Nine days in Jordan: one road south, and everything on it

A Roman auditorium for six thousand people, cut into a north facing hillside so the audience sat in shade, built when this was the provincial city of Philadelphia. Climb to the top row for the view down over the rooftops of downtown.

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

Mezze, grilled meat and the first of many cardamom coffees. Restaurants here serve alcohol, which is not true of most of the country outside Aqaba and Madaba.

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. The eighth century governor's hall behind is the most complete building up here, and the terrace looks straight down into the theatre you were in yesterday.

The plaster figures from Ain Ghazal, made around 7000 BC in a village that is now a suburb of Amman, have bitumen eyes and are among the earliest large representations of people anywhere. The copper scroll from Qumran, a treasure list hammered into metal, is in the same building.

Three restored 1920s villas on the side of the next hill, run as an art foundation, with terraced gardens, a library and the excavated apse of a sixth century church at the bottom of the garden. Free, quiet, and the best coffee terrace in the city.

The triple arch at the southern approach went up in 129 AD for a visit by the emperor Hadrian, half a kilometre outside the actual gate, on the confident assumption that the city would grow out to meet it. It never did. Start here and walk in.

An enormous asymmetric oval of paving ringed by columns, laid out in the first century to join the main street to the temple hill at an awkward angle, and unlike anything else the Romans built. Get here before the coaches and it is yours.

The temple of the city's patron goddess stands at the top of a monumental staircase with eleven columns still up. They were seated on lead pads to take up earthquakes, and they still visibly move in the wind, which the guides will demonstrate with a key in a joint.

Eat mansaf, lamb cooked in fermented dried yoghurt and served over rice and flatbread, at about three in the afternoon, which is when Jordanians eat it.

Under the floor of a nineteenth century Greek Orthodox church, a mosaic laid around 560 AD showing this whole region from the Nile delta to the Lebanese coast, with Jerusalem in the middle in enough detail to make out its main street, its walls and its gates. Excavators in Jerusalem have dug on the strength of it and found what it showed.

Twenty minutes west, the plateau ends and drops four thousand feet to the Jordan valley. On a clear morning the view takes in the Dead Sea, the oasis of Jericho and the hills of Jerusalem. The church at the summit shelters an outstanding sixth century mosaic of hunting and herding, and a modern bronze serpent on a staff stands on the edge.

Back in town, a shelter built over the floors of several Byzantine churches and a Roman street, including a room of mosaics from the classical world that has nothing religious about it at all. Half an hour, and it explains why the town keeps digging up floors.

Dinner in a restored old house on the main street, with mezze on a terrace and a shop of local craft work in the courtyard. Book at the weekend.

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, paved by the Nabataeans with a water channel cut along both walls. There are carved niches and a life sized camel caravan in relief along the way, and almost nobody looks at them.

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

Past the Treasury the canyon widens and both walls carry rows of tomb fronts, dozens of them in the older stepped Nabataean style. This is the point at which the scale of the place becomes clear, and it is where the day visitors turn round.

Four enormous facades in a row along the eastern cliff, up a staircase from the valley floor. The largest was converted into a church in 446; the one beside it is banded red, grey and cream in swirls that look like polished agate. The terrace in front is the best view over the whole city.

A vast excavated complex beside the colonnaded street, with a columned forecourt and a small theatre in the middle of it, probably a civic building rather than a temple. It is the one place where the ground plan of the city centre is legible.

Bigger than the Treasury and far less visited: fifty metres wide and nearly as high, 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 there is a tea shop on the rock opposite where everyone sits and stares at it.

A narrow slot canyon you can walk a couple of hundred metres into, with Thamudic and Nabataean inscriptions and scratched figures of people and camels along the walls, cut by traders who watered here two thousand years ago.

A slope of deep red sand banked against a black rock face, which everybody climbs and then runs back down. It is harder work than it looks and the view from the top over the valley is the classic Wadi Rum photograph.

A fifteen metre natural arch you can scramble up onto without ropes, which is the reason every jeep tour includes it and every visitor has the same photograph standing on top.

Chicken and vegetables cooked underground in a sand oven, flatbread, tea, and then the reason everybody comes: no artificial light for thirty kilometres in any direction.

Dive centres along the south shore run half day trips out to the reef and the wrecks, including a freighter deliberately sunk in the 1980s that now sits on its side in twenty metres of clear water. Snorkellers can reach good coral straight off the beach in the marine park.

A square Mamluk fort by the shore, rebuilt in the early sixteenth century and used as a caravanserai for pilgrims heading to Mecca. The Hashemite coat of arms over the gate was added when the Arab Revolt took the town in 1917.

The excavated walls and gates of the first city Muslims built outside Arabia, founded in the seventh century as a port on the pilgrim road to Mecca, sitting incongruously between the beach hotels. Free, and open to walk around.

Sayadieh, spiced rice with fish, at one of the places by the fish market, or a table at the yacht club end for sunset over Egypt and Israel on the far shore.

Mudbrick walls, a nave, an apse and a small cemetery, built at the end of the third century and buried by an earthquake in 363, which is why it survived. It predates the great imperial churches at Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and it is viewed through a fence rather than entered.

Fifteen minutes north of the centre, with short flights to Amman and a handful of international routes. Allow two hours for a domestic connection and three for anything else.