headaches during busy periods, so if you’re flying in, it’s worth packing a change of clothes and any essentials in your carry-on, just in case history repeats itself.
We took an airport taxi to our hotel, a 45-minute drive. The process was easy — there’s an official taxi booth right outside the airport — but our driver spent the whole ride coughing and smoking with the window open, which was not exactly the relaxing welcome-to-Jordan moment we’d hoped for. The fare was metered and fine, but if that’s not your idea of a good time either, arranging a private transfer or hotel car pickup in advance is worth the extra cost.
We finally checked into our hotel around 4pm — too late for any sightseeing, so we called it and rested up for what we knew would be a long day ahead. We stayed at the Fairmont Amman, a genuinely excellent hotel with great hospitality. I’m loyal to Accor properties whenever I travel since I have an Accor membership, and Fairmont remains my go-to when I want a bit of luxury.
What You Can Actually See in Amman With Half a Day
Since the lost-luggage saga ate our one shot at sightseeing, here’s what we’d have done with even a half day in Amman, for anyone else short on time. The Citadel, the Roman Theatre, and the downtown souks all sit within a genuinely walkable triangle, so it’s realistic to hit all three in about four hours without feeling rushed.
Start at the Amman Citadel (Jabal al-Qal’a), perched on the city’s highest hill. Beyond the sweeping 360-degree views over Amman’s white-washed rooftops, the plateau holds the Temple of Hercules, the ruins of the Umayyad Palace complex, and Byzantine church foundations, all sitting within a compact, walkable site. From there, it’s a short descent down to the Roman Theatre, a beautifully preserved 6,000-seat amphitheater carved directly into the hillside — still acoustically sharp enough that you can hear someone talking normally from the very top row. Finish in Downtown Amman (Al-Balad), weaving through the fruit and spice souks, the gold market, and Amman’s oldest mosque, with a stop for a coffee or a plate of knafeh if you’ve got room after Egypt’s buffet-heavy final stretch. If you’re really tight on time, the Citadel alone is worth the detour just for the view.
Onward to Petra
With flight time eating into our already-short trip, we really only had one full day in Jordan, and we wanted to spend every hour of it in Petra. Our original plan had actually been to skip Amman for sightseeing entirely: land, go straight to Petra so we could start exploring early and make the most of the one full day, then spend our final night unwinding at a resort on the Dead Sea before flying home the next morning. A tidy, logical plan. Except by the time we sat down to book it, every decent hotel near the Petra entrance was already full for our dates — Petra Guesthouse was the only room left, and only for one night. So the plan got rearranged on the fly: one night in Amman first, then Petra, then fly out from the airport near Petra the next day — the Dead Sea resort night quietly dropped from the itinerary in the process.
Early breakfast, checkout, and an 8am pickup from the hotel got us on the road to Petra, with one stop for a toilet break and coffee for the driver. We arrived around 10:30am and were delighted to find Petra Guesthouse sitting right next to the Petra entrance. We checked in, dropped our bags, and joined the queue for tickets.
A quick note for anyone planning this now: Petra’s entrance fees for overnight visitors (classified as “accommodated visitors”) currently sit at 50 JD for a one-day ticket, 55 JD for two consecutive days, and 60 JD for three. If you’re staying in Jordan for three nights or more, the Jordan Pass is worth looking into before you arrive — it bundles your Petra ticket with the visa fee waiver and entry to 40+ other sites like Jerash and Wadi Rum, and for most multi-day itineraries it pays for itself. We picked up a brochure with the ticket, and it turned out to be a genuinely useful map of Petra’s various trails.
About Petra
Petra is a famous archaeological site in Jordan’s southwestern desert, dating to around 300 BC, when it served as the capital of the Nabatean Kingdom. Accessed via a narrow canyon called Al Siq, it’s home to tombs and temples carved directly into pink sandstone cliffs, which is exactly how it earned its nickname, the “Rose City.” The whole Petra complex sprawls across roughly 60 sq. km of the Petra Mountains — seeing all of it properly takes a good three days. With less than one day, like us, you have to be strategic about what you see beyond the Treasury.
