Wadi Rum offers the full-blown desert experience, with arching horizons of sand broken by towering sandstone mountains, all saturated with colour in the way that only deserts are: achingly blue skies, rich ochre rocks and sand that varies from the lightest straw to deep, golden honey depending on the time of day. Travelling through this spectacle with your Bedouin driver in his 21st century camel (generally a Toyota Landcruiser), you visit natural landmarks like canyons and rock bridges, and then see evidence of those who’ve passed this way before in rock inscriptions dating back hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. It was here that Lawrence of Arabia fashioned his unique desert fighting force and there are numerous sites associated with his exploits. But more than anything else Wadi Rum offers the chance to enjoy the silence and majesty of one of the world’s great landscapes.