I went expecting milky tea and earnest vicars – and instead, in a quiet moment sitting at the back, glimpsed the future of tourism.

The revelation came courtesy of Daniel Adamson, former trekking guide for ATG Oxford, now based in Beirut as Director of Communications for the Abraham Path (and just about the least stereotypical PR you could ever meet; sorry PRs). This is how he explained it.

Web 1.0 was where a webmaster presented a site for ‘consumption’ by individuals; it was, if you like, a mediated experience, where end-users had little or no say in what was presented. They browsed. This is still mostly how TV, radio and newspapers operate (and long may it continue; it has a purpose).

Web 2.0, on the other hand – as Wikipedia defines it – “refers to a second generation of web development and design that facilitates communication, information sharing, interoperability and collaboration”. Design creativity flows to and fro between webmaster and ‘consumer’, ideas are shared and websites are no longer shop-windows, developing, instead, into meeting-places. There’s a nice visualization of the difference here at Sizlopedia.com.

The concept is exemplified by Facebook, Twitter, Flickr – websites which create nothing but which serve at platforms where individuals can meet and create on their own terms.

Tourism remains stuck in a 1.0 mindset. Most travellers, most of the time, get a mediated experience of their destination – variations on the well-worn theme of the 1970s-style package holiday, where you pay someone on your local high street (or your computer screen) to sort the whole thing out for you. This ‘expert’ tour operator then shepherds you – and a bunch of other people – from the airport to the destination and back again. The tour operator acts as webmaster, while their customers browse pre-selected attractions with impotent docility. Destinations become mere shop-windows.

What the Abraham Path Initiative is trying to do is not construct a path, or develop tourism, or act as guide or tour operator. They want to be a platform, upon which individuals can create their own experience of these destinations. They are network facilitators, trying to establish a system within which travel can return to being a means by which people can meet other people, unmediated by ‘experts’.

Tourism 2.0 is scary – like Web 2.0 is scary – because it highlights the fact that you will only get out of your holiday what you are prepared to put into it. You create your own experience, and you meet a whole bunch of unexpected people and challenges along the way. The end is likely to be different from how you imagined… if you ever reach the end; Tourism 2.0 begins to erase the differences between ‘home’ and ‘destination’.

Tourism 2.0 also means travel can finally lose its Noughties’ laziness. A journey can become a journey again.

Lots of people will prefer the 1.0 model: tour operators and ground agents still have a long and lucrative life ahead.

And, of course, truly independent travellers – who do their own research and make their own decisions – will thrive, as they always have done (and always will).

But those travellers who fall between the two – disliking the commercialism of the travel industry, but seeking some structure, theme or direction for their journey – finally have a model to aspire to, and to develop on their own terms. Lots of 1.0 operators have been trying to find them, dreaming up specialist small-group low-impact tours, voluntourism and all sorts of niche products. But it’s all still 1.0. And, I’m afraid, it all rubs me up the wrong way.

The Abraham Path are breaking new ground – literally and metaphorically. I won’t blether on any more but I had an exciting day, imagining the possibilities for Tourism 2.0.

But I’m only a journalist – what do travel professionals think of this? Am I being idealistic, or is there the nugget of a genuine innovation here? The economics of creating a Tourism 2.0 platform are not easy to pin down – has anyone got any ideas? Love to hear your thoughts.

One of the most interesting things was Rabbi Froman’s affirming the possibility of maintaining viable Jewish communities under Palestinian rule within a Palestinian state on the West Bank – surely a ‘third way’ between the expansionist status quo (immoral and profoundly damaging) and a Gaza-style settler clearance (inconceivable under current conditions, it seems to me). I would love to talk to him about it – and to try and gauge Arab opinion about Sheikh Bukhari in Jerusalem and Ibtisam Mahameed in Faradis. Are they admired? Respected? Marginalised? Ridiculed?

…but I’m not going to blog about that.

Instead I’m going to blog about this story in yesterday’s Jordan Times – which I followed as it unfolded on Queen Rania’s Twitter page. The Queen and Minister of Tourism went to Rasoun, a small village in northern Jordan, to mark the launch of the ministry’s project establishing walking trails in under-developed rural areas. I was in Rasoun a few weeks ago for the Independent: it’s a simple country town, set in a beautiful landscape of forested hills. Down in the valleys, streams water orchards of fig, olive and pomegranate. Up on the slopes are a few hard-to-find towns: Rasoun itself, Orjan, Baoun, with some smaller villages, linked by goat tracks. Some people are farmers, but most are public sector employees: civil servants, police, army.