Discoveries keep coming even now: a 1993 find of Greek scrolls dating to the Byzantine period, and more recently, satellite imaging that revealed a previously unknown monumental structure buried under the sand nearby.
When UNESCO named Petra a World Heritage Site in 1985, the Bedouin families living within the ruins were relocated by the Jordanian government. Then in the early 2000s, Petra was named one of the “New Seven Wonders of the World,” which sent tourism numbers climbing — and with it, ongoing efforts to protect the site from both foot traffic and environmental damage like flash floods.
After Petra was largely abandoned as a trading hub in the eighth century, its structures sheltered nomadic shepherds for centuries. It wasn’t rediscovered by the western world until 1812, when Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt documented it in his travel chronicles. Formal excavation began in 1929, led by British archaeologists Agnes Conway and George Horsfield alongside scholars Tawfiq Canaan and Ditlef Nielsen.
Getting to the famed Treasury involves a 2.2 km walk from the Visitor Center. The first 1.2 km runs through a wide canyon lined with ruined temples and buildings — easy to rush past on your way to the main event, but some of the finest examples of Nabatean architecture are sitting right there if you slow down.
How to Explore Petra
On foot / walking. The best way to see it, but be realistic about your fitness level and the time you have. Weather matters too — we visited in late October and it was a pleasant 20°C.
Horse ride. Offered from the Visitor Center to the horse stable, a short 1.2 km stretch.
Horse carriage. Runs from the stable to the Treasury. The path down is gently sloped, which makes for a nice walk — I wouldn’t recommend the carriage on the way in, since it moves fast and you’ll miss the slow build of walking through the Siq and that first glimpse of the Treasury. Most people save the carriage for the return trip instead. If that’s your plan, you need to be back at the Treasury by 5pm — we got there at 6pm and the carriages had already packed up for the day.
By camel. You’ll spot them right at the Treasury, sitting there looking photogenic. They can also carry you around the lower levels of Petra.
By mule or donkey. Most Bedouin guides you hire in Petra have access to a donkey, and this is the way to reach higher spots like the Monastery and the High Place of Sacrifice, especially useful if you’re travelling with kids or short on time. You’ll find donkeys clustered just past the Treasury.
A quick word on the animals: Petra’s working-animal welfare situation has been a well-documented concern for years, and it’s genuinely improved on some fronts — lighter carriages, a free on-site veterinary clinic, and welfare programs run with local partners like the Princess Alia Foundation have made a real difference. That said, conditions still vary a lot by handler, so if you do choose to ride, take a minute to actually look at the animal’s condition before you hop on, and don’t be afraid to walk away and pick another one — or walk instead, which more visitors are choosing to do these days.
The Siq
The ancient main entrance to Petra runs from the Dam to the Treasury: a rock canyon about 1,200 meters long and 3 to 12 meters wide, with walls reaching up to 80 meters high. Most of it is a natural rock formation, with the rest carved by the Nabateans.
By the time your feet are aching and you catch that first sliver of the Treasury through the canyon walls, you’ll feel like you’ve wandered straight into an Indiana Jones movie. Because, well, you basically have.
Treasury (Al-Khazneh)
The Treasury is one of the most elaborate temples in Petra, carved — like most of the city’s structures, including the Monastery — straight out of a sandstone rock face. It’s believed to have been the mausoleum of the Nabatean King Aretas IV in the 1st century AD. Local Bedouins gave it the name “Al-Khazneh,” or “The Treasury,” in the early 19th century, believing it held hidden riches.
