Filming locations in Wadi Rum

Wadi Rum is the desert that screen epics keep coming back to, a Martian sweep of red sand and sandstone towers in southern Jordan. It is the very ground David Lean made famous in Lawrence of Arabia, the immense backdrop to the film's sweeping ride across Arabia, and decades later Denis Villeneuve filmed its red dunes and soaring canyons as Arrakis, the spice planet of Dune. Two of cinema's grandest deserts, and they are the same place.

What rewards the trip is the sheer scale, which no screen can quite hold. You enter the protected area by ticket and explore it the way it has to be explored, on Bedouin-run 4x4 trips that thread between the massifs, or on foot at the base of the cliffs. The light shifts the rock from rust to rose over the course of a day, and standing in it you understand why both films chose to come here rather than build a set.

The locations do not so much cluster as merge. The Lawrence sands and the Dune dunes are facets of one vast protected landscape, so a single guided itinerary takes in both without backtracking. There is no shortcut and no need for one, the point is the slow drive deeper into the silence.

Plan it through a local operator, because the desert is unforgiving on your own, scorching by day and cold by night. The best base is a Bedouin camp, where you stay overnight under a sky thick with stars that the cities have long since lost. Aqaba and its airport are about an hour away, and Petra sits a couple of hours to the north, so many travellers fold the two together.