Resurrecting Lawrence of Arabia

Ali reckoned he had guided them all through Petra: heads of state, U.N. ambassadors, even royalty. His proudest moment, however, was the day the Iron Lady came to town. "I was selected to show Margaret Thatcher around the site," he says with pride. "What a woman! It was 40C and she still turned up in an immaculate twinset and high heels."

Nowadays, however, Ali is lucky to be guiding a handful of backpackers, let alone world leaders in inappropriate attire. On a good day, Petra—the ancient city of the Nabataean kingdom that ruled Arabia 2,000 years ago and was, until recently, Jordan's primary tourist attraction—drew 3,000 visitors daily. But that was before Israel erupted in a spate of violence that sent tourists packing region-wide. These days, only a few trickle through the two-kilometer-long narrow, rose-hued stone gorge to emerge, blinking in the sunlight, opposite the Treasury building, a location easily recognizable to fans of the final Indiana Jones movie.

At street level, this lull means Ali is grumpier than usual because taking home poor tips guarantees a regular ear bashing from his wife. In a wider context, however, it's even more serious: luxury hotels across the country—a legacy of the Israeli-Jordanian peace accords of 1994 and the subsequent joint tourism projects undertaken a few years before the start of the second intifadeh—are nearly empty, and the tourist sites deserted. Any passing traveler can currently walk into a five-star property and pick up a room fit for King Abdullah II himself for less than $50 a night. "It's been a difficult season," admits Jordan's Minister of Tourism, Taleb Rifai. "People read headlines about crisis in the Middle East, but they don't realize that, in Jordan, we have been living a normal life throughout this troubled period."

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Rifai has one last ace up the sleeve of his jellaba robes, however. Jordan has a special resonance for fans of T.E. Lawrence, the Welsh soldier who united the disparate Arab tribes to fight alongside the British against the Turks in World War I. Since his 1935 death in a motorcycle crash, the mythology surrounding Lawrence has cast him as the ultimate romantic adventurer. Counting on the draw of his legend to revive their flagging fortunes, the tourist authorities have inaugurated a series of Lawrence theme tours that follow in the footsteps of the man portrayed with equal measures of gusto and effeminate charm by Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, the classic 1962 David Lean film.

The three-to five-day trips take in the major attractions of Jordan's rich cultural heritage in the context of Lawrence's own journey through the desert to Aqaba. Starting with the mandatory daylong rounds of Petra's historical sights, Lawrence fans hit sacred ground at Wadi Rum. This desolate stretch of desert is home to the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the range of mountains that provided the inspiration for Lawrence's autobiographical epic of the same name. Lawrence loved the stillness and raw, natural beauty of the desert. In the book, he recounts tales of his campaigns against a backdrop of evocative descriptions of the unforgiving landscape and the Bedouin people whose lives he came to share.

On July 6, 1917, Lawrence led his combined armies to victory at Aqaba, taking the town from the Turks—a key battle in the Arab revolt. Today, only the 15th century fort, built by the Mamluk sultan Qansweh al-Ghuri, hints at Aqaba's early history. The fort has always been the symbolic heart of Aqaba and, when it fell to his troops, Lawrence knew he had completed his journey to victory. For those on the tour, too, Aqaba is the final destination, complete with a celebratory open-air feast in the fort's courtyard, the sound of battle cries replaced by popping corks and silver service.

Rifai will doubtless toast what he hopes will be a Lawrence-inspired tourism renaissance. "The Lawrence myth has been rather underplayed in Jordan until now," he says. "We need more examples of people like him to broker stronger relations and mutual trust between East and West." But the harsh reality for the foot soldiers of Jordan's stalled tourist industry is that it will take more than the eulogized legacy of an eccentric British officer to bring visitors back. Especially if a U.S.-led military assault on Iraq goes ahead and opens what King Abdullah II has described as "the Pandora's box of the Middle East." Ali is, it seems, in for serious earache for some time to come.