There is a particular kind of travel frustration that involves waiting. Waiting for the moment to be right, for the stars to align, for things to calm down. The problem with this approach — beyond the obvious one, which is that you spend a great deal of time sitting on your sofa waiting — is that it tends to mean the world's most extraordinary places go unvisited by the people who would love them most.
Jordan has, for too long, been a victim of precisely this. A destination that sits on more wishlists than almost anywhere on earth, perpetually deferred by would-be visitors who look at a map, clock the neighbours, and decide perhaps next year. Next year. Always next year.
Well. The Foreign Office updated its travel advice last week. Jordan is open, Jordan is welcoming, and Club Avandra's journey through one of the world's most beguiling countries is very much back on.
We suggest you stop waiting.
We know a fair bit about travel uncertainty, having navigated rather a lot of it: the best response is not paralysis. It is planning. It is the particular pleasure of having something magnificent to look forward to — an itinerary open on your phone, a departure date in your diary, the knowledge that somewhere between now and then, you will be standing in front of the Treasury at Petra watching the rose-red sandstone catch the morning light and thinking, with some satisfaction, that you really did the right thing.
Booking now also means locking in rates at a moment when they are genuinely favourable — because when confidence returns to a destination, the prices tend to follow. Getting in early is not just good for the soul. It is, as it happens, good for the budget.
And then there is the matter of who you're travelling with.
Our Jordan itinerary is six days long and feels, by the end of it, considerably larger than that. It begins in Amman with a VIP airport arrival that removes the usual indignities of international travel, and a city tour led by Muna Haddad — founding CEO of Baraka Destinations, founding president of the Jordan Trail Association, and precisely the kind of local expert whose knowledge of a place would take you a decade to accumulate on your own. An evening gala dinner inside the Royal Automobile Museum, catered by chef Sara Akel among a collection of royal cars, follows. Jordan does not do things by halves.
The days that follow take you to Bethany Beyond the Jordan and the extraordinary mosaic floors of Madaba, to a homecooked lunch with Firyal at Hikayet Sitt — Grandmother's Story — where the Maqlouba comes straight from the pot and the welcome is genuinely that warm. Then Petra, which no amount of prior knowledge or photography quite prepares you for. Then Wadi Rum at sunset with live violin on a sand dune — yes, really — and a night under more stars than you thought one sky could hold. The journey ends at the Dead Sea, where you float in mineral-rich water at the lowest point on earth feeling, quite reasonably, as though you've earned it.
All of it infused with exclusive Avandra access — private viewings, female-led enterprises, royal collections, experiences that simply don't appear on any public itinerary — and the company of like-minded women who, like you, decided that waiting was overrated.
Your host throughout is our own Debbie Flynn, Chair of the Club Avandra Advisory Board and former head of the UK Jordan Tourism Board for twenty-one years. Debbie knows Jordan the way most people know their own postcode — with an intimacy and an affection that make every moment richer.
"Jordan is rightly a wishlist destination for many people," she says. "I have always felt safe on trips there, from family holidays with my boys to grown-up adventures with girlfriends."
Twenty-one years. We trust her judgement entirely.
The world is not going to hold still and wait for the perfect moment. And neither should you! Jordan is ready. We're ready. The question is simply whether you're joining us.
