Things to Do in Jordan When Amman Is Your Base
Written for people who are here for weeks or months, not for four days. Every trip below is one you can make on a Friday and be home by Saturday night — with the bus, the fare, the entry fee and the season.
Most articles about things to do in Jordan are written for a visitor with five days and a rental car. They list the same four places in the same order, and they price everything as though you will only ever see it once.
Our students are in a different position. They live in Amman for a term, they have Fridays and Saturdays free, and they usually have no car. That changes the answer completely. It makes some famous trips easy and cheap, it makes one or two of them awkward, and it opens a set of discounts that ordinary tourists never see.
This is that version of the guide.
Two money decisions, and one of them expires
1. The Jordan Pass — buy it before you fly
The Jordan Pass is an official Ministry of Tourism product sold only at jordanpass.jo, and only online, and only before you arrive in the country. It costs roughly 70–80 JOD depending on how many days at Petra you include.
It bundles two things: entry to more than forty sites, Petra and Jerash included, and a waiver of the 40 JOD entry fee at the airport — on condition that you stay at least three nights.
Every student who comes to us clears that condition on day one. Nobody enrols in an Arabic course for three nights. So for our students the pass is close to automatic: the waived visa fee alone covers more than half of it, and one trip to Petra covers the rest.
The catch is the timing. Once your passport has been stamped, the pass can no longer help you with the visa fee. Buy it while you are still at home.
2. Resident prices — ask, every single time
Jordan prices its sites in tiers: Jordanians, residents, Arab nationals, foreign visitors. Almost nobody tells arriving students that the middle tiers exist.
The official fee schedule of the Jordan Tourism Board lists a resident rate at the nature reserves, and it is not a small difference:
- Dana Biosphere Reserve — 10 JOD for a foreign visitor, 5 JOD for a resident
- Ajloun Woodland Reserve — 8 JOD, 6 JOD for a resident
- Mujib Siq Trail — 21 JOD, 18 JOD for a resident
- The Jordan Museum in Amman — 5 JOD, 1 JOD for a resident
Petra has a resident rate too, and there the gap is dramatic: reports put it at 10 JOD instead of 50. The condition attached to it is the part you need to check for yourself, because it concerns how long you have held your residency, and it is applied at the ticket window rather than published clearly.
So make it a habit: carry your residency document, and ask at the counter what the resident price is before you pay the posted one. The worst answer you can get is no.
Fees in Jordanian dinars for foreign visitors, from the official schedule published by the Jordan Tourism Board. Nature reserve prices carry 16% tax on top. Look at the second figure for a moment: a visitor who sleeps outside Jordan pays 90 at Petra, and someone living here pays 50 — or less. Living in the country is itself the discount.
Four weekends out of Amman, without a car
These are ordered by effort, not by fame. The first can be done on an ordinary Friday morning with no planning at all; the last needs a weekend and a night away.
Jerash, and Ajloun on the same day
The best-preserved Roman city outside Italy, and the easiest serious trip from Amman. Local coasters leave continuously from the North Amman bus complex at Tabarbour — no timetable to study, you turn up and the bus fills and goes.
If you start early, Ajloun Castle sits close enough to add to the same day, and the two together make a complete Friday. The forest reserve at Ajloun is the greenest place most students see in Jordan, and it surprises people who arrived expecting only desert.
The Dead Sea — the one that needs company
Be honest about this one: there is no comfortable public transport from Amman to the tourist beaches. That is the single most useful thing we can tell you, and most guides leave it out.
Your realistic options are a taxi or a ride-hailing app at roughly 25–35 JOD for the trip, an organised group trip, or a JETT service running to specific hotels. The taxi figure is why this works best as a shared plan: split four ways it becomes ordinary, and alone it is the most expensive thing in this article per hour spent.
The season is the opposite of what people assume. The Dead Sea is at its best in winter, from November to February, when it is warm down there and Amman is genuinely cold. In July it can be punishing.
Wadi Mujib — closed for half the year
The Siq Trail is a walk upstream through a canyon, in the water, holding a rope in places. It is the most physical thing on this list and the one students talk about second-most.
It is also the one with a hard calendar. The trail opens on 1 April and closes at the end of October, and stays shut through the winter because of flash-flood risk. If you are here for a winter term, take it off your list rather than travelling down to find a locked gate.
Petra and Wadi Rum — the full weekend
This is the trip that needs your Friday and your Saturday, and it is worth both. JETT buses leave Amman early in the morning, around 6:30, from the Abdali station, with a branch at the 7th Circle as well. Petra is roughly 10–12 JOD each way, and Aqaba around 8–10 JOD, with local buses or a taxi covering the last stretch from Aqaba into Wadi Rum.
There is no passenger rail to either. The historic Hejaz Railway still runs, but as a heritage excursion, not as transport.
Most students do the two together over one weekend. Petra rewards a long day on foot — the main trail runs about four kilometres in each direction before you start climbing — and Wadi Rum works best if you sleep out there rather than looking at it and turning round.
The one place our students never stop talking about
We have watched a lot of students come back from a lot of weekends, and there is no contest. It is Wadi Rum, overnight.
Not the drive through it. The night. The part that stays with people is the quiet — a silence with no traffic underneath it, which is something most of them have never actually heard — and then the sky, and the zarb, the dinner cooked in a covered pit in the sand, and sitting with the camp’s hosts afterwards.
Petra is more famous and more photographed. Wadi Rum is the one that changes how people describe Jordan when they get home. If you only have one weekend to spend, spend it there, and sleep in the desert rather than beside it.
And in Amman itself
Amman deserves more than a paragraph, so we gave it a whole article: a week in Jabal Al-Weibdeh, the hill our school sits on, written as seven days of real situations with the Arabic used in each.
For the ticketed sites, the numbers are small enough that you can go on an ordinary afternoon: the Citadel on the highest hill in the city is 3 JOD, the Roman Theatre downtown is 2, and the Jordan Museum is 5 — or 1 if you hold residency. None of them needs planning. Go on a weekday when the tour groups are elsewhere.
The Arabic you will actually use on these trips
Not greetings. These are the five sentences that come up at a bus station and a ticket window, in the Levantine Arabic spoken in Amman rather than in textbook Modern Standard.
That last one is the sentence that pays for itself.
When to go where
Jordan is small enough that the season matters more than the distance. Two places two hours apart can be pleasant and unbearable on the same day.
- Petra, Wadi Rum, Jerash and Amman — spring, March to May, and autumn, September to November. Long days without the heat.
- The Dead Sea and Aqaba — winter, November through February and into March. Warm down at the bottom while Amman is cold, which is exactly when you will want to leave.
- Wadi Mujib — April to the end of October, and closed the rest of the year.
If you are studying with us over a winter term, plan the low places first and keep Petra for the spring. If you arrive in spring, do the reverse.
Living in Amman: the practical guides
The residency question in the money section connects directly to one of those: whether you can claim a resident price depends on the paperwork described in our guide to visas and residency.
Weekends are better in the language
Every trip on this page is open to anyone with a bus fare. What changes is what happens on the way — who you end up talking to at the station, and whether the answer you get is the one meant for visitors.
