Jeddah & Abha

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.

The evening is unscheduled. Your driver stays available if you want to go out along the Corniche, which runs for over 30 kilometres of waterfront with King Fahd Fountain standing 312 metres high out in the sea.

A guided walk through Al-Balad, 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 arriving for Makkah, and that combination of trade and pilgrimage paid for the quarter.

What you come for are the tower houses: coral stone several storeys high, faced with roshan, the carved wooden bay windows that move air through the rooms while keeping the street from seeing in. A good part of the quarter is propped and under restoration, building by building, so expect a working site rather than a finished one.

The afternoon is left open to rest before an early start tomorrow.

An early boat out to the reefs. The Red Sea runs more than 1,700 kilometres along the western coast and the reefs here have been outside mass tourism for decades, which is the whole proposition — coral in a condition that is now rare in the northern Red Sea. You snorkel or dive according to your certification, with a licensed operator and gear provided.

Back on shore, you are driven to the airport and fly south to Abha, which has its own airport. You are met there and taken to your hotel for three nights.

A day in the mountains around Abha. The Sarawat range runs through here and Al Soudah is the highest peak in the country. You take a cable car down the escarpment, then walk a section of the trails in Asir National Park through juniper and terraced ground.

Al Habala Park sits at high altitude, named for the rope ladders once used to reach the village on the cliff below it, and there is a cable car here too. The afternoon ends in the local markets in town.

You drive down the escarpment road to Rijal Almaa, about 45 kilometres from Abha. The drive itself is a large part of why people make the trip.

The village is built of dark stone laid in courses, several storeys high, with lines of white quartz set into the outer walls to throw off the rain. The houses are stacked up the mountainside so tightly that from the valley floor the whole village reads as a single structure. Its architecture carried social meaning as well as aesthetic — family members shared the floors of 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; UNESCO added the practice to its intangible heritage list in 2017. Several houses are open as a museum, one of them with 20 sections of traditional objects, old manuscripts and farming, building and transport tools. There is a visitor centre at the village covering Asir from prehistory to the Saudi era, and Qasabat Al-Owus Tower has the highest view over the valley.

Time in the morning for anything you want to go back to, then you are driven to Abha airport for your flight.