North to south, twelve days

You are met at Tabuk airport and driven to your hotel. Tabuk is the base for the far north-west, and the rest of the day is left free after the flight. Your guide runs through the route with you in the evening.

Tabuk Castle stands on the old road that ran from Damascus to Madinah, and its towers were used to watch that road. Its construction dates to 1559 and it has been restored several times since. The Hejaz Railway station in the city belongs to the same route: work on the line began in 1900 and took eight years, carrying pilgrims and freight south from Damascus until it was broken in the First World War. There is no ticket for either site, and both are short visits, so the afternoon is yours.

A full day out at Wadi Disah, with your guide and driver for the whole of it. You leave Tabuk early and are back there in the evening.

The drive on into the AlUla valley, arriving in the afternoon. The day ends at Elephant Rock, a 52-metre sandstone outcrop weathered into the shape of an elephant with its trunk to the ground. Sunken seating has been cut into the sand around the base, and late afternoon into dusk is when the rock turns deep red. There is no entry ticket.

Hegra is the largest surviving Nabataean city after Petra and the first place in Saudi Arabia inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. More than 110 tombs are cut into sandstone outcrops standing on open desert floor, their facades carved straight into the rock. Access is by guided tour with an AlUla Rawi, moving between the tomb clusters by vehicle; daily numbers are capped, so your place is booked before you travel. At the visitor centre you see the reconstruction of Hinat, whose burial was excavated in 2008.

Dadan was the capital of the Dadanite and Lihyanite kingdoms, and its tombs are cut almost 50 metres up the cliff wall above the oasis, two of them guarded by carved lions. Jabal Ikmah, a short drive on, is a desert canyon whose walls carry hundreds of pre-Arabic inscriptions in Dadanitic, Thamudic, Minaic and Nabataean scripts; the path is short and level and there is no ticket. The day ends in AlUla Old Town, mud-brick houses built from the 12th century behind fourteen gates, with a fort of around the 10th century standing 45 metres above them. The restored lane fills up after 3pm and the restaurants run late.

You travel on to Madinah and settle in. Madinah is open to visitors of any faith, but access to the sacred areas at its centre, including Al Masjid an Nabawi, is restricted to Muslims. Your guide sets out clearly what is open to you before you start, so the following day is planned around it rather than around a surprise at the gate.

A full day in Madinah: the historic neighbourhoods, the date farms, the city museums, Uhud mountain, and the old lava fields that make the ground here unlike anywhere else in the Hejaz. The pace of the city follows prayer times, so the day is arranged around them. Muslim travellers who want to enter Al Rawdah Al Sharifah need a permit, booked in advance through Nusuk.

On to Jeddah on the Haramain high-speed line. The afternoon is in Al-Balad, the old merchant quarter on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2014: tower houses of coral stone several storeys high, faced in roshan, the carved wooden bay windows that let air through while keeping the street out. Much of the quarter is propped and under restoration, so it is a working site rather than a finished one. In the evening, the corniche runs over 30 kilometres along the water.

Inland and up into the Sarawat mountains to Taif. Al Hada Mountain, in the same range between Taif and Makkah, carries a cable car and a road of switchbacks that has been in use for a thousand years. Roses are the town's industry rather than a story told to visitors: growers return to the fields each December and the crop is distilled into rose water and perfume oil about 55 days later. Al Shafa rises over 2,500 metres about 30 kilometres from town, and is the afternoon drive if the weather is clear.

A flight to Abha, the main town of the Asir highlands. The escarpment catches monsoon cloud, so the ground here is green, terraced and forested with juniper rather than desert. In the afternoon you drive down the escarpment road to Rijal Almaa, a village of stone tower houses about 45 kilometres from Abha, lines of white quartz set into the walls to shed rain, the interiors painted by the women of the house in Al-Qatt Al-Asiri, a practice UNESCO added to its intangible heritage list in 2017. Several houses are open as a museum.

If your flight allows, there is time for the cable car down the escarpment or a short walk on the trails of Asir National Park before you are driven to Abha airport.