“BE CAREFUL if you are walking along the seafront,” cautioned David, our guide, as we set off to explore the Red Sea resort of Aqaba. “Walk too far one way and you will end up in Israel, walk too far the other way and you will be in Saudi Arabia.”

It was the last day of our week’s holiday in Jordan, and this was the first time we had come face to face with the reality of its situation. Sandwiched between Israel, the Palestinian territories, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, Jordan is in the middle of the world’s biggest no-go area. Yet like a peaceful garden in the midst of an inner-city ghetto, Jordan somehow manages to escape the turmoil raging all around. At no time in the previous week had we felt anything other than safe and secure.

A glance at a map of the Middle East is enough to put most families off visiting Jordan. When I told friends we were spending half-term there, walking in the desert, concerns about heat, dust and dehydration were added to terrorism and political unrest. What sort of place is that to take an eight-year-old child? Actually, it turned out to be a very good one. We had chosen a family adventure with Walks Worldwide, one of the few companies to organise walking holidays without age restrictions for kids. All the adults in our party of six families were walkers and experienced travellers who did not see why they should settle for easy holidays when children came along. Our group included eight children ranging in age from two to eight — my son, Adam, was the oldest — and none of them had any problems, although one mother did tell me she felt her two-year-old daughter was too young for the trip.

“It was interesting to be so close to Iraq and yet to feel so secure,” said David Anderson, a deputy headteacher from Kent, there with his six-year-old daughter Olivia. “The camping, the night-time fires and the different foods were all great for the kids,” said Elizabeth Holden, a lawyer and mother of Louis, four and Piers, two.

“It was great to have an adventurous holiday where I could bring a four-year-old,” said Geraldine Rafter, an accountant from Dublin, with her daughter Aoife.

Barry Holden, a marketing director, and also a parent, agreed: “The trip was certainly a baptism of fire for children under five — but it is great that one company is prepared to take young children on a holiday like this.”

The breadth of ages did cause the odd moment of discord: the younger children tended to become bored and tired more quickly than the older ones, and the heat and dust of the desert made tough going at times for all of them.

Our base was the Beit Ali camp in the southern desert of Wadi Rum, the area made famous by T.E. Lawrence in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Here, Susie and Tahseen Shinaco have set up a Beduin-style encampment at the foot of the granite and sandstone peaks. The campsite is perfect for families who want an exotic desert adventure without sacrificing comforts such as hot showers and flushing lavatories. Each family had its own tent, complete with proper beds, arranged around a courtyard with a traditional round Beduin goat-hair tent at the centre. Adam and I spent two nights sleeping inside this tent, its roof open to the sky so that we could see the stars at night and wake to the call of the muezzin and a bright desert sunrise.

After a long circular walk on the first day — around 10km (6 miles), which proved to be too much for some of the children — we settled into a pattern of driving out in Jeeps, taking short walks for an hour or so, and then driving to the next site of interest. We spent our days wandering among the ever-changing landscape of dunes, ripples and dark craggy rocks sculpted by the wind into fantastical and surreal shapes silhouetted against a deep-blue sky. Lawrence described Wadi Rum as “magically haunted, vast, echoing and God-like,” and his biographer Michael Asher called it “delirium tremens embodied in rock and stone”.

It is easy to imagine deserts as monotonous, but the vividly contrasting colours of the sand, from rose to apricot and ochre to brilliant white, changed from hour to hour and from one valley to the next. For the children, this was one enormous outdoor playground: they leapt off sand dunes, climbed rock bridges and searched for lizards and beetles among the stones.

The kids were happiest whenever there was a cliff to scramble up or a rockface to climb. If they did get exhausted, they could always take a ride on a camel, led by our cheerful Beduin guide Nasser, who would lift them into the saddlebags, one on each side. With his chequered headscarf and flowing robes, Nasser looked every inch the traditional Beduin, but he also drove a pick-up truck and used a mobile phone to keep in touch with his colleagues. Sometimes we would arrive at the head of a gorge, hot and thirsty after a long climb, to find that Nasser had phoned ahead and a welcome pot of sweet, spicy tea was brewing on a log fire.

Page 2: continues
Page 3: need to know
Page 3: family walks

() Two hours north of Wadi Rum is Petra, the Nabatean city carved into the rock more than 2,000 years ago. I had always wanted to visit Petra but I was not sure if it would be suitable for a young child. For one thing, the only way in is to walk along a narrow canyon known as the Siq, which runs for a mile between towering cliffs.

Times recommends

• The three best routes to the Med
• How to cash in on your holiday money
• 10 tips for the perfectly packed suitcase