Most tour groups stop right here, but we pushed on past the Treasury through the amphitheater, the Colonnaded Street, the Royal Tombs, the Nymphaeum, the Great Temple, Qasr al-Bint, and the Lion Triclinium, eventually reaching the Basin at the bottom of the stairs up to the Monastery. There’s a restaurant near the museum called The Basin that runs a buffet from noon to 3pm — we stopped there for lunch before continuing up.
The Journey to the Monastery
We’d planned to ride donkeys up to the Monastery to save our energy, and after reading up on the animal welfare situation in Petra, we made a point of choosing donkeys that looked healthy and well cared for.
What we hadn’t researched was what it’s actually like to climb a mountain trail on a donkey, with one handler managing all three of us at once. It was terrifying for me, and even more terrifying for my two friends. My donkey somehow got picked to lead — and I’m convinced he was the smartest of the three, even though he kept hugging the edge of the path the whole way up. The trail wasn’t especially wide, and we kept crossing paths with people walking down, which meant they constantly had to step aside for us — not a great feeling, and being in the lead position meant I was the one who had to actually call out and ask walkers to move aside so my donkey could get through. I felt awful doing it, and honestly wasn’t very good at it either, mostly just apologetic mumbling in the general direction of strangers rather than anything resembling clear instruction.
Meanwhile, behind me, things were falling apart in their own specific ways. Lucky’s donkey had apparently decided she personally was the problem and kept veering sideways, pushing her leg uncomfortably close to the rock wall with every few steps. Dian’s donkey, for its part, had bigger ideas entirely — it tried, more than once, to just turn around and head back down the mountain of its own accord, which meant our one handler spent most of the climb wrestling Dian’s donkey back into line and had zero attention left over to notice that I, up front, was doing a genuinely mediocre job of clearing the path. About two-thirds of the way up, the donkeys stopped, and we got off to walk the rest. By that point we were so thoroughly traumatized by the whole ordeal — the wall-scraping, the mutiny attempts, my own failed crowd control — that we decided then and there we were walking back down too, even though we’d already paid for the donkeys both ways. No amount of refund logic was going to get any of us back on those animals for a descent. That decision is exactly why we ended up coming down much later than planned and missed the horse carriages entirely.
The Monastery
The Monastery is one of the largest monuments in Petra, measuring 47m wide and 48.3m high. It follows a similar model to the Treasury, but with niches for sculptures replacing the bas-reliefs. A columned portico extends across the façade, and the interior holds two side benches and an altar against the back wall — originally used as a meeting space for religious associations. It dates to the early 2nd century AD, during the reign of King Rabel II. Later, the hall was repurposed as a Christian chapel, with crosses carved into the rear wall — which is how it earned the name “Monastery” (Dayr, in Arabic).
We sat there for a while trying to figure out how on earth we were going to get back down, half-joking that most of the guys running the donkey stands looked like extras from a Pirates of the Caribbean shoot.
We walked back toward the Treasury, stopping at a few spots we hadn’t managed to see on the way in. By the time we got there, it was after 5pm, and most of the day’s crowds had already left — the Treasury was nearly empty, which was honestly one of the best moments of the whole day.
When we first entered Petra, I’d shot down Lucky’s request to take the horse carriages, since that first 1.2km stretch was downhill and easy enough to walk. I promised her we’d take the carriages on the way back instead, once our feet were tired and it was an uphill slog. Famous last words. Because we’d taken so long making our way back on foot without the donkeys, the horse carriages were long gone by the time we needed them, so we ended up walking the full 2.3 km back to the Visitor Center after all. Our friendship was genuinely tested on that walk — Lucky was completely spent and at one point wanted to just stop in the middle of the road and set up camp there indefinitely. Dian and I spent the rest of the walk cheering her on and bribing her with the promise of a very large dessert waiting at the hotel if she just kept moving. It worked, but only just.
(For what it’s worth, the reason we’d taken the donkeys up to the Monastery in the first place was to claw back time, since we’d started the day at Petra later than the early-morning start we’d originally planned. Lesson learned: an early start buys you options later in the day that a late one quietly takes away.)
