Oman

Arrive at Muscat International and transfer into the city, low and white along its bay under bare brown mountains. The afternoon is a gentle introduction: the Mutrah corniche at the hour the light goes gold on the water, then the souq behind it, one of the oldest in the Arab world and still a working market rather than a display, thick with frankincense, silver and Kashmiri traders. Dinner overlooking the harbour where the royal yacht and the dhows share an anchorage.

Early to the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque, which admits non-Muslim visitors only in the morning and is worth being first through the door for: a prayer hall under a fifty-metre dome, a Persian carpet that took six hundred women four years to weave, and a chandelier of Swarovski crystal and gold. Then the Royal Opera House, the Bait Al Zubair museum for the silver, khanjar daggers and household history, and Old Muscat itself, where the Al Alam palace stands between two Portuguese forts on the rock. The afternoon is free on the corniche.

South along one of the great coastal drives, the road running between the Hajar mountains and the Gulf of Oman. First the Bimmah Sinkhole, a limestone collapse of startlingly blue water a few hundred metres from the sea. Then the day's centrepiece: the boat across the mouth of Wadi Shab, the walk up the canyon past date gardens and falaj channels, and the swim through three pools and a slot in the rock into the cave with the waterfall inside it. Late afternoon into Sur, where they still build wooden dhows by eye on the creek, and on to the reserve at Ras al Jinz.

A pre-dawn walk down to the beach with the rangers for the quietest hour of the trip: green turtles finishing their nests in the half-light and dragging themselves back to the water, and, in season, hatchlings breaking out of the sand and running for the surf. Back for breakfast, then inland. Wadi Bani Khalid at midday, a chain of deep emerald pools in a limestone gorge, before the drive into the Sharqiya Sands: deflating the tyres at the edge, driving the crests in the late light, and a camp among the dunes with dinner under the stars.

Sunrise from the top of a dune with the whole erg going orange, then a morning with a Bedouin family who still herd camels here, drinking coffee with cardamom in a goat-hair tent and hearing how the sands are actually lived in. Out of the dunes by late morning and west across the gravel plain to Nizwa, the old capital of the interior, arriving in time to climb the great round tower of the fort for the view over the date palms, and to walk the souq at the hour the silver and the halwa sellers are still open.

A day among the interior's forts. Bahla first, a UNESCO site where a vast mud-brick citadel stands inside twelve kilometres of oasis wall, and where the restoration took the better part of thirty years. Then Jabreen, the elegant one: a fortified palace of painted ceilings, date stores, a Quranic school and a horse stair, built by an imam who preferred scholarship to sieges. In the afternoon, the old quarter of Al Hamra and then Misfat al Abriyeen, a mud-brick village stacked into the mountainside above its own terraces, walked along the falaj channel that still waters them. On a Friday we start at the Nizwa livestock market instead, at dawn.

Up the mountain road onto the rim of Wadi Ghul, a canyon a kilometre deep that Oman calls its Grand Canyon and that genuinely earns the comparison. The morning walks the W6 Balcony Walk, an old donkey path cut into the cliff at around two thousand metres that traverses the wall for two hours to the abandoned village of As Sab, terraces and all, hanging above the drop. It is not technical, but it is exposed, and the views are relentless. Night on the mountain, where it is properly cold after dark and the stars are the best of the trip.

Across to the Green Mountain and up onto the Sayq plateau, two thousand metres of terraced villages growing pomegranate, walnut and the damask roses that are distilled here every spring. The walk links Al Ayn, Ash Shirayjah and Al Aqr along the falaj, with the terraces dropping away below and the canyon opening out at Diana's Point. Then the descent and the drive back to the capital, arriving in time for a last dinner on the Muscat coast.

The final morning is shaped around your flight. If there is time, the fish market on the Mutrah waterfront at seven is the real Muscat and takes an hour, or the National Museum opposite the palace is the best single account of the Omani maritime empire anywhere. Then the transfer to the airport. Oman connects easily onward to the Gulf, East Africa and South Asia, and we are glad to add Musandam, the Salalah frankincense coast in khareef season, or our Jordan expedition to either end.