Would you believe it? My first morning out of Iraq, I was woken up by an earthquake in Amman. With every crash and thump, Simona and I looked at each other, shook our heads and reminded ourselves we were in Jordan now. There was no reason to think that noise was a bomb. The building started to shake and I was about to remark on the gale that must be blowing outside when the roar stopped me.

“That one was definitely a bomb.”

“Why would there be a bomb in Jordan?” Tommo asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, mentally computing how far we were from the blast. “See. There’s the helicopter coming to the scene,” I added, identifying the familiar thudding sound of the rotor blades. Walking past the road works later I realised my error.

Amman was cold and grey but the Mecca Mall was all glitz. Really, it’s called the Mecca Mall, a less than spiritual shrine to shopping and cinema screens. We only went there because I hadn’t seen Lord of the Rings yet. As Denethor stuffed his face with the finest foods while the men of his city perished in the stupid mission he’d sent them on I found myself muttering, “Nothing changes.”

Near where Jamil lives there are loads of ministries and government buildings, among them the “Directorate of Education and Military Culture”. What’s that all about? I thought it was bad enough the way the British government has started letting the army infiltrate schools, allowing kids in some places to drop a couple of GCSE subjects in favour of military training, but it seems worse is possible. How can you have education and “military culture” in the same department?

It made me curious so I looked the human rights reports for Jordan on the internet and they weren’t great. There’s a law that allows for lenient treatment of men who kill female family members because they disapprove of their behaviour – you can get a 9 month sentence for an “honour killing” and the only protection the state gives the girls and women is to lock them up under “administrative detention” for their own protection, which no option to choose not to be imprisoned for safety, although the father of a 17 year old woman was allowed to take her into his custody and then he killed her, more or less with impunity.

Journalists who don’t follow the official line, i.e. what the king says, are fired and so are academics and so on. They’re kicking out Palestinians who are refugees there and also closing their borders to refugees from Iraq.

I asked L about it because he’s originally Palestinian and he was saying a chant in Arabic which was something about “Don’t you know we love Saddam?” I said surely you don’t really, and he said yes, he was a good man, and talked about all the things he did for Arab countries, for Palestinians, for Sudan, Syria, Jordan, etc. He was, says L, the best Arab leader. He protected Arab people. I pointed out that he also killed lots of Iraqi people for saying they didn’t think he was a very good man or for criticising his government.

Obviously one man’s opinion doesn’t represent everyone in the country, much less the whole region, but L’s answer was that it made Saddam angry that people were being so ungrateful for all the money he gave for hospitals and stuff and that was when he started killing lots of people. It seems to me a weird kind of justification.

He said the Jordanian king doesn’t care at all about Jordanian people. He’s always off abroad and buying nice things for himself and his wife and putting up taxes so people earn only 80-110 Dinars a month, working 13 hour days, and you want to eat, you pay tax, you want to go to school you pay tax, you want to go to the toilet, you pay tax. If you earn 100 Dinars they tax you 115.

There’s a prime minister, he says, as well as the king but he’s only there to do as the king says and if he doesn’t he gets sacked. The newspapers are only allowed to print what the king tells them as well. He says the last king was a bit better but really they’re all the same. He says the UAE leader is the best in the Arab world now – he cares about his people and gives them money, housing, education, etc. I don’t know. I’ve never read anything at all about UAE.

The capital is built on hills so you walk up a slope on the road and the ground rolls away from you on one side so when you look down there are loads of buildings nestled in the dip and the buildings seem to be carved out of the hillsides, built to fit the contours. There are some dramatically shaped tall buildings – one is sort of cylindrical with Batman-like pointy bits on top. The rooves are a mushroom field of satellite dishes. From the back room in Raed’s house you can see across the entire city, as different as it could be from the small towns, villages, deserts and valleys around.

The Bedouin have moved out of Petra itself, the ancient city literally carved from the mountains, caves cut into striped, curving rocks woven out of dozens of colours, stalks and limbs and pillars pouring down the mountainside. Ida said the King, the last one, moved them into a village nearby. Life was fine there, she said. They keep goats and make crafts and come into the ancient site every day to sell to the tourists. Ida’s eighteen and unmarried. “Some of the girls are married at fourteen and they have three children by my age, but it’s too young.” She learnt her English from the tourists.

Fahima sells jewellery beside the Lion Fountain, the creature carved into the rock under what appears to be a waterfall when there’s enough rain to flow down it. As we came round the corner, the wind slicing through our layers of clothes, she asked for a lighter. Huddled round the fire she made in a corner, rock towering over us, she softly told us she’s got three children, her husband keeps camels for trekkers through the city and they’re happy living in the village. The queen helps the women and now they have co-ops to sell jewellery and other crafts and to get a bit of education.

A woman joined us for the last stretch of the way up to the High Place of Sacrifice, wheezing like a steam train, losing her court shoes on the rocks, apparently just so she could climb into a hole in the rock and play something tuneless on her whistle. An old man sitting at a table of odds and ends by the Urn Tomb invited us to look: “This from Hong Kong, one week old.” He gestured towards the other side of the table: “These ones, these are antiques from Petra.”

