Wadi Rum, Jordan: It's not Mars, but it's out of this world

It's five in the morning, pitch-dark and not as starry, starry night as you might think out here in the desert. From out of the gloom emerge our regular guide, Amer, and our Bedouin driver-cum-mountain-guide, Suleiman.

Armed with packed lunches provided by the staff at the Sun City Camp in the heart of Jordan's Wadi Rum, the five of us hop into the back of a ute fitted with bench seats and a weathered shade cloth. We bounce through the blackness, a landscape we know to be vast and otherworldly reduced to ethereal glimpses of rock and sand in the vehicle's headlights. It's freezing cold.

Two hours later we reach the base of Jabal Umm ad Dami, Jordan's highest peak at 1854 metres. From the top, they say, you can see the Red Sea, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria. Well, we're about to find out.

We arrived at Sun City Camp the previous afternoon on one of the last legs of World Expedition's 10-day Jordan Trail Highlights tour, a trip that had taken us from Amman, the capital, to the Greco-Roman ruins at Jerash, the Dead Sea and the pink city of Petra.

Sun City is a sprawling camp of simple "tented" rooms and more up-market space age geodesic domes surrounded by the red desert sand and craggy, wind-ravaged cliffs that have made Wadi Rum so beloved of filmmakers looking for the unearthly on Earth.

These days, the obligatory four-wheel-drive sunset tour stops at a rocky outcrop where actor Matt Damon sat to contemplate his fate in the 2015 movie The Martian. Our driver even has the image on his phone so we can recreate the shot faithfully. The Martian was shot almost entirely in Wadi Rum but it's not the first time this startling landscape has been used to portray other worlds. Will Smith's recent Aladdin remake filmed here, as well as sections of Star Wars spin-off Rogue One, Ridley Scott's Prometheus and on of 2020's remake of the sci-fi classic Dune.

We begin climbing Jabal Umm ad Dami at 7.30am and return to the ute at 11am. It's not a hike for the inexperienced or the unfit – and it helps if you're part-goat. It's a tough, hot scramble up and over steep rock faces, scree and fallen boulders. We stop often and drink lots of water. At a couple of points Suleiman passes the time by singing and reciting poetry. One of the tunes is called "The Lonely Bedouin" and the other is something about mint, tea and a girl. I'm still unclear if it was a poem, a song or a recipe.

The summit, reached after 90 minutes of hard yakka, is marked by a Jordanian flag, and the 360-degree panorama does indeed take in the Red Sea, Israel, et al. We take a million photographs that will never do the view justice while Suleiman lights a fire and brews a kettle of sweet black mint tea.