Well firstly before I go into too many details:

1) I spent 7 hours in the sun from 10am till 5pm and didn't burn (go Scottish skin mixed with factor 50 sunscreen).

2) I had Turkish Coffee and didn't get the usual stabbing chest pain and heart palpitations (I am still wide awake though)

Both of these are highlights but not THE highlights.

Mohammed, our most excellent driver, picked us up at 6.15am and we set off on the 320 mile round trip. We hit the dark desert highway (Eagles songs bouncing around in my head) and set out dodging police speed traps, Jordanian Mario Kart driving and the occasional flatbed pick up with camels in the back.

If you told me I was going to go to a country that was full of red rock desert with little else and I'd find it beautiful, I would have laughed you out of town. It is however deeply beautiful. As flat as the fens, but an intriguing lunar landscape with every crack in the ground telling stories of wind direction, long forgotten rivers or ancient earthquakes.

We quickly stopped into a souvenir store and grabbed some pressies. It was apparently cheaper than at Petra but in Jordan everything is a minimum of 1 dinar. It creates the paradoxical situation where a pin badge is ridiculously over-priced but a hand crafted carving is ridiculously cheap.

We turned off the highway after around 2 hours and hit the road through Wadi Mussa (the valley of Moses) this produced an interesting talk about Islam from Mohammed (one of many including Tu Pac, John Travolta and how England play boring rugby). There is really a lack of awareness of how intertwined Islam, Judaism and Christianity are.

We stopped to take some pictures high up in the valley and then headed down to the entrance to Petra.

As park entrances go, 50 Dinar (50 pounds) is steep but it is well worth what we found.

After some joking with a policeman about our lack of passport and papers -Wayne Rooney got us out of that scrap - we entered the park.

The sun was 35 degrees, we were met with the offers of camels, horses and donkey rides to get us around the site but being an occasional P.E. teacher and a proper P.E. teacher we went on in foot.

The entrance treated us to some interesting caves and carvings. Then we entered the Siq...

As local legend has it the Nabataeans were being chased down by a rival force and came across the rocks around Petra. Seemingly backed against a cliff face, the rocks opened and provided them with shelter.

It is through this passageway you begin to enter the city. This in itself is awe inspiring. The natural rock twists and turns; changes and shimmers in colour and contorts into seemingly impossible positions. Throughout this passage (no more than ten feet wide), there are carved caves and pictures of camel trading into the rose coloured rock. As you walk through, either side of you is an ancient water harvesting system and some carved steps leading up to higher hollowed caves.

As you round the last corner, what hits you is breath-taking. It was here I had a slight moment and was rendered speechless and motionless.

Each step you take reveals a small part of the other worldly Treasury. The air is cool from the shade and a peace falls over everyone who gets their first glimpse. The hush fizzles electricity in the air as you take your next step forward revealing another column or part of the structure. Eventually, I appeared out of the Siq and was met by the full scale of this remarkable achievement.

The scale is unbelievable (the measurements are 32m wide by 43m high if you wish to ruin the sight with quantitative detail). You are dwarfed and as you look up from the the ground you spot more and more intricate detail. The light captures the rose stone and it changes its tone and majesty right to the top where the urn on the central column is riddled with bullet holes in the search of fabled treasure. Pictures and images do it no justice. Words are the closes thing to quantify the structure and the best I can come up with is utterly indescribable...

From here, you move to the actual city. Everywhere you turn, there are tombs of similar (but not as majestic) scale carved into the rock. You can see cave dwellings carved into the rock like the holes in a Swiss cheese. These are not natural caves, they are purpose built dwellings.

I do not have the lifetime or words to describe every part of Petra I can only encourage you to visit and try and explain it yourself. But I will leave you with our last experience.

The monastery was easily the next most memorable after the haunting first. Set a top 800 carved steps into Mount Ad-Deir is the monastery Ad-Deir itself. The climb took a long time with our water supply running low, large sections of sand to cross and the scorching afternoon heat bearing down on us. It took the best part of an hour to reach the monastery and when we got there Petra played another trick on us.

We were faced with the wall of the top of the mountain and in it was a small car dwelling like we had seen hundreds of times throughout the day. We then turned the corner and were dwarfed. I was speechless again.

Not just carved but actually cut back into the rock was a behemoth of a construction. I stood at the entrance - the one and only step and I had two inches of head above the floor of the monastery. The door itself was at least 10 times my height and that was not even half of the size of the whole structure. If ever there was a reminder needed that you are not the most important thing on earth, this was it and then there was the next part.

A small sign pointed up to the top of the mountain professing to the view of the 'edge of the world'. A short further climb took me to one step from going over the edge of the mountain...

Suddenly, I was looking out over the last of the mountain range then onto the desert behind. Desert hazily blended into the sky: sky blended into desert. A haze covered the horizon; black rock plummeted steeply below me and there was no doubt that I was looking over the edge of the world.

Never having felt vertigo before, I suddenly felt very small and the world seemed to be dropping away in front of me. The quickening of my pulse and the sinking feeling in my stomach confirmed that Jordan is the first country to help me empathise with those who can't get to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

We headed very quickly down as the sun was already sinking and we still had a long drive back.

With mountains, desert, landscapes and history like this, it is no wonder that Jordan features so often in the three main religions of the world. There are no end of peaceful experiences to be had in place like this. You must visit.

Petra is another experience that cannot be replicated anywhere on the planet. Jordan seems to be full of them.