Explore Jordan: Jerash, Petra, Wadi Rum & the Dead Sea, 7 Nights

Our representative meets you inside the arrivals hall at Queen Alia International Airport, before immigration, and helps you through the entry formalities. Once you have your luggage you are driven to your hotel in Amman. The evening is free; a guided evening tour of the old and new city with dinner can be added at extra cost. No meals are included today.

After breakfast you see Amman, a city built over a series of hills and known in Greco-Roman times as Philadelphia. You visit the Citadel, with the Temple of Hercules and the Umayyad Palace, and the Roman Theatre below it. You then drive north to Jerash, one of the best-preserved Roman provincial cities anywhere, with colonnaded streets, temples, plazas, theatres and city gates that lay under sand for centuries. There is an optional lunch nearby at a kitchen run by the women of Souf village, at extra cost, before the drive back to Amman. Meals included today: breakfast.

You leave Amman for Mount Nebo, where by tradition Moses looked out over the Promised Land; the memorial church on the summit holds Byzantine mosaics, and the view takes in the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea. In Madaba, the City of Mosaics, you visit St George's Church and its sixth-century mosaic map of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, the oldest of its kind. Further south you stop at Kerak Castle, a Crusader stronghold later enlarged by the Ayyubids and Mamluks, before continuing to Petra to check in. Meals included today: breakfast.

The whole day is for Petra, the Nabataean capital carved into rose-red sandstone more than 2,000 years ago and now a UNESCO World Heritage site. You walk in through the Siq, a natural gorge about a kilometre long, to the Treasury, and with two nights in town there is time to go on to the tombs, the theatre and the colonnaded street at your own pace. A short horse ride from the visitor centre to the mouth of the Siq is part of the entrance ticket if you want it. Petra by Night, a candle-lit walk to the Treasury held on certain evenings, can be added at extra cost. Meals included today: breakfast.

After breakfast you visit Little Petra and the nearby Neolithic village of Beidha, one of the earliest settled villages known, where reconstructions show how its houses were built. You then drive to Wadi Rum, the Valley of the Moon, for a two-hour ride in an open Bedouin 4x4 among sandstone mountains, narrow canyons and red dunes. You stay at a desert camp, where a Bedouin dinner is served. Stargazing with an astronomer and a hot-air balloon flight can be arranged at extra cost, subject to weather. Meals included today: breakfast and dinner.

After breakfast at the camp you drive north and down to the Dead Sea, more than 400 metres below sea level and the lowest point on the earth's surface. You check in at a resort on the shore and the rest of the day is free to float in the water, which is about ten times saltier than the ocean, try the black mud, or sit by the pool. Meals included today: breakfast.

You leave the Dead Sea for Iraq al-Amir, in the hills west of Amman, a village among springs and olive trees with a Hellenistic-era monument and caves nearby. Here you visit the women's cooperative, where local women make handmade paper, pottery and handwoven cloth. You continue to As-Salt, a hill town of Ottoman-era stone houses that is on the UNESCO World Heritage list as a place of tolerance and urban hospitality, and then to Amman for the last night. Meals included today: breakfast.

After breakfast you are driven to Queen Alia International Airport, where the package services end. Meals included today: breakfast.