I have happy memories of Jordan, my favourite Middle Eastern country. I remember sitting on a low stool in a cafe in Amman, smoking a fragrant waterpipe and playing backgammon with a wise old man. His parents had given up their traditional nomadic desert life to come and live in the city when he was a boy. He bought me glasses of tea. In return he had the pleasure of winning several games of backgammon.

Ahmed threw the dice, one red, one green, onto the board of black wood and pale mother of pearl (“All the four colours of our flag,” he observed, exhaling a sweet plume of apple smoke above my head). He spoke of backgammon as being a philosophy for life: it is black and white and you have no choice over what is dealt for you, or over what other people do to you. But the choice that you do have is how to best play your own pieces in order to make all you possibly can of what you have been dealt.

With his wisdom ringing in my ears I continued down the rolling King’s Highway to the staggeringly lovely gorge of Wadi Dana that drops a vertical mile down towards the Dead Sea. Except for a few olive groves the land was virtually barren. Shepherd boys sat squinting as their goats foraged the flinty slopes. Outcrops of rocks, jebels, were red and rough and in the distance smoky blue mountains faded smoothly into the desert floor.  The mountain tops were clear against the sky but their bases merged together into one endless string of peaks, seeming to run across all Arabia.

Petra was every bit as beautiful as I had hoped since first watching Indiana Jones’ Last Crusade. It is a place that provokes ambition and far-sightedness. Projects that had taken several lifetimes to complete mocked the triviality of our modern lifestyles that demand instant gratification.

I was reading TE Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. So I was desperate to spend a few days in the vast natural amphitheatre of Wadi Rum, a magnificent swathe of blushing desert hemmed in by towering ramparts of rock. I imagined Lawrence and bands of vengeful Arabs, mounted on camels and armed to the teeth, riding silently up that valley, a “processional way greater than imagination”, where I now sat. I brewed tea on my camping stove read Lawrence describe how “our little caravan grew self-conscious, and fell dead quiet, afraid and ashamed to flaunt its smallness in the presence of the stupendous hills.”

The silent timelessness of Wadi Rumm reminded me of my own minute insignificance.  Lying on the valley floor the black stillness was so absolute that I could literally hear myself blink.  Rush hour felt a long way away and laughably irrelevant.