Jeddah, Taif & 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 yours; the waterfront is the easy way to start.

A guided morning in Historic Jeddah (Al-Balad), added to the World Heritage List in 2014. The city has been the sea gateway to Makkah since the 7th century, and the pilgrim and Indian Ocean trade paid for the quarter: tower houses of coral stone faced in the carved wooden bay windows called roshan.

Much of it is propped and under restoration, so this is a working site rather than a finished one. The afternoon is yours.

Out by boat to the reef off Jeddah with a qualified guide. The Saudi Red Sea coast runs more than 1,700 kilometres and its reefs have had very few divers on them, having sat outside mass tourism for decades - coral in a condition that is now rare in the northern Red Sea.

Certified divers dive. Everyone else snorkels the same shallow sites from the surface. Back in the city for the evening.

You leave the coast and climb into the Sarawat mountains to Taif. The approach runs up Al Hada Mountain, part of a range curving about 87 kilometres between Taif and Makkah, on a road of switchbacks that has been in use for a thousand years - it was known as Darb Al-Jammalah, the camel drivers' way. The temperature drops as you climb.

At the top, at about 2,177 metres, there is acacia and juniper along the road and stalls selling rose water, fruit and hot drinks. A cable car runs down the mountainside to Al-Kar, and the ride is worth doing for the drop alone.

The morning is at the rose farms. Roses are a real industry in Taif rather than a tourist story: growers return to the fields each December, and about 55 days later the crop is picked and taken to the distilleries to be turned into rose water and perfume oil. You see both ends of that - the fields and the extraction - and the annual Taif Rose Festival is held at Al Rudaf Park if your dates line up.

In the afternoon you drive about 30 kilometres to Al Shafa, which rises over 2,500 metres and is cool and green at the top, with juniper on the slopes and pomegranate, grape and fig in the valleys below. Heritage villages and historical forts stand in the same mountains.

A travel day south along the Sarawat range to Abha, the main town of the Asir highlands. The escarpment here catches monsoon cloud, which is why the ground is farmed in terraces and forested rather than bare, and why Saudis themselves come up here in summer.

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

Down the escarpment road to Rijal Almaa, about 45 kilometres from Abha, with the drive itself a large part of the point. The village is built of dark basalt laid in courses, lines of white quartz set into the outer walls to throw off rain, stacked up the mountainside so tightly it reads as a single building from the valley.

Inside, the walls carry Al-Qatt Al-Asiri, geometric bands of bright colour painted by the women of the house straight onto the plaster; UNESCO added the practice to its intangible heritage list in 2017. Several houses are open as a museum with around 20 sections of manuscripts, tools and household pieces, and no ticket is needed to enter. On the way back you ride the cable car at Al Habala Park, named for the rope ladders once used to reach the village on the ledge below.

A slow morning, then the transfer to Abha airport for the onward flight.