It traces the stunning, extraterrestrial landscape featured in films like Star Wars and Dune, while helping to preserve traditional Bedouin culture.
My Bedouin guide Abdallah led the way up and into the crags of Jebel Umm Ishrin (1,753m), the sheer, eastern wall of Jordan’s most spectacular valley: Wadi Rum. Though it’s considered one of the world’s most breathtaking desert landscapes today, few outsiders had ever heard of Wadi Rum in 1917 when British archaeologist and writer TE Lawrence travelled through, describing this eastern wall as “one massive rampart of redness”.
Forty-five years later, his journey inspired the film Lawrence of Arabia, which effectively introduced Wadi Rum to the outside world.
Long before Lawrence, local Bedouin scrambled to dizzying heights on these cliffs, blazing vertiginous paths to needle the mountains’ narrowest gaps, reaching their innermost fissures and skirting their dome-capped summits on the hunt for ibex.
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As Abdallah and I followed in their footsteps, clambering up the cleft of Umm Ejil (also known as Rakhabat Canyon), the passage narrowed and rock walls popped with weathered niches and delicate natural columns, as if marking the approach to an ancient shrine. Panting, I dropped to a black sandstone bench to rest beside Abdallah. We were deep in the heart of Jebel Umm Ishrin, engulfed in its silence, until a human-like whistle suddenly broke the quiet. I craned my neck to scan the surrounding cliffs. Such high, hidden reaches have long been considered the hideouts of magical jinn (genies).
Anthon Jackson Wadi Rum’s surreal landscape has served as the filming location for numerous blockbuster movies (Credit: Anthon Jackson)Anthon Jackson
Wadi Rum’s surreal landscape has served as the filming location for numerous blockbuster movies (Credit: Anthon Jackson)
Abdallah smiled: a starling, he explained. Their two-part whistle is a familiar sound in the surrounding Hisma plateau.
Of the area’s hundreds of miles of red-sand desert, the bulk of which stretches beyond the Saudi border, it’s Jordan’s fortuitous sliver that is by far the best known. It’s this stretch, centred on the Unesco-inscribed Wadi Rum Protected Area, that a bewitched Lawrence described as “magically haunted” and “vast and echoing and God-like”. In recent decades, this extraterrestrial terrain has served as the backdrop of numerous blockbuster films, including Prometheus (2012), The Martian (2015), Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) and Dune (2021 and 2024).
It was also here, after years of careful scouting by a group of Bedouin and British friends, that a brand-new long-distance hiking route was unveiled in February 2023: The Wadi Rum Trail. This 10-day, clockwise circuit twists 120km from Jebel Umm Ishrin, encompassing the best of Wadi Rum’s dreamlike landscapes, venturing far beyond the well-trodden 4×4 paths and into the heart of the Protected Area. As one of the trail’s co-creators, Ben Hoffler, explained, it’s a rich amalgam of Bedouin trails: “Among the pathways it links are walking tracks, shepherding tracks, camel tracks, hunting routes, smuggling routes [and] part of the old darb al-hajj (pilgrimage route) to Mecca.”
Hoffler has spent more than a decade blazing mountain paths in the region, including Egypt’s Sinai and Red Sea Mountain trails and the Bedouin Trail – a transcontinental 1,200km route linking Jordan to Upper Egypt. Still, for Hoffler, there’s a distinct and enduring allure to Wadi Rum. “The mountains tower up and soar up in a way that has a grandeur that I haven’t seen in other parts of the Hisma plateau. [Wadi Rum] also cradles a Bedouin culture that remains in many ways more traditional than what you’ll find in the Saudi Arabian parts of the Hisma… It has a special feeling.”
Alamy Most visitors breeze through Wadi Rum in enclosed 4×4 tours (Credit: Alamy)Alamy
Most visitors breeze through Wadi Rum in enclosed 4×4 tours (Credit: Alamy)
Like the ingenious Nabatean civilisation that built Petra many centuries before them, the Zalabieh (the most prominent Bedouin community within the Protected Area today) were drawn to Wadi Rum by the perennial springs that trickle at the base of Jebel Rum – the majestic massif that towers over the valley just opposite Jebel Umm Ishrin. Sprouting with wild mint thickets, the rock walls around the springs are adorned with ancient Thamudic and Greek inscriptions along with several distinctly Nabatean shrines.
Yet, until only a few generations ago, the Bedouin village located at the base of Jebel Rum was little more than a huddle of goat-hair tents. Thanks to government efforts since the 1930s, the majority of the Bedouin here (as elsewhere in Jordan) have now permanently settled, with SUVs effectively replacing camels and 4×4 tourism driving the local economy. Most such tours head south, following the valley along a virtual highway of tracks.
By contrast, the Wadi Rum Trail climbs east into the twisting bowels of the mountains, losing the crowds from the start. Ten days later, it ends where it began, with increasingly hair-raising abseils down the face of Jebel Rum landing you back at the springs.
Creating the trail
Climber and adventurer Tony Howard was first drawn to Wadi Rum in the 1980s and has since played a pivotal role in putting Wadi Rum on the tourism map. In exploring and publishing the region’s first climbing routes, he struck up lasting friendships with Zalabieh members and was deeply impressed by their hospitality and knowledge of the steep terrain.
Anthon Jackson “The Wadi Rum Trail first and foremost pays homage to the Bedouin of Wadi Rum” (Credit: Anthon Jackson)Anthon Jackson
“The Wadi Rum Trail first and foremost pays homage to the Bedouin of Wadi Rum” (Credit: Anthon Jackson)
After Howard and Hoffler hiked the Sinai Trail together in Egypt, the two began collaborating with Howard’s friends in Wadi Rum – among them Zalabieh elders – to create a similar long-distance trail in Jordan.
Like Hoffler’s other projects in Egypt, the Wadi Rum Trail was designed with both hikers and locals in mind. Though tackling the trail on your own is permitted, the creators are convinced that the most rewarding experience is to be had in the company of Bedouin guides.
“The Wadi Rum Trail first and foremost pays homage to the Bedouin of Wadi Rum,” said Howard. “They know the area, its flora and fauna intimately from ancestral knowledge – and they are always good company and good fun!”
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“There are many hearts in this path,” said one such Zalabieh elder, Sabbah Eid. “[It’s a] beautiful experience with nature and the life of the Bedouin, far from communication and modern life… it gives a special spirit to the place – complete calm.” As Eid explained, much of the impetus for the trail’s creation was to support the Bedouin community, connecting “a new generation of young people to work on this path – instead of working with tours on cars”.
Hoffler believes that Bedouin-led efforts like the Wadi Rum Trail can help preserve the Bedouin’s natural environment and cultural heritage. “If history have shown us anything it’s that the Bedouin known how to live sustainably in the wilderness,” Hoffler said.
