Jeddah, Umluj & AlUla

You are met at the airport and driven to your hotel. Jeddah has the country's second international airport and is the standard arrival point for the west coast, so the trip starts here. The rest of the day is free, and the seafront, over 30 kilometres of it, is where to spend the evening if you land in time.

A morning in Historic Jeddah, the old merchant quarter known as Al-Balad, on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2014. The city has been a major Indian Ocean port since the 7th century AD and the sea gateway for pilgrims arriving for Makkah, and those two roles built the quarter: tower houses of coral stone several storeys high, faced in roshan, the carved wooden bay windows that move air without opening the house to the street. Restoration runs building by building, so a good part of it is propped and half ruin. The afternoon is kept free to repack for the coast.

You travel up the coast to Umluj with your driver and check in. The rest of the day is deliberately loose: the boat days that follow both start early, and the point of the afternoon is to sort kit, confirm sizes for masks and fins, and get a briefing on the plan for the next two days rather than to add another site.

A full day out by boat with snorkelling stops through the day, lunch on board and time in the water at each site. Reefs along this coast have been outside mass tourism for decades, which is what you are here for, and the difference is visible in the condition of the coral rather than in anything a guide has to point out. Certified divers can dive instead of snorkelling, arranged in advance. If the wind is up, the skipper picks sheltered ground and the plan changes on the day.

The second boat day runs to a different stretch, so you are not repeating the first. Time in the water again through the middle of the day, and back in the late afternoon. This day is easy to trade down if you would rather have a slower one: it can be run as a half-day with the afternoon on the beach.

You leave the coast after breakfast and travel inland to AlUla, a sandstone valley that was farmed and settled for thousands of years because it has water, and that sat on the incense road running north out of southern Arabia. You check in during the afternoon, and the day ends at Elephant Rock: 52 metres of sandstone weathered into the shape of an elephant with its trunk to the ground, standing alone on open sand. Late afternoon into dusk is when to be there, as the stone turns deep red, and there is sunken seating cut into the sand around the base.

The morning at Hegra, the largest surviving Nabataean city after Petra and the first site in Saudi Arabia on the UNESCO World Heritage List, where more than 110 tombs are cut into sandstone outcrops across the desert floor. You travel between the tomb clusters by vehicle with an AlUla Rawi; numbers each day are capped and the place is booked before you travel. In the afternoon, Jabal Ikmah, a desert canyon whose walls carry hundreds of pre-Arabic inscriptions in Dadanitic, Thamudic, Minaic and Nabataean scripts, close enough to the path to read without climbing. If there is time before the light goes, AlUla Old Town, mud brick from the 12th century under a fort of around the 10th, is the place to end.

You are driven to the airport for the flight out. Where the timing allows, a last early stop is added before the transfer, confirmed with you the evening before.