Two hours out of Riyadh, the map simply stops.
Which Edge of the World trip gets you to the cliff for sunset. What a red-sand afternoon costs once the quad bikes are included. Whether the flight north to AlUla earns its place in a short week.
A cliff at dusk, a reef off Jeddah, a tomb cut into sandstone.
Three bookings that between them cover most of what people fly to Saudi Arabia for. The price of each, and how they actually went.
01The one everybody takesEdge Of The World, camels &Stargazing with 4×4The Tuwaiq cliffs at golden hour, a bat cave under the rim, then dinner and a telescope out on the sand. More travellers book this than any other tour in the country.
02The Jeddah morningJeddah: Bayada Leisure Boat Trip with SnorkelingOut of the marina onto the Red Sea with fins and a mask aboard. The coral starts far closer to the city than most people expect.
03The reason to fly northVisiting The Incredible Heritage Site Hegra in AlUlaQasr al-Farid and the tomb facades at Hegra, standing free in the sand where the Nabataeans cut them.
Every good Riyadh day ends with the city behind you.
The escarpment, the red dunes and the camel flats all sit inside a two-hour drive of the capital. Three kinds of afternoon, what it costs to join each one, and how late they run.
Riyadh and Jeddah are the two doors. Everything else is a drive or a flight.
A capital with a desert at the end of the road, a port with a UNESCO old town on the water, a mudbrick city the kingdom began in, and a sandstone valley in the north. Where the tours actually run.
Hegra, Diriyah and Al-Balad: three UNESCO sites, three different centuries.
Nabataean tombs cut into free-standing sandstone in the north, a mudbrick capital on the western edge of Riyadh, and coral-stone houses in Jeddah with the wooden balconies still on the front. None of them needs a whole day on its own.
- 1Red Sand Adventure 4×4 (Camel Ride ,Quad Biking, Heritage House)from $100
- 2Visiting The Incredible Heritage Site Hegra in AlUlafrom $65
- 3Diriyah Tour with Traditional Dinnerfrom $130
Jeddah keeps its reef and its old town about ten minutes apart.
The Red Sea is warm here all year and the coral starts a short run out of the marinas. Back on shore, Al-Balad is four hundred years of coral-block houses with carved shutters, and it walks in an afternoon.
What a day out in Saudi Arabia actually costs.
Every priced tour on the site, sorted into three brackets. The desert evenings cluster in the middle; the private guides and the luxury 4x4 days are what push the top end.
Audio walks, city sightseeing, the shorter Al-Balad tours and the half-day runs out of Madinah.
The standard desert evening: escarpment, camel ride, dinner under the stars. Most of the site sits here.
Private guides, luxury 4x4 days, the AlUla itineraries and anything quoted for a small group.
Two Saudi cities are not open to every visitor.
Makkah is closed to non-Muslims, and so is the central area of Madinah. The tours the site lists for both are ziyarat and Umrah services run for pilgrims by local operators, along with the transfers between the two cities. They are here because they are part of what can be booked in Saudi Arabia, not as sights to slot into a tourist itinerary.
In Riyadh the usable hours are the last two of the day.
From May into September the middle of the day is unusable outdoors, and the tours are built around that. Most desert trips leave in the afternoon, reach the escarpment for sunset and feed you after dark. Winter mornings are the exception, and the hill routes run then.
Places in Saudi Arabia
Kinds of Saudi day
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