Dana to Feynan on Foot

Sixteen kilometres, all of it down. You start at 1,200 metres in Dana village among Phoenician juniper and half-collapsed Ottoman stone houses, and finish nearly a thousand metres lower on the floor of Wadi Araba, where every plant has thorns and the ground is black with copper slag from mines the Romans ran and the Bronze Age started. The change happens slowly enough to watch: juniper, then acacia, then not much at all. A donkey carries the group kit and the water, so you walk with a day pack. We stop for lunch in the shade at Shag al-Reesh around 11.30 and reach Feynan by mid-afternoon, where a 4x4 takes you out over a rough track to Rashaydeh. The honest part: downhill sounds like the soft option and it is not. Eight hours of braking on loose gravel will find your knees, and there is almost no shade after eleven. From June to September the wadi floor sits above 40C, so we start at 5am or we do not go at all. If four hours of walking at home is not comfortable, take our birding morning instead and enjoy your holiday.