Riyadh, AlUla & Abha

You are met at the airport and driven to your hotel. Distances inside Riyadh are large and the city is built for driving, so your vehicle and driver are with you from the start. The evening is yours.

The National Museum of Saudi Arabia takes the morning. Its halls run in order - geology, pre-Islamic Arabia, the life of the Prophet, the successive Saudi states, unification - so the whole span can be walked in one visit without doubling back.

Al Masmak stands on the same grounds inside the King Abdulaziz Historical Centre: a mud-and-clay fort with four watchtowers, thick walls and a single studded door, where the capture of the city in 1902 began the state that exists today. It is a garrison building rather than an ornamental palace, and it is small enough to see properly in an afternoon.

About twenty minutes from the centre, Diriyah is the mud-brick town that was the capital of the first Saudi state. The Emirate of Diriyah ran from 1727 to 1818 from the At-Turaif district, a World Heritage Site since 2010 and the most complete Najdi architecture at this scale anywhere: thick mud-brick walls, stepped parapets, and triangular openings cut high for light and air.

It has been restored and opened as a walkable museum quarter, so you go through the streets rather than around a fence. Wadi Hanifa runs directly below - the valley that was the reason Riyadh grew where it did, cleared from a dumping ground into a green corridor of water channels and walking paths. There is a restaurant and cafe area alongside At-Turaif, which makes this an evening as much as a history stop.

You travel north-west to AlUla, a sandstone valley farmed and settled for thousands of years because it has water, on the incense road running north out of southern Arabia. You check in and the afternoon is easy.

In the evening, AlUla Old Town: a labyrinth of mud-brick houses built from the 12th century, walled and entered through fourteen gates, overlooked by a fort of around the 10th century standing 45 metres up. The restored lane below holds shops and places to eat and stays open late, which makes it the one part of the valley with a real evening.

Hegra is the largest surviving Nabataean city after Petra and the first Saudi site on the UNESCO World Heritage List. More than 110 tombs stand cut into sandstone outcrops across the desert floor, their facades carved directly into the rock, some chambers inscribed with a description of the person laid inside.

The site is entered only on a guided tour with an AlUla Rawi, moving between tomb clusters by vehicle, and daily numbers are capped, so your place is booked before you travel. At the visitor centre is the reconstructed face of Hinat, a Nabataean woman excavated from one of the tombs in 2008 - one of the few points in the valley where the site stops being architecture and becomes a person.

Dadan was the capital of the Dadanite and Lihyanite kingdoms, which held this oasis and the trade moving through it for centuries before the Nabataeans reached Hegra. The tombs are cut almost 50 metres up the cliff face, square openings in a line across red stone, two of them guarded by carved lions. The scale only registers when you notice how small the people below them are.

In the afternoon, Jabal Ikmah, a short canyon whose walls carry hundreds of pre-Arabic inscriptions in Dadanitic, Thamudic, Minaic and Nabataean script. The path is level and the carvings sit close enough to read without climbing. Elephant Rock, a 52-metre outcrop weathered into the shape of an elephant, is the usual last stop as the light drops.

You travel south to Abha, the main town of the Asir highlands, high in the Sarawat mountains. The escarpment catches monsoon cloud here, so the ground is green, terraced and forested with juniper rather than desert - it reads nothing like the country you have crossed to reach it.

You arrive with time for the town itself in the late afternoon - the local markets, and the view off the edge of the escarpment.

An unhurried morning in Abha - the markets, or the top of the escarpment once more - then the transfer to Abha airport for your onward flight.