Twelve days from Dubai to Muscat: start with the skyline, end in a mud brick village

Dubai International is fifteen minutes from the old town on the red metro line, which is the cheapest way in by a wide margin and runs until midnight. Sleep in Bur Dubai or Deira rather than out along the beach: the first two days happen here and taxis to Downtown are quick when you need them.

Give the first afternoon to Al Fahidi, the surviving pocket of old courtyard houses with wind towers on their roofs, then take an abra across the water and back for the price of a coffee. It is the best few minutes in the city and the only one nobody sells a ticket for.

Start on the Deira side early, while it is still working. The wharfage along the creek is a kilometre of wooden cargo boats loading air conditioners, tyres and refrigerators for Iran, Somalia and India, stacked on the quay in the open with no fence and no security. It is the single most surprising thing in Dubai and hardly anybody goes.

Al Ahmadiya, five minutes inland, was the emirate's first school and is now a small restored museum with the heritage house next door. The exhibits are modest. The building tells you what a wealthy Dubai family lived in before oil, which is the point.

In the afternoon, the Dubai Frame in Zabeel Park gives you old city on one side and new city on the other from the same window, which is a heavy handed idea that works.

Jumeirah Mosque runs a guided visit for non-Muslims most mornings through the Sheikh Mohammed Centre for Cultural Understanding, and it is genuinely good: an hour, questions encouraged, coffee and dates afterwards. Book ahead, cover up, and it will be the most useful hour of your three days.

Then Downtown for the afternoon. The Burj Khalifa deck sells timed slots and the sunset ones cost roughly double, so either commit to that or go at two in the afternoon and accept the haze. Either way book online: the walk-up price is punitive.

Stay for the fountain after dark. It runs every half hour into the evening, it is free, and the best view is from the lake edge rather than from a restaurant terrace charging for it.

Take a morning flight, because the afternoon is worth having. Immigration in Muscat is quick, the car hire desks are in the terminal, and the drive to Mutrah takes twenty five minutes on an empty road.

Mutrah is where to sleep and where to spend the first evening. The corniche runs along the harbour under a wall of bare rock, with the fish market at the western end and merchant houses with carved balconies facing the water.

Climb up to the outside of Mutrah Fort at the end of the afternoon. The Portuguese put it there in the 1580s, it is closed to visitors, and the walk up gives you the whole bay with the sun going down behind it.

The Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque admits non-Muslim visitors on weekday mornings only, roughly eight until eleven, and closes to them on Fridays. Go early: it is twenty kilometres out towards Seeb, and the last half hour before closing is the crowded one. Women need a headscarf and everyone needs covered arms and ankles.

Back in old Muscat, the National Museum opposite the palace is the best museum in the country and easily two hours, with reconstructions of Omani architecture, frankincense, and the ships that took the empire to Zanzibar.

Finish outside the palace itself. Qasr Al Alam is a working royal residence with a facade in blue and gold that looks like nothing else, and the two Portuguese forts either side of the harbour frame it.

Be at the fish market by seven. The boats come in at first light, the auction is loud and fast, and by nine it is over and being hosed down. It costs nothing and it is the most alive hour in Muscat.

Bait Al Zubair afterwards is a private family collection turned museum: khanjar daggers, silver, jewellery, and a reconstructed townhouse in the garden. It explains the objects you will see for sale in the souq later, which makes the souq more interesting and the haggling less blind.

In the evening, the Royal Opera House is worth a ticket to almost anything. It was the first opera house on the Arabian peninsula, the acoustics are serious, and the programme runs from flamenco to Arabic classical. If nothing is on, the daytime guided tour gets you inside the building, which is the real attraction.

The drive to Nizwa takes under two hours on a dual carriageway that climbs quietly through a gap in the Hajar range. Leave after breakfast and you are there for lunch.

Nizwa Fort is the reason the town is on the map: a vast round tower of the 1660s, built over a well and a series of murder holes designed for a siege that lasted years. The climb to the top is easy and the view over the date palms explains the whole geography of interior Oman in one turn.

The souq wraps around the fort and is best in the last two hours of the afternoon: dates by the kilo, frankincense, silver, pottery and a hall of meat and vegetables at the back that has not been prettified.

This is the day that needs four wheel drive and an early start. The road runs west through Al Hamra, then climbs a graded track for the last stretch onto the summit plateau of Jebel Shams, the highest mountain in Oman at just over three thousand metres. Allow two hours each way from Nizwa and take water for the whole day.

Below the pass, the abandoned village of Ghul sits in a gash in the rock at the mouth of the canyon, where the walls of the gorge close in to a slot a few hundred metres wide and a kilometre deep.

The walk everyone comes for starts at the goat herders' hamlet of Al Khitaym on the rim. The path is level, cut into the cliff face a long way above the canyon floor, and runs about an hour and a half each way to a deserted terraced village that ends at a waterfall. It is not technical and it is not for anyone who dislikes exposure.

An easier day, all of it on tarmac and none of it more than forty minutes from Nizwa. Bahla comes first: a mud brick fort with kilometres of oasis wall around it, the first place in Oman to be listed by UNESCO, and so fragile that it was on the endangered list for two decades while it was rebuilt.

Jabrin, ten minutes further, is the opposite kind of building. It went up in the 1670s as a palace rather than a stronghold, with painted ceilings, a room for horses on the ground floor and a school of medicine and astronomy upstairs. It is the most beautiful interior in Oman and it is almost always empty.

Come back east through Al Hamra and turn up the hill to Misfat al Abriyyin, a village of stone houses stacked above its own date terraces, watered by a falaj channel that still runs through the middle of it. Walk down through the plantation and back up. Late afternoon light does the rest.

The long drive of the trip: roughly four hours east through Izki and Ibra, along the northern edge of the Wahiba Sands, then down to the sea. It is a good road with long empty stretches, and the sand starts appearing on both sides about two thirds of the way.

Sur sits on a lagoon, with the old quarter of Al Ayjah on the far side reached by a bridge or by a small ferry. The boatyard on the near shore still builds ocean going wooden ships by eye, with no drawings, and nobody minds you walking in among the hulls.

Cross to Al Ayjah at the end of the day for the white lighthouse and the row of restored merchant houses along the water, and the view back at the town.

The coast road north is the best three hours of driving on this route: cliffs, empty beaches, and a string of wadis running down out of the mountains where the road crosses them. Wadi Shab, about forty minutes out of Sur, is the famous one, a walk in from a car park and a boat across a pool at the start of it, and it needs three hours if you do it properly.

That still gets you into Muscat by mid afternoon. Drop the car near the airport or keep it one more night, whichever the hire company prefers, and go back down to Mutrah.

The souq is the last thing on this trip and the right last thing. Go at six, when the lanes fill with people buying rather than photographing, and let yourself get lost in it. Every exit leads back to the corniche eventually.

Muscat International is twenty five minutes from Mutrah on a clear road, and the terminal is fast: a late flight leaves the whole morning free.

If that is you, the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque is on the way out of town and its morning visiting window is exactly when you would be passing. Otherwise stay in Mutrah, eat breakfast on the corniche, and watch the fishing boats come back in.