Last year I also passed through Rasoun during a stay in a nature reserve run by Jordan’s Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN), which occupies a swathe of forest on the hilltop nearby. They operate a network of rural trails through the reserve, crossing Rasoun’s remote countryside.

Then I revisited the area this April to walk the Al-Ayoun Trail, a separate concern originating in a cooperative effort among the local villagers to introduce tourism to their area. This has been fostered by the Abraham Path Initiative (API), an American organisation seeking to establish an international walking route linking sites of Abrahamic interest across the Middle East. I’ve written in more detail about the Abraham Path for Wanderlust magazine and the Times. The API discussed cooperation with the RSCN in Rasoun, but were rebuffed (so I understand) by the RSCN’s policy of insisting that anyone walking on its paths must pay for an RSCN guide to accompany them. So instead the Al-Ayoun Trail runs around the reserve perimeter, purposely routed through the villages in order to encourage interaction between walkers and villagers.

Now the Jordan Times is reporting how the Ministry of Tourism wants to establish its own, compeletely separate walking paths in the Rasoun area, following neither the RSCN’s routes nor the existing Al-Ayoun Trail.

It’s a circus! From five years ago, when Rasoun was unknown and unvisited, suddenly everyone from lowly British hacks to the Queen herself are busy visiting, talking and planning. The poor Rasounis must be wondering what they’ve done to deserve it.

Why isn’t everyone co-operating? The background is complicated, but it boils down to this. The RSCN don’t like to work with anyone else: they set their own rules, devise their own business plans and pursue their own goals. They also have closer links with the Ministry of Environment than the Ministry of Tourism, who tend, as a consequence, to leave them alone.

The API has a different vision: their raison d’etre is to bring travellers and local people into contact with one another. For them, the RSCN’s trails, which bypass centres of population to traverse wild countryside, miss the point.

Yet the Jordanian tourism ministry, for its part, is suspicious of the API, since the Al-Ayoun Trail is intended to form one link in the longer Abraham Path (map here), which will connect across the border into Palestine and Israel. The underlying idea – to encourage Jordanians to follow the pilgrimage route into Israel and to encourage Israelis to walk the path in Jordan – is anathema to mainstream Jordanian opinion. The government, I’m sure, feels like it can’t be seen to condone such overt ‘normalisation’, let alone support it. Yet promoting rural development through sustainable tourism is a key theme in the government’s – and the king’s – plans for the next few years, especially in the beautiful, downtrodden region around Rasoun. So with the API cold-shouldered, and the RSCN playing the lone wolf, the government has chosen to go it alone, drawing in (to my knowledge) at least one ex-API specialist to help map new walking routes that follow none of the existing paths.

But how unseemly it all is! Rasoun is such a little place, in an unregarded corner of a much-overlooked country – does it merit a squabble? Aside from anything else, I wonder how sustainable three separately plotted, separately waymarked, separately guided (and, no doubt, separately charged) walking routes can be, in this tiny backwater.

The worst is that everybody is fighting about promoting walking and the enjoyment of nature! It’s such a simple idea: meet, talk, walk, for the benefit of all. Make contact through the physicality of walking on the land, and it becomes possible not just to share experience, but to compare experience. But if nobody can agree in Rasoun, what hope is there for the bigger picture?

Those who plough on regardless hoping or imagining that competing interests will just fade away are condemned to a life in denial. That applies in politics just as much as in business – or in building communities. Ideas are nothing without people. It seems that the Jerusalem Peacemakers – unlike almost everyone else – have realised that to bring about a desired goal (peace) you have to work with all the resources available to you (settlers, non-settlers, Palestinians inside and outside Israel, Jews, Muslims…). The Jordanian tourism authorities, if they wish to bring about the goal of sustainable rural development through tourism, should also be working with all the resources they have – which include, in this case, both the RSCN and the API. Even if the prospect of Israelis walking in the Rasoun hills upsets them, they should hold their noses and work to make it happen. Benefit may accrue – and ignoring the problem will not make it go away.