Desert and coast

Riyadh is the country's main air hub, so it is the usual arrival point. You are met and driven in. Distances inside the city are large and it is built for driving, so the first evening is left clear.

The National Museum of Saudi Arabia runs as a sequence of halls covering the peninsula from prehistory to the modern state, and Al Masmak, the clay fort where the capture of the city in 1902 began the present state, stands on the same grounds in the old centre. Late in the afternoon, Wadi Hanifa: 120 kilometres of valley through the capital, reclaimed from a dumping ground into a chain of parks and water channels, and the reason the city grew where it did.

About 100 kilometres north-west of the city, at the point known as the Edge of the World, the Tuwaiq escarpment breaks off and the plain simply stops. The escarpment runs some 800 kilometres across central Arabia; at this point the wall falls away to a flat desert floor with nothing on it to the horizon. The rock holds marine fossils, snails and shells, because this was seabed long before it was desert. There is no ticket and no infrastructure at all: no water, food or fuel, and mobile coverage that drops out. The final approach is rough track and needs four-wheel drive. You go for the light at one end of the day and carry everything in.

The drive south out of Riyadh towards the Rub' al Khali, the largest continuous sand desert on earth. Trips into it run from Riyadh, and the day is mostly road, with the ground changing as you go. You reach camp in the late afternoon and the first night is under the dunes.

Uruq Bani Ma'arid was inscribed in 2023 as Saudi Arabia's first natural World Heritage property. It covers the point where the sand sea meets the Tuwaiq escarpment, more than 12,000 square kilometres of dune field and rock plateau together, and that range of ground is why it qualified as a natural rather than a cultural listing. It is also where the Arabian oryx was returned to the wild after going extinct outside captivity; sand gazelle and mountain gazelle are here too. Access is regulated and accompanied throughout.

The morning is in the sand proper, where the dunes run to a scale that photographs badly and has to be walked. There is genuinely nothing in them, which is the point of coming. After lunch the convoy turns back and you are out of the reserve by evening.

Across to Al Ahsa, 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 in the middle of the Eastern Province desert, and the listing covers the whole working system rather than a single monument: gardens, canals, springs, wells and drainage. It has been farmed continuously since the Neolithic and it is still a working oasis rather than a preserved one.

Al Qarah is a limestone hill inside the oasis, about 1.5 kilometres long and cut through by 28 narrow, high-sided caverns, among them Al Nashab. The rock draws heat out of the air, so the passages hold a steady temperature while the oasis outside is well past 40 degrees, which is why they were used as shelter. Sections are lit and there is a visitor centre at the base. In the afternoon, Qasr Ibrahim in Hofuf, a fortified palace of over 18,000 square metres built under the Al-Jabri dynasty, with watchtowers, barracks, stables and a prayer hall with a mihrab.

Out to the coast at Dammam and Al Khobar, reachable from Al Ahsa by road or rail. This is the industrial and administrative heart of the oil region and it reads that way: somewhere people live and work rather than a heritage stop. The Khobar seafront is the main public space, running along the Gulf with fountains, seating and walking paths, and the causeway to Bahrain leaves from here.

A free morning if your flight allows, then the transfer to Dammam's international airport.