The Amazing Race 34, Episode 4

Florence (Italy) - Aqaba (Jordan) - Wadi Rum (Jordan) - Petra (Jordan)

[Ad for Royal Jordanian Airlines and travel to Jordan in a station on the new Elizabeth Line of the London Underground.]

Phil Keoghan welcomed the cast of The Amazing Race 34 onto their chartered jet flight from Florence to Aqaba by telling them that this would be the first time that The Amazing Race had visited Jordan.

Why Jordan? Why now? Why not sooner?

I have no inside sources on the production team of The Amazing Race (although I always welcome tips). My assumption, though, is that they included Jordan as a way to give more variety to a route largely limited to Europe by COVID-19 fears and travel restrictions that greatly complicated production of the TV show, even travelling by chartered plane rather than on airline flights.

Jordan was one of the relatively poor countries dependent to a greater or lesser extent on international tourism that chose to prioritize tourism revenues over health and safety by imposing fewer COVID-19 restrictions on travel and/or lifting restrictions sooner. Other such countries have included Greece and Portugal (visited in the post-pandemic portion of the previous season), Serbia, Croatia and Mexico. This was a decision driven by the neo-colonial economics of international tourism, not by health or safety. It doesn’t mean that the risk of COVID-19 was or is any less in Jordan than in other countries with more restrictions on travel. It did, however, get the attention of potential visitors who might not have considered a trip to Jordan, or who would have passed it over for better-known destinations.

Several Hollywood blockbusters have been set in Jordan, but that has done little to raise the country’s name recognition or its profile as a contemporary tourist destination. “Aqaba!” is one of the iconic lines from the Oscar-winning epic, Lawrence Of Arabia, and this episode of The Amazing Race 34 featured a reenactment of one of the scenes from that movie: an attack on a train in the Wadi Rum desert by a band of swordsmen riding camels. But few people would think first of Jordan if asked to name countries in “Arabia”. The Nabataean city of Petra was featured in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. But its effectiveness as an “exotic” movie set came precisely from being unknown to most viewers, many of whom probably never realized that it was a real-world place in Jordan, not just something created on a Hollywood back lot, in the California desert, or by special effects.

In his on-site narration of this episode, Phil Keoghan says, “Some experts believe that Petra covers about a hundred square miles — equivalent to the size of a hundred Manhattan Islands.” I don’t expect “reality” on a “reality TV” show. But this gets the area of Manhattan and the ratio wrong by a factor of more than twenty. That this slipped through the CBS fact-checkers is a reminder that the “facts” provided by tour guides are often wrong, and their claims exaggerated. At a minimum, give any spiel like this a sanity check.

Phil Keoghan may have strayed into hyperbole, but Jordan has long deserved more attention from travellers interested in diversity and value. Petra is one of the “wonders of the world” that does not disappoint. Everyone I know who has visited Jordan has remarked that the entry fee to Petra was (as it still is) high, but that Petra was worth the price of admission even for backpackers on a budget. Travellers who planned only a brief visit Jordan, just to go to Petra, have often told me that they would have liked to stay longer and explore more of the country.

Jordan has a mix of international visitors of which U.S. backpackers — other than those on excursions from Israel — are only a very small fraction. The beach resorts around Aqaba are popular with Israelis looking for a cheaper but nearby alternative to places on the Israeli coast. Some Christian pilgrimmage tours to “the Holy Land” include Biblical sites in Jordan as well as Israel. Petra draws some visitors from all over the world, although most are in tour groups and few stay long or visit much of the rest of the country. Many members of the Palestinian diaspora come to Jordan to visit friends and family, and/or as a route to and from the Palestinian territories. As with any divided country or pair of hostile neighbors, I think anyone who visits Israel should make it a point to see what things look like from the other side. The border crossing between Aqaba and its twin city of Eilat, Israel, is by most reports the easiest place to enter or leave Israel, typically with the shortest queues and the fewest hassles.

Syria and Yemen used to be the cheapest destinations in West Asia or the Levant (“the Middle East”), and were the first countries in the region that I visited. Sadly, civil wars in both those countries have become great-power proxy wars, with the demise of such little tourism as there was as the least of their bad consequences. Of the other countries in the region, Jordan might not be quite as cheap a place to travel as Egypt can be, and it’s not the regional business and financial center that Beirut once was, but it provides a good balance of stability, safety, mid-range comfort, and value for your dinar.