Ali found us traipsing down the mountain, his donkeys clattering ahead. In the gorges, the sounds around the next corner echo and ricochet so it sounds like the walls are singing and calling. “Every day I run up and down this mountain. I have about 100 JD a month, about 3 Dinar a day, but not tomorrow. Tomorrow I am going to town for photographs and papers to join jaish [army]. It will be easy life in jaish. If I have to run for three days, no problem. I do this already.“

Ali opened his wallet to show us a picture of his girlfriend. “I think in your country you don’t have to pay money to the bride’s family to marry. I can’t marry because I have no money for her family. I have no money for a house. It’s maybe 6000 Dinar. In jaish pay is 350 Dinar a month.” He was planning to sign up for sixteen years. What if he had to go to war, to fight, to kill people? He shrugged. It’s the same everywhere: poverty forces young people into the military and, once there, they’re the tools of the wealthy and powerful, whether they agree with them or not.

Further south in Wadi Rum, tourism is also run by co-operatives, of 4 wheel drivers, camel owners and villagers. Here and there in the desert is a camp, a small rectangular enclosure, partially covered. Aodeh’s description, on the bus up from Aqaba, of his camp a couple of hours’ walk from the village, seduced us with stars and red mountains, blue lizards, eagles, immense beetles, purple and yellow wildflowers and endless quiet, this last splintered by the ubiquitous beeping of the two Bedouin men writing text messages on their mobile phones. Perhaps it’s true. Perhaps you can’t stand in the way of progress.

I knew Hussein was Iraqi before he told me: he’s got the look, the sunken cheeks, the worry lines around eyes that look too young to look so old. Before he got off the bus at the miserable building site, hundreds of miles from home, the only place he could find work, he wanted to know, how is it now in Iraq? Is there work? Is there petrol, electricity, water? Are there still explosions?

The drive home to Baghdad was a little wild. Gales and hail slowed the drive out of Jordan. Bureaucracy slowed the passage through the border. The time was that Iraqi drivers were finished with the formalities in minutes, while we foreigners sat waiting for interminable hours in a room full of tinsel, a giant Saddam portrait and a TV, generally playing something like Caspar the Friendly Ghost. Now it takes a few seconds to get a European passport stamped and interminable hours to bring the driver with you.

On the Iraqi side of the border a sandstorm was obscuring the white lines in the road until you were on top of them, dunes in an ongoing process of creation and obliteration in the middle of the highway. Between Ramadi and Falluja, with visibility clear again, we went to pass the middle vehicle of a three-humvee convoy. It was in the centre lane and we moved to pass it in the outside, not an unusual manoeuvre on Iraqi roads. The gunner on top whipped round and pointed his gun at us. He gestured furiously at the inside lane. Hussein and I both shrugged. If it made him happy, we could pass them on the inside instead.

Behind us he was flapping his arms even more frantically at the next vehicle, which wasn’t going fast enough to pass them. A burst of gunfire behind our wheels rattled the air inside the car, and me. The humvee sped past, then slowed down and we had to start the whole performance again. In spite of everything I got home in one piece. The news is as follows.

Someone threw a grenade into Safa’s garden, where Happy Family is based. No one was hurt although the cat got a bit singed. He says he knows who it is, it’s a personal vendetta, nothing to do with working with foreigners and the same person threatened a couple of schools and orphanages not to bring their kids to the show in the National Theatre.

I missed the big show. The date had to be changed because there’s a festival commemorating the death of the Imam Ali and performances like ours are not acceptable, so it had to happen earlier. I also missed the Romeo and Juliet wedding. A young man from a powerful tribe but a poorer family and a young woman from a lesser tribe but a wealthy family fell in love.

His family didn't want him lowering the status of his tribe; hers opposed her marrying into 'poverty' and tried to marry her off to the first candidate they thought suitable. She refused them all and was mistreated. His relatives threatened to wipe out hers if they married. They talked about eloping to Yemen; they even concocted a plan for him to kidnap her but it's impossible for an unmarried couple to cross the border without her father's permission.

Eventually, faced with worse disgrace, her family agreed to, but refused to attend, the wedding. His, if they know, are in denial. Boris, a Hungarian journalist with a longstanding interest in the right of Iraqi people to choose who they love, arranged a wedding reception in lieu of their families and asked Peat to perform. When they visit their families, they'll each go alone and hope in time the sides will accept it.

The happiest news is that Abbas, the four year old boy who was badly burnt at Al-Sha'ala camp, is OK. When Peat went to take him to the hospital, they were turned away because of a bomb nearby. The place was full of more casualties than it could handle. He's written in more detail about the frustrations of trying to get a doctor sorted – www.c2i.blogspot.com. Eventually one was found who could get out to the cam. He said Abbas was only days from losing his leg to the infections.

Peat saw him a couple of days ago and he's walking about, sleeping at night, smiling and laughing, wearing trousers, still whole, the look of exhausted agony and despair gone from his eyes although I doubt Peat or I will ever forget it. He took Alaa with him to translate when he brought Abbas to the hospital and she couldn't sleep until she knew he was alright.

It horrifies me to know how close he came to having his leg amputated, to think of how many we haven't reached and won't reach, that eight and a half months and billions of dollars after the war ostensibly ended, lives and limbs are so precarious that they can depend on a bunch of clowns arriving at the right moment.