Kingdom of the faithful: Serena Mackesy visits Jordan, where tourists walk in the steps of the ancients

At first glance, the streets of downtown Amman resemble those of San Francisco. The only direction you can go is up; and at least 90 per cent of the population seems to be male, 90 per cent of them wear moustaches, and they spend much of their time snogging each other in public places.

But for females, particularly blonde females, Amman is not such good fun. Getting down the streets of San Francisco does not generally involve running the gamut of every man you pass saying 'Hello, how are you?' and blowing his nose into his facial hair. And San Franciscans make quite a point of not staring at everybody.

People's reactions when my pet archaeologist and I decided to go to Jordan without a man in tow varied from 'you'll love it' (the diplomat) to 'you can't do that, it's far too dangerous' (the tour company). Certainly, Arab countries are not the most relaxed of holiday destinations, so the lemon leggings and cropped T-shirts would have to go, for a start. But the pay-off for such sobriety (and a tan that stops at the elbows) is a fantastic combination of sounds, sight and smells. And there is tons of history. Despite the fact that a large chunk of the population has a taste for shell-suits, the sense that one is walking in the steps of the ancients is immeasurably strong.

We arrived in Amman at night. Our taxi driver was called Khaled. When we told him we had to meet a friend from the embassy, he said 'now you have two friends in Amman', and promptly charged us double the going rate for the trip in from the airport - still only about half the cost of a cab in from Heathrow. Amman, though not exactly your world cultural centre, is a scream of a city; all the roads have different names from their official ones, so that maps are useless, and everyone seems to orientate themselves by the Seiko sign downtown or the Intercontinental Hotel.

The city, like Rome, is built on seven jebels, and each one has a mosque on top, save the one crowned by the temple of Hercules and a museum full of chunks of Petra. You climb up to this via a series of staircases through people's backyards and under their washing lines; and, just when you are convinced that you must have gone wrong, you stumble upon a set of gigantic pillars.

In the afternoon, we sat on a pillar for a smoke and were caught unawares when the call to evening prayer began. The mosques in Amman are linked by a single sound system, on some sort of delay mechanism, so that as each phrase dies away on one hill it is taken up on the next: a sort of row, row, row your boat, only infinitely passionate. A muezzin's song, done right, is so powerful that it actually changes the light: one moment we were in blazing sunshine surrounded by chicken wire and the next we were plunged into a desert sunset. When he finished, the sound of car horns faded back in and we realised that the city had been completely still.

It is easy, within a day's strike of Amman, to see a lot of grand stuff. Jerash, for example, one of the cities of the Decapolis, was wealthy enough to support a theatre, temples, a forum and baths. It is accessible by bus, but the last one back to the city goes at some unearthly hour and there are no hotels, so it's better to get a cab to take you for the day.

Jordan has more history than you can shake a stick at (the King's Highway is a Bible junkie's paradise) and certainly more than you can cram in to a couple of weeks - assuming you are going to spend four days scratching the surface of Petra.

Our plan was to get down to Aqaba (where T E Lawrence distinguished himself by accidentally shooting his camel in the head) and work our way back up. So we caught a bus.

JETT buses have teeny television screens in the front that show Egyptian yarns about women fainting and men pushing bottles into each other's faces. My courtships were never so exciting. A hostess

sells stewed tea and instant coffee: my friend, nursing a rampant mini-bar hangover, nearly lost her cool when she took her first sip.

Out of the window, we could see scrubby sand dotted with stone shacks bearing hopeful shop signs; in the distance were mountains of striped sandstone. Running across the desert and up through the foothills is the most romantic railway in the world. It carries phosphates from the huge Wadi al-Hesa mine down to the sea.

Aqaba, encircled on three sides by naked mountains too steep to climb, has the air of a French seaside town which has been picked up, corniche and all, and dumped on the moon. The hotels, with piers going out into the Red Sea and offering fine views of Eilat and Sinai, are consciously geared to Westerners - which means that the food leans more towards shellfish than lamb's brains, small boys with specs hog the dance floor and British squaddies make a pain of themselves. But it's a good place to rest up and feel relatively safe in a swimsuit. And those with a taste for offal can sate it thoroughly in the centre of town among the habibi-tat shops.

Desert is something you can't imagine until you've seen it. When Lawrence was beating his friends into whipping their enemies at Wadi Rum, its harshness wasn't cut by roads: it just stretched unbroken to where the dunes climbed half-way up the mountains. We were driven through it to Petra by a man called Gemil, which is Arabic for beautiful. Somehow the desert looks less romantic when you're doing 60 miles an hour on a clifftop above it and the driver is singing Bedu love songs and shouting 'Aiwah] y'allah]' every two minutes.

Petra is not just the jewel of Jordan: it is the most beautiful place in the world. It is menacing and romantic, as rose-red (and yellow, black and purple) as one could hope, and hacked with startling lightness of touch from rock faces hundreds of feet high. This is the relic of a civilisation so cruel and so imaginative as to have chopped the top 20ft off a mountain in order to create a couple of obelisks. It is worth enduring just about anything to get to Petra.

In Petra, below the Place of the Merciful Phallus and beside the amphitheatre, we encountered Jihad, one of the excitable youths who gallop up and down the mountain chasms on a chestnut pony.

He approached us, draped himself sidewise on his saddle, flung his red-and-white-checked towel casually across his shoulder and gestured to a mare standing below the Urn Tomb. 'You see that horse?' he said. 'She's looking for man hjorse.'

VISITOR'S FACT FILE

Getting there: British Airways (0345 222111) operates a joint London-Amman service with Royal Jordanian, but the lowest official fare is pounds 742. Major Travel (071-485 7017) has a fare of pounds 389 for travel on Air France via Paris.

RED TAPE: All visitors to Jordan require visas. These can be issued upon arrival at Amman.

The cost for British visitors is pounds 22. The Jordanian Embassy in the UK is at 6 Upper Phillimore Gardens W8 7HB (071-937 3685).

RECOMMENDED READING: Jordan and the Holy Land, Discovery Guide by Diana Darke (Immel, pounds 12.95).

(Photograph omitted)