FEW films evoke the breathtakingly raw beauty of the Middle
Eastern desert as successfully as the Peter
| Image: PCL |
O’Toole classic, Lawrence of Arabia. Now, the
enigmatic figure of T E Lawrence is returning once more to Jordan,
70 years after his death.
As a young British soldier, Lawrence united the disparate Arab
tribes in a daring uprising against the Turks. Now, by devising
Lawrence-themed tours the Jordan Tourism Board is looking to the
legend – or at least that of the man portrayed by
O’Toole in the epic 1962 film classic – to boost
tourist numbers after several years of poor arrivals, security
concerns and empty hotel rooms.
Despite traditionally being known as one of the safest tourist
destinations in the Arab world, Jordan’s geographical
proximity to Israel’s West Bank, coupled with general unease
in the region, has done the destination few favours. But UK
arrivals to Jordan are likely to top 50,000 for last year, up from
34,750 in 2003, partly thanks to a concerted £250,000
marketing drive by the JTB last year. More joint initiatives with
operators are in the pipeline this year and two fam trips for a
total of 50 agents are planned.
JTB sales and marketing director David Symes said: “Last
year’s joint marketing campaigns with the trade paid off and
will continue this year.”
The Lawrence-themed tours follow in his fabled footsteps
visiting key locations from the film and aim to change negative
perceptions of the destination.
Explore Worldwide senior product manager Peter Crane said:
“Jordan has been firmly back on the agenda since last spring.
There’s a lot of pent-up demand – we ran 24 trips last
year, all full, and forward bookings look good.”
Bales Worldwide marketing executive Alex Porter said Jordan is
definitely turning a corner. “There’s a lot more
confidence in the destination and with forward bookings up around
20% for Jordan tours, and 25% for fully inclusive tours business,
booking figures reflect this.”
But does the Lawrence tour stand up on the ground? Some of the
mass-market desert camps in Wadi Rum would have Lawrence heading
for the hills, while genuine Lawrence fans may find the use of his
name is tenuous in some locations.
“There are two ways to stay in Wadi Rum,” said
Explore’s Crane. “Some operators use the more
commercialised camps, but we found people wanted a quieter and more
authentic desert experience, so we use non-fixed camps in the Siq
al Barrah gorge to the north of Wadi Rum’s main
valley.”
Porter added: “The romantic notions of the Lawrence legend
make for an interesting angle. But our main emphasis is always on
Jordan as a destination – the country sells itself.”
Travel Weekly flew to the desert to join one of the JTB’s
inaugural Lawrence tours.
Day one:
Amman to Petra
The tour starts in Amman, the Jordanian capital, where our appetite
for desert-bound adventure was whetted with a journey on the Hedjaz
Steam Railway, the 1,060-mile Turkish-built railway that runs from
Istanbul via Jordan and Syria to Saudi Arabia. Despite
Lawrence’s sterling efforts to blow up sections of the track
in 1916 to halt the supply of arms to the Turks, the train still
makes the seven-hour journey as far as Damascus. Today, the only
invading forces are a group of horsemen on Arabian thoroughbreds
who provide a sideshow to the journey by staging a fake kidnapping
of a portly German tourist.
As the train rasps through the ramshackle outskirts of town,
there’s still enough soot from the engine to choke a camel.
Arriving in Jiza, a dusty desert settlement two hours down the
track, we transferred to buses for the journey south along the
187-mile Southern Desert Highway to Petra.
Day two:
Petra to Wadi Rum
Petra, the ancient city of the Nabataean kingdom that ruled Arabia
2,000 years ago, remains Jordan’s primary tourist
attraction.
Traditionally Petra attracted around 1,000 visitors daily;
currently only a few hundred pass through the narrow
pink-hued gorge to emerge, blinking in the sunlight, at the
magnificent Treasury building. From Petra we head by bus for the
heart of the Jordanian desert, Wadi Rum. This desolate stretch of
desert is home to the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a range of mountains
on the west side of the desert that provided the inspiration for
Lawrence’s autobiographical novel of the same name.
In the book, as in the film, Lawrence recounts his tales of desert
life against a backdrop of romantic descriptions of the unforgiving
landscape and Bedouin people whose lives he came to share. The
highlight of the tour is the chance to spend a night sleeping under
a blanket of desert stars in Wadi Rum, enjoying the typical Bedouin
hospitality that characterises desert life in the region. As the
sun set we watched the mountains change colour across Wadi Rum
before settling down with an apple-scented hookah pipe under the
stars.
Day three:
Wadi Rum to Aqaba
The next morning our guide woke us at an hour so ungodly even the
camels were still dreaming. It was worth it, however, to catch the
sunrise over the shifting desert sands, just as Lawrence had the
morning he set out to capture Aqaba 85 years before us – a
scene captured superbly by the film’s director David
Lean.
From the heart of the desert it’s less than an hour by bus to
Jordan’s Red Sea diving resort, Aqaba. On July 6 1917,
Lawrence led his armies to victory at the coastal town of Aqaba,
taking the town from the Turks and, according to the film, enjoyed
a moment’s quiet contemplation on his camel looking out at
the sunset over the Red Sea. Today, the sunset is as impressive as
ever, but the view is of building sites along the coast.
Jordan has big plans for the development of Aqaba over the next few
years, including a proposal to double the size of the port and
flood the bay with a marina. Among all the new buildings, luxury
hotels and tourist cafés, the only remaining testimony to
Aqaba’s former life is the 15th century fort, built by a
Mamluk sultan, where the ghosts of Lawrence’s army live
on.
