Top Things to Do in Mecca

A Jeddah matriarch steers you through coral-stone lanes where latticed balconies leak frankincense onto your shoulders. You'll taste cardamom coffee boiled in front of you, hear oud strings plucked behind a merchant's curtain, see the Red Sea glint like hammered steel at sunset.

The escarpment drops 300 metres so abruptly that your ears pop before your foot leaves the car. Acacia trees grow sideways, warped by wind that sounds like a didgeridoo inside your skull.

Riyadh's mud-brick stronghold smells of palm-trunk rafters and old gunpowder. Inside, a curator lifts a 1900s kohl stick to the light so you can see the iron still gleam; outside, the souq's alley narrows until your shoulders brush bolts of indigo fabric.

Swap Mecca's marble cool for a furnace of orange sand that squeaks under tires and tastes like roasted cinnamon when you tumble. Drivers deflate to 12 psi, gun engines, send you up 40-metre ridges where the horizon bends like a hot coin.

The itinerary threads from Dadanite lion tombs to the black basalt labyrinth of Old AlUla, where mud alleys smell of dates laid out to ferment on reed trays.

The Asir Mountains rise like green knuckles punched through cloud. Qat plantations smell of damp earth after Mecca's dust. A cable car swings you over cliff villages where stone houses grow out of rock and baboons bark from acacia branches.

King Abdulaziz Airport to the sea in 45 minutes: you exit immigration smelling of aircraft fuel and re-enter smelling of grilled hammour and diesel boats. The driver keeps a cold bottle of Zamzam in the glove box and a prayer-rug in the trunk.

AlUla's desert floor is so quiet you hear your own eyelids blink. Then the guide lifts a Nabataean tomb door and a rush of 2,000-year-old air, dry, sweet, faintly almond, strokes your face.