Amman in Jordan – brief visit

Monday, 17 November 2025

In the two months from mid-August to mid-October I travelled to a number of countries – Seychelles, Mauritius, Algeria (north coast and south Sahara) – and to one French colony – Reunion. In fact I started that little circuit with a longer visit to Nepal, that will be the subject of my next couple of blogs.

And in the middle I made a brief visit to Amman, the capital of Jordan. I’ve been to Jordan several times before, but tourist-wise the country is having a tough time due to its position in the world, the straight-line distance between Amman and Gaza is just under 150km. Not that there’s anything like straight-line travel in this corner of the world. In fact Israel’s all out genocidal programme to totally destroy Gaza – people? children? just incidental damage according to the Israelis – has not infringed on Jordan, but it’s certainly scared off tourists.

▲ The Roman Theatre in Amman – I went no further than Amman on this visit, but I have been to Jordan before and made the obligatory trip down to Petra and to other attractions. My most recent visit was in 2012 when again I didn’t get far from Amman, visiting the wonderful mosaics at nearby Madaba. We’d visited Amman’s big Roman Theatre – much larger than the theatres I’d see in Algeria soon afterwards – with our children on our first visit. I certainly clambered up and down the many tiers much more rapidly than I do on this visit.

A sign explains who sat where in Roman times: senators and seats of honour at the bottom (ima cavea), citizens in the middle tiers (media cavaea), urban poor, foreigners, slaves and woman right at the top (summa cavea)

This brief visit to Jordan was for the annual tourism conference organised by the Canadian based, but very international, travel company G Adventures. I went to their conference last year as well, held in Jaipur, India. After which I made a hill station circuit to Mussoorie, Rishikesh and Haridwar

▲ Next year G Adventures are moving further west to Morocco for their 2026 gathering.

▲ Having checked out the Roman Theatre I then climbed steeply uphill to the superb Roman ruins at the Citadel. Visitors get more than just wonderful ruins, the views over Amman are also splendid and it all looked even more impressive the following evening when G Adventures held their ‘White Party’ amongst the floodlit ruins.

▲ More floodlit ruins – the Eastern Gate of the Umayyad Palace

▲ Finally the White Party moved on to the Hyatt Hotel for a performance by The Jacksons. It’s certainly not The Jackson Five anymore, Michael Jackson at the very least has departed, and I couldn’t really be bothered to sort out who was original and who had subsequently signed up, never mind they were great performers. And next morning I flew out to Algeria.