Would a cokehead camel be waiting outside the Treasury, as Audi had suggested was likely? This was the question the three teenagers in our party were pondering as we snaked through the Siq – a dark, mile-long fissure in desert sandstone leading to the hidden city of Petra. As we approached the final twist, a chink of morning sunlight glinted between the chasm walls. Then, suddenly, there was the towering façade of columns, figures and conical roofs hewn out of high, golden-coloured rock by the Nabataeans, centuries before Christ.

And there, too, was a camel, introduced to us by her minder as Zuza, sitting on the ground with head held high in haughty expectation. It was 13-year-old Laura Winter’s idea to buy some Diet Coke instead of the regular Coca-Cola. “Better for her health,” she reasoned. Then she and my son Sebastian, 14, each fed a can to Zuza, whose trick was to open it with her teeth, tilt her head back, glug the contents and spit out the twisted metal. Her owner was raking in the baksheesh from every tourist who bought her a drink, of course.

“Oh, I do love the people on Bare Bones tours,” roared Audi, our guide, in his heavily accented English, sharing the youngsters’ glee. He meant the group tours staged by the specialist archaeology holidays company Andante Travels, mindful that their standard tours might appear stuffy to young, independent-minded travellers. The idea is that while the erudite element is retained, it is done so with the lighter touch of young, fun-minded guides, and with a bit of adventure built into the itinerary. Participants make their own mealtime arrangements rather than sitting down to shared lunches and dinners followed by lectures.

Sebastian and I plumped for this trip partly because it was run during school holidays, to appeal to families. As it turned out, there was only one other family and a few twentysomethings among the 20-strong group, with most being middle-aged couples. The tour was led by Nick Jackson, a scholarly, Arabic-speaking archaeologist, in a splendid duet with a Jordanian guide, Odeh al-Shoubaki. “Call me Audi, like the car; everybody did at Cardiff University,” he urged when we met him.

“Mind your brown bread,” Audi warned the party the following day, curiously demonstrating that he had picked up a bit of rhyming slang during his education in Wales. He was leading us under a low arch among the ruins of Jerash, one of the ten autonomous “Decapolis” cities of the Roman Empire and perhaps the unsung archaeological glory of the Middle East.

The extent and state of the preservation of Jerash is astonishing: plazas, aqueducts, bath houses and fountains; temples with Ionic colonnades; villas lining cobbled causeways rutted by chariot wheels; a vast oval forum; and the auditorium where Jordanian soldiers wearing traditional headdresses were playing bagpipes – a legacy of the Scottish regiments that served here during the 1920-46 British Mandate in Transjordan.

Jackson shared his insights on everyday life in Roman Jerash, helping us to visualise citizens bartering for olives and loaves of bread; shouting centurions in scarlet tunics; and patricians at leisure, being served wine and goat meat by slave girls. “Wow, I really can imagine what it is like to be a Roman now,” enthused Sebastian.

Admittedly, by the time we reached our second Decapolis city, Umm Qais in the far northwest, both he and I were feeling a touch blasé about Roman history. More captivating was the view from the ruins, over the Sea of Galilee in the distance, and the brown hump that is the Golan Heights, captured by Israeli tanks in the Six-Day War.

Umm Qais is ancient Gadara, where Jesus diverted demons from possessed men to swine, which duly leapt into the distant sea. “Pigs do fly, then,” commented one sceptic. Over the coming days we were to gaze over more biblical landscapes. From the summit of Mount Nebo, where Moses surveyed the Promised Land, we were able to make out the minarets of Hebron and Jericho on the West Bank, and, in the far distance, Jerusalem.

As our bus streamed down the north-south trade route known as the King’s Highway towards the desert proper, Audi entertained the group with vignettes of life as a Jordanian, and titbits of local trivia. We learnt, for example, that it is illegal for taxi drivers in Amman to be unshaven or to have a dirty car; and that several seats in the country’s parliament are reserved for women.

Tourism in Jordan is recovering slowly from the slump after 9/11, Audi explained, adding – predictably, I suppose: “We are between Iraq and a hard place.” He also taught us a smattering of colloquial Arabic, including the vocabulary for dealing with persistent hawkers: “First say hallas, ‘enough’. If they still won’t leave you alone, try inishi. This means ‘bugger off’.”

Use of the latter term, I am pleased to report, was never necessary. The hassle factor was low compared with, say, Egypt or Morocco. Rather, we found the traditional Arabic hospitality unfailing, never more so than on the “adventure” leg when we transferred to four-wheel drives to head off-road into the desert and overnight at the remote, simple solar-powered Wadi Feinan eco-lodge in the Dana Nature Reserve.

Here, local Bedouin slaughtered lambs for us and barbecued them under the stars. In the morning they lit fires to brew us tea, before we hiked through the desert to explore the remains of Bronze Age copper mines worked by their ancestors.

A bit more of this sort of fun in the desert, and one or two fewer ancient sites, probably would have been a better balance for Sebastian and me, and the Winter family with whom we bonded naturally, usually leaving our hotel to seek out a local restaurant together in the evenings. However, the youth element was still rather underrepresented in the group, despite Andante’s efforts to appeal to a younger market. On the other hand, participants on the tour seemed to welcome the breezy atmosphere that the young people contributed to the group.

Petra was an apt finale for the trip. From our dawn glimpse of the Treasury to sundown on the eerie High Place of Sacrifice overlooking the fabled city, we were dazzled and awestruck. The Nabataeans were a tribe of Semitic traders who controlled the caravan routes between Persia and Syria through Petra, Jackson explained. “How they became master builders and artisans and why such a complex civilisation flourished here still mystifies archaeologists.”

In its heyday, tens of thousands of souls lived in this remote ravine, where we spent all day among innumerable temples, amphitheatres, dwellings and striking façades carved out of solid stone. The cries of hawkers and excited tourists echoed off canyon walls as we climbed a winding trail of 1,200 worn steps up to Ad Deir Monastery atop a looming plateau of pink and copper-coloured rock folded into contours like cake-mix.

Petra has survived centuries of earthquakes, erosion and neglect since its demise during the Roman Empire. Earlier this year it was voted one of the seven “new” wonders of the world. But nothing you hear or read can prepare you for the otherworldliness of the place – not even tales of a camel addicted to Coke.

Need to know

Getting there: Martin Symington travelled with Andante Travels (01722 713800, www.andantetravels.co.uk), which offers an eight-day Bare Bones tour of Jordan for £1,100pp, based on two sharing, and including flights, B&B accommodation in mainly three-star or equivalent hotels, plus two dinners, transport, the services of two expert guides and entrance to archaeological sites. The company also offers similar tours year round to nine other archaeologically rich destinations around the Mediterranean.

Reading: Insight Guide (£16.99), Rough Guide (£13.99). Petra and the Lost Kingdom of the Nabataeans, by Jane Taylor (IB Tauris, hardcover, £35)

Further Information: www.visitjordan.com.

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