Worth knowing if you’re planning your own timing: Petra’s gates generally open around 6am and close in the early evening (roughly 6pm in summer, 4pm in winter), so plan your descent with that in mind. If you happen to be there on a Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday and still have energy left, Petra by Night now runs as a separate, bookable experience — the Siq and Treasury lit by around 15,000 candles starting at 8:30pm. We did not have that energy. By the time we reached the hotel, doing Petra at night — which would have meant walking the same route all over again — was completely off the table. Instead, we had dinner at the Cave Bar, reportedly one of the oldest bars in the world, carved straight into 2,000-year-old rock, before collapsing gratefully into our room at Petra Guest House.
Where We Stayed: Petra Guest House
Don’t let the name fool you — this is actually a four-star hotel run by Crowne Plaza, and one of only two proper luxury options right by the Petra Visitor Center (the other being the Movenpick). There’s also a budget-friendly Petra Moon Hotel in the same area. Most visitors base themselves in Wadi Musa, a small town a 10–15 minute drive away, but after the kind of day we’d had, staying steps from the entrance felt like the correct life choice.
Leaving Jordan
We left the next morning around 10am after breakfast, taking a longer route past the Dead Sea on our way to the airport, just to see it for ourselves. The road was hilly, but the views over the rocky desert were beautiful.
The Dead Sea is a salt lake bordered by Jordan to the east and Israel and the West Bank to the west, sitting in the Jordan Rift Valley and fed mainly by the Jordan River. Its surface sits 430.5 meters below sea level — the lowest elevation on land on Earth — and it’s one of the saltiest bodies of water anywhere, with almost ten times the salt content of ordinary seawater. That extreme mineral concentration is exactly what gives it its famous healing reputation.
There are several proper resorts right on the water — the Kempinski Hotel Ishtar, Mövenpick, Hilton, Marriott, and Crowne Plaza all sit along the same stretch of shoreline — which made it all the more painful knowing that was exactly the plan we’d had to scrap earlier for lack of availability. If I could go back and actually pull off the original itinerary, that resort night would have been the perfect capstone: after the physical toll of a full day scrambling around Petra on foot (and, apparently, on the backs of very judgmental donkeys), floating weightlessly in famously buoyant, mineral-heavy water and getting a proper spa treatment sounds like exactly the right way to decompress before a long flight — rather than going straight from dusty hiking boots to an airport lounge. If you’re planning your own Jordan leg, book that Petra-adjacent hotel and the Dead Sea resort night well in advance, so you don’t end up improvising the itinerary the way we did. We settled for a scenic pit stop and a handful of photos instead.
Final Thoughts
There’s so much more to see in Jordan, and five days would let you actually explore it properly. If you’re tight on time like we were, focus on Petra and save the rest of the country for a longer trip down the line.
Jordan was noticeably more expensive than Egypt, especially around Petra. If you’re staying more than three nights, the Jordan Pass is genuinely worth it — it folds your visa fee and Petra ticket into one purchase and unlocks a long list of other sites along the way.
Looking back at the whole two weeks now, Jordan was the shortest chapter but somehow the one that’s stuck with me the most vividly — maybe because we had so little slack in the schedule that every hour had to count, or maybe it’s just hard to compete with watching the Treasury reveal itself at the end of a mile of narrow canyon. Between Egypt’s sprawling, unhurried grandeur and Jordan’s tight, breathless sprint through one perfect site, the two countries ended up complementing each other in a way I hadn’t fully expected when we first pieced this trip together. If Egypt taught me to slow down and let a guide’s spontaneous suggestion reroute an entire evening, Petra taught me the opposite lesson: sometimes you only get one shot at a place, and the only real strategy is to walk further than the crowd is willing to, for as long as your legs will allow it.
This last stop wrapped up our two-week girls’ trip through Egypt and Jordan, and Petra was, without question, one of the absolute highlights. ❤️
