Coffee, souqs and old towns

You are met at Jeddah airport and taken to your hotel. Jeddah is the country's second international airport and the usual arrival point for the west coast.

The evening is free on the corniche, which runs for more than 30 kilometres along the Red Sea.

A full day in Historic Jeddah, the old merchant quarter 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 to Makkah, and the quarter that survives was paid for by both roles.

The buildings are the reason to be here: tower houses of coral stone several storeys high, their facades covered in roshan, the carved wooden bay windows that let air through while blocking the view in. Many are propped and under restoration, so the walk follows the lanes that are open.

The drive inland climbs the Al Hada road, a line of switchbacks through the Sarawat mountains known traditionally as Darb Al-Jammalah, the road of the camel caravans. The temperature falls as the road rises.

At around 2,177 metres there are acacia and juniper along the verges, and stalls selling rose water, fruit and hot drinks. You are in Taif by the afternoon, with the evening free in the town's markets.

Taif's rose growing is a real industry: growers return to the fields each December and the crop is picked and distilled about 55 days later into rose water and perfume oil, sold on from the factories in the town. The morning is at a farm and a distillery, then the Al Shareef Museum, a preserved traditional building holding coins, weaponry, clothing and household pieces from across the Hejaz.

In the afternoon you fly south to Abha, in the Asir highlands, and are taken to your hotel.

The Asir escarpment catches monsoon cloud, so the ground here is green, terraced and farmed, with juniper forest rather than desert. The morning is around Abha: the trails of Asir National Park, the cable cars down the escarpment, and Al Habala Park, named for the rope ladders once used to reach the village on the cliff below.

Then the escarpment road down to Rijal Almaa, 45 kilometres from Abha: stone tower houses several storeys high, laid in dark basalt courses with lines of white quartz set into the outer walls, stacked up the mountainside so tightly the village reads as one building. Inside, the walls are painted by the women of the house in Al-Qatt Al-Asiri, geometric bands of bright colour applied straight onto the plaster, which UNESCO added to its intangible heritage list in 2017. Several houses are open as a museum, and there is a visitor centre in the village.

A last morning in Abha's markets, then the flight across the country to the Gulf coast at Dammam and the road inland to Al Ahsa.

You are taken to your hotel in Hofuf. Summer is the high season in Asir and the reverse of everywhere else in the country, so the two halves of this trip rarely feel like the same climate.

Al-Ahsa Oasis is the largest oasis in the world by palm count and a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape inscribed in 2018. Around 2.5 million palms are watered from natural springs across more than 85 square kilometres, and the listing covers the whole working system — gardens, canals, springs, wells and drainage — rather than any single monument. It has been farmed continuously since the Neolithic and is still a working oasis.

Inside it stands Al Qarah Mountain, a limestone hill running about 1.5 kilometres and cut through by 28 narrow, high-sided caverns, Al Nashab among them; the rock draws the heat out of the air, so the passages stay cool while the oasis outside is well past 40 degrees. In town, Qasr Ibrahim spreads over 18,000 square metres in Al-Kut, built under the Al-Jabri dynasty between 1436 and 1534, with watchtowers, stables, courtyards and a prayer hall with a mihrab. Handcraft Castle, recognised by UNESCO as part of the Creative Cities Network for craft and folk art, closes the day.

The morning is free depending on your flight, with the car and driver available for a last stop in Hofuf.

You are driven back to Dammam for your departure.