Abu Dhabi

The city of Abu Dhabi occupies an island at the emirate's northern tip and holds most of what visitors come for — the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, the museum district on Saadiyat, the corniche and the entertainment island at Yas — all of which are covered in the Abu Dhabi city guide rather than here. What is worth grasping at emirate scale is the proportion. This emirate is the overwhelming majority of the UAE's territory, and the city is a small bright dot at the top of it. Everything south is desert, punctuated by the oasis belt around Al Ain on the Omani border and the dune country of Liwa near the southern edge. Between them are the gravel plains and camel farms that most people drive through without registering, and a road network good enough that the scale is easy to miss from behind the wheel — Liwa is over two hours from the capital and the drive feels like forty minutes of nothing repeated three times.

Al Ain sits inland on the Omani border, ninety minutes from the capital, and is the closest thing the UAE has to an old city. It grew around natural springs, and the date palm oases at its centre are still irrigated by falaj channels — an underground and open water system that has been running for millennia and is cool enough inside the palm shade to feel like a different climate. That system, together with the Bronze Age tombs at Hili and Jebel Hafeet, forms the UAE's only UNESCO World Heritage listing, and it is the strongest argument that this country has a past as well as a skyline. The city is also low-rise and green in a way nowhere on the coast is, with a serious camel market, forts including the birthplace of the country's founding ruler, and Jebel Hafeet rising above it — a mountain with a famously good road to the summit and a view over the whole oasis at sunset. Al Ain is a comfortable day trip from either Abu Dhabi or Dubai and a better overnight.

South of Al Ain the country runs out. Liwa is a crescent of oasis settlements at the northern rim of the Rub al Khali — the Empty Quarter, the largest continuous sand desert on earth — and the dunes there are on a scale nothing near Dubai approaches, rising in ridges hundreds of metres high with nothing behind them for hundreds of kilometres. This is the desert people imagine when they book a safari near the coast, and it is a completely different proposition: over two hours from Abu Dhabi city, no realistic day trip, and the entire point is being there at dawn or dusk when the light does what it does. A handful of desert lodges and camps make an overnight straightforward, and the drive itself passes through date plantations that supply much of the country. How the accessible safaris near the cities differ from this, and how to choose between them, is set out in the UAE desert guide. Go between November and March; in summer this is genuinely hostile ground.

The emirate's Gulf coastline runs west from the capital for several hundred kilometres, thinly populated and edged with mangrove and salt flat. Offshore, a number of islands have been given over to conservation, and the best known carries a wildlife reserve where Arabian oryx — the animal the UAE brought back from extinction in the wild — along with gazelle, cheetah and giraffe live on open range, reached by boat or short flight and visited on guided drives. It is an expensive and genuinely unusual day, and it has more in common with an African reserve than with anything else in the Gulf. Practically, all of this needs a vehicle: Al Ain and Liwa have no public transport a visitor should plan around, distances are long even where the roads are fast, and fuel and rest stops thin out south of Al Ain. The UAE transport guide covers what driving here is like. Fill the tank before heading into the Liwa loop rather than assuming the next station is close.