All seven emirates in fourteen days by hire car — the creek Dubai was built on, the hilltop fort where British gunfire in December 1819 opened the treaty relationship that eventually made these the Trucial States, the oldest mosque and the oldest irrigation channel in the country, and the oasis crescent on the edge of the Empty Quarter that both ruling families came out of.
Dubai, the creek
Start at the water, not the skyline. Dubai was a pearling and re-export port and the creek is the whole reason it exists: in 1901 the ruler declared it duty-free, and Persian merchants from Lingah moved across and built the wind-tower houses now restored as the Al Fahidi quarter. Cross on an abra — the fare is still counted in single dirhams — and walk the Deira wharfage, where wooden dhows are loaded by hand for Iran, Somalia and India.
Dubai, the vertical half
Downtown and the Burj Khalifa, 828 m and opened on 4 January 2010, three weeks after Abu Dhabi bailed the emirate out. Observation decks are timed-entry and priced by slot, so book ahead or skip it. Then the Metro, driverless since it opened on 9 September 2009, down Sheikh Zayed Road to Equiti and a five-minute taxi into Al Quoz for the Alserkal Avenue warehouses, which is where the city keeps its galleries. No station puts you at the door.
Sharjah
Twenty kilometres and a different set of rules. Sharjah is dry — no alcohol is sold, served or legally carried — and it spends on museums instead: the Museum of Islamic Civilization in a converted souk on the corniche, and the Sharjah Art Foundation, set up in 2009 to run the contemporary art biennial the emirate has held since 1993 and the most serious thing of its kind between Istanbul and Delhi.
Up the coast to Ras Al Khaimah
Collect the hire car and take the old coast road rather than the E11. Ajman keeps its museum inside an eighteenth-century fort that served as the police station until 1978; Umm Al Quwain, the least developed of the seven, has an old town on a sand spit and mangroves behind it. End at Dhayah Fort above Ras Al Khaimah, the only hilltop fort left standing in the country: a British expedition took the town in the first week of December 1819, the survivors held this hill and surrendered on the 22nd, and the General Maritime Treaty was signed down in the town on 8 January 1820. The phrase Trucial States is later than that treaty and often misattributed to it — it comes from the maritime truces the same sheikhs began signing in 1835, renewed each year until the perpetual one of 1853.
Jebel Jais
The road climbs to about 1,900 m on the highest mountain in the country, 1,934 m at the summit, which is on the Omani side of the line. There is frost up here in January and it runs twelve to fifteen degrees cooler than the coast — take a jacket you will feel foolish packing. The zip line strung across the ravine is 2.83 km and was certified as the world's longest in 2018; it books out at weekends and closes in high wind.
Over the Hajar to Al Bidya
South and east through Masafi, where the mountains change colour from grey limestone to black ophiolite — seabed crust pushed up on end, which is why geologists come here. Dibba on the far coast is split three ways between Sharjah, Fujairah and Oman, with three sets of number plates in one bay. Just south of it stands Al Bidya, a squat four-domed mosque of mud and stone dated to around 1446 and still in use for prayer.
Khor Fakkan and Fujairah
Khor Fakkan is an exclave of Sharjah on the wrong sea, with a deep-water container terminal at one end of the bay and swimmers at the other. Fujairah is the only emirate with no Arabian Gulf coast at all, which is exactly why it matters: the pipeline from Habshan surfaces here and lets Abu Dhabi load crude without passing through the Strait of Hormuz, and the anchorage offshore is one of the largest ship-refuelling stations in the world. Count the tankers waiting.
Mleiha and Faya
Back inland to Sharjah's desert interior. The archaeological centre at Mleiha is built over a circular Umm an-Nar tomb of the third millennium BC, and the ridge at Jebel Faya nearby produced stone tools dated to roughly 125,000 years ago — evidence for a much earlier human crossing out of Africa than the textbooks allowed. The Faya palaeolandscape was inscribed by UNESCO in 2025, the country's second listing.
Hatta
A Dubai exclave in the mountains, with the Omani border running along its eastern and southern edge — several tracks out of the valley end at an Omani post, and a standard UAE hire-car policy will not cover you through one. The E44 back towards Dubai stays inside the country the whole way. The heritage village is a reconstruction and the dam is the reason people come, kayaks on turquoise water. Inside the mountain above it, DEWA has tunnelled a 250 MW pumped-storage plant, the first in the Gulf, meant to bank solar power by pushing water uphill in the afternoon and letting it back down at night. Its completion date has slipped repeatedly; either way there is nothing of it to see from the road.
Al Ain, the oases
The country's first World Heritage listing, made in 2011, and the only city on this route that is not on the sea. Al Ain Oasis holds something like 147,000 date palms watered by falaj — gravity channels running off the mountain, walkable on raised walkways through the shade. At Hili, ten kilometres north and almost on the Omani border, one of those channels has been dated to the Iron Age and is among the oldest known aflaj anywhere.
Jebel Hafeet
The mountain south of town, about 1,240 m, with a road of some sixty corners laid up it in the 1980s. The point is at the bottom: several hundred beehive tombs on the lower slopes, built between roughly 3200 and 2700 BC, excavated by a Danish team in 1959 who gave the whole period its name. Afterwards Al Jahili Fort in town, built in 1891, which holds a permanent exhibition on Wilfred Thesiger. He did not set out from here — both of his Empty Quarter crossings began far to the south, in Dhofar in 1946 and in Yemen a year later — but he came out at Buraimi, the Omani half of this same oasis, in 1947 and again in 1948.
Abu Dhabi
West across the gravel plain to the capital. The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque took eleven years and opened in 2007; Sheikh Zayed is buried in the courtyard, entry is free, the dress code is enforced and the slot must be booked. Friday morning belongs to worshippers and visitors are not admitted until the afternoon, so do not make this a Friday. Then Qasr Al Hosn, a watchtower of the 1760s grown into a fort, the oldest stone building in the city, and the whole of Abu Dhabi until oil money arrived.
Saadiyat
Louvre Abu Dhabi opened on 8 November 2017 under a 180-metre dome of eight layered star screens that drops what Jean Nouvel called a rain of light onto the floor. The building is the exhibit. The collection is bought and borrowed under a thirty-year intergovernmental agreement signed in 2007, for which the emirate paid roughly €400 million for the name alone and about as much again for the loans, exhibitions and curatorial advice.
Liwa and the sand sea
Two and a half hours south to the northern edge of the Rub al Khali. Liwa is a crescent of some fifty villages along a line of groundwater, and it is where the Bani Yas confederation came from — the Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi left for the island in 1793, the Al Maktoum branch went north to Dubai in 1833, and everything on this route follows from those two moves. Tal Moