A bubble suite in Wadi Rum, Petra next door

Wadi Rum reduces the landscape to two elements: red sand and sandstone. You drive in from the visitor centre into a protected desert of vast rock massifs rising sheer from the flats, weathered into towers and arches, the ground between them a fine rust-coloured sand that squeaks underfoot. It has stood in for Mars and other worlds in more than one film, and the comparison is fair — there is a scale and emptiness here that quietens people. The land is Bedouin, and the camps are run by families who have lived off this desert for generations. Your bed for the night is a transparent dome, a heated bubble suite pitched among the rocks with a clear panel arced over the bed. The point is the sky. With almost no light for a hundred miles, the stars come in an unbroken field, and you lie warm inside while the desert cold settles outside. It is a designed, deliberate way to sleep under the stars rather than a rough one, which is both its appeal and its slight artifice. The reason this earns a place beyond novelty is what sits two hours north. Petra, the rock-cut Nabataean city, is reachable as a day from Rum, and it repays every hour. You walk in through the Siq, a narrow cleft in the sandstone that runs for more than a kilometre, until it opens without warning on the carved facade of the Treasury. Beyond it lie tombs, a Roman theatre and a long climb to the Monastery, far more than the single famous frontage suggests. Come in the cooler months, October to April, when daytime desert heat is manageable and Petra is walkable, but pack for genuinely cold nights. The bubble can feel staged if you want raw wilderness, and it is fair to say the concept is engineered for the photograph. Taken for what it is — a comfortable, quiet night under an enormous sky, next door to one of the ancient world's great survivals — it is a considered pairing of craft and setting.