Nine days in Israel and Jordan: cross the river and everything changes

Two stretches of the sixteenth century Ottoman wall are open to walk, both from Jaffa Gate: north above the Christian and Muslim Quarters, or south around Mount Zion. Take the northern one for the rooftops and the first sight of the Temple Mount. It closes in the late afternoon.

The fortress inside Jaffa Gate is Herodian at the base, Crusader and Mamluk above, and crowned by an Ottoman minaret that everybody photographs and calls the Tower of David. The museum reopened in 2023 after a long rebuild and lays out four thousand years of the city in an order that makes sense.

Down the steps into Mamilla for the polished version, or ten minutes further into the streets off Jaffa Road for hummus, grilled meat and a great deal more noise.

The octagon with the gold roof was finished around 691 under the caliph Abd al Malik, which makes it one of the oldest surviving Islamic buildings anywhere. The tiles outside are Ottoman work of the sixteenth century, laid over the original mosaic. Walk the whole platform rather than photographing the dome and leaving.

Not the Temple but the retaining wall Herod built to hold up the platform it stood on, and the enormous lower courses are his. Free, open at any hour, security screening at the entrance, separate sections for men and women, and paper head coverings in a basket by the gate.

The cafes around Hurva Square do falafel, salads and iced coffee and are five minutes uphill from the Wall. All of it closes early on Friday and stays shut on Saturday.

A dug out section of the colonnaded main street of Byzantine Jerusalem, below the modern quarter. The sixth century mosaic map at Madaba, over in Jordan, shows this street running through the middle of the city with these columns along it, which is how the excavators knew where to look.

Golgotha and the tomb are both inside this one building, up a staircase and under the rotunda respectively, and it takes a while to realise the whole church is a shell built over a hillside. The division of the interior between six denominations has been frozen by agreement since 1852, which is why a wooden ladder has stood untouched on a ledge above the entrance since the eighteenth century.

The terrace by the hotel at the top of the ridge is the panorama: the whole walled city end to end with the Dome of the Rock in the middle. Get here before nine and you avoid both the coaches and the man with the camel.

At the bottom of the slope, a walled garden of very old olive trees and a deliberately dark basilica built over the rock where Jesus is said to have prayed the night before his arrest. The windows are glazed in violet to hold the mood of the night it commemorates.

Hummus, msabbaha and hot bread in the Muslim Quarter, or a sesame kaak ring and a twist of zaatar from a barrow outside the gate, eaten on the steps.

A flat topped mountain above the shore, fortified by Herod as a palace refuge and held by Jewish rebels through a Roman siege that ended in AD 73. The Roman camps and the ramp they built are still visible on the desert floor below. The cable car runs from early morning; the snake path is a stiff forty five minute climb best done before the sun is on it.

A managed beach on the shore with showers, shade and the black mineral mud everybody covers themselves in. Twenty minutes in the water is enough: it stings any cut you had forgotten about, you cannot swim properly in it, and it must not get in your eyes. Do not shave that morning.

The settlement of a Jewish sect that copied and hid the Dead Sea Scrolls in caves in the cliffs above, where a shepherd found the first of them in 1947. There are ritual baths, a refectory and a room the excavators called the scriptorium, and you can see the cave mouths from the path.

Leave Jerusalem by seven. Exit fees are payable in cash on both sides, the crossing keeps short hours and closes on holidays, and three hours is a sensible allowance even when it goes smoothly.

Four hours from the Jordan valley to Wadi Musa, with a stop for lunch at a roadside place near Ma'an. The King's Highway is far more beautiful and adds two hours, which is a decision to make when you see what time you clear the border.

The town that exists for Petra, strung along a road that drops from the ridge to the gate. There is nothing to see in it, but the view from the top end at sunset, out over the mountains hiding the site, is the best thing about arriving in the evening.

Hotel buffets and a handful of restaurants on the main street. Standards are fair rather than exciting and prices are higher than the rest of Jordan. Eat early and sleep: tomorrow starts at six.

A natural fault in the sandstone, a kilometre and a bit long, three metres wide in places and up to a hundred and fifty metres deep. The Nabataeans paved it and cut a water channel along both walls, and there are carved niches and a life sized camel caravan in relief that almost nobody looks at.

Forty metres of columns, urns and figures cut back into the cliff where the gorge opens, almost certainly a royal tomb rather than a treasury of any kind. The urn on top is pitted with bullet holes fired by people who believed gold was sealed inside it. The room behind is bare, as it is at nearly every monument here.

There is a restaurant by the museum at the foot of the Monastery trail and stalls selling flatbread and tea most of the way up it. Eat before the climb rather than after.

Bigger than the Treasury and far less visited: fifty metres wide and nearly as high, cut in the first century AD at the top of a staircase of about eight hundred steps up a side valley. The doorway alone is taller than a house, and by four in the afternoon there may be a dozen people looking at it.

About three hours by car or driver on the Desert Highway, or four and a half by the daily bus. Leave after breakfast and you will be checked in by two.

One flat hilltop above the downtown bowl, fortified for four thousand years. Two columns of a Roman temple stand at the southern edge with the marble hand of a statue that must have been thirteen metres tall lying beside them, and the domed hall of an eighth century Umayyad governor is the most complete building up here.

The spine of Jabal Amman, lined with cafes, bookshops and the stairs down into the old town. It fills up around six and stays busy late, and most of the good small restaurants are on the streets off it.

Cut into a north facing slope so the audience sat in shade, this held six thousand people when the city was the Roman Philadelphia. Climb to the top row for the view down into the bowl of downtown, which is the best free thing in Amman.

The plaster figures from Ain Ghazal, made around 7000 BC with bitumen eyes, are among the earliest large representations of people anywhere. The copper scroll from Qumran is in the same building, which closes a circle if you stood outside those caves four days ago.

Lamb cooked in fermented dried yoghurt over rice and flatbread, eaten in the middle of the afternoon rather than late. It is the national dish and it is taken seriously, so go somewhere that makes it every day.

Three restored 1920s villas on the side of Jabal al Weibdeh, run as an art foundation, with terraced gardens, a small library and the excavated apse of a sixth century church among the trees. Free, quiet, and the best coffee terrace in the city.

The blue domed mosque on the western ridge, built in the 1980s as a memorial to the first king of Jordan, holds three thousand people under a dome with no columns under it. Non Muslim visitors are welcome outside prayer times and robes are lent at the door.

Half an hour south of the city on a good road. Allow three hours before an international departure.