On our penultimate day in Jordan, we visited the Citadel and the Roman Theatre, alongside their museums. We were also steered around the old quarters of the city by Iain Stewart, who I first came across via his BBC series on geology and by speaking at a virtual conference on mining and minerals he chaired for Britain’s Natural History Museum. he now holds the Jordan-UK El Hassan bin Talal Research Chair in Sustainability at Jordan’s Royal Scientific Society.
Iain and his wife, Paola, took us under their wing, among other things steering us uphill to Amman’s Rainbow Street and then on to Trinitae’s Soap House. Fabulous scents and soaps. Inadvertently, we were slightly late back for the last supper with our Exodus group, but it seemed to go down without too much of a storm.
Overall, I couldn’t recommend the Exodus 12-day tour of Jordan more warmly. There were occasional glitches, of course, with the Gaza horrors raging in the background, but the trip more than satisfied the desire to visit the country that ignited when my original nuclear family went briefly across the border with Israel back in 1959, when I was nine and we were living in Cyprus.
Without being greedy, I can’t wait to go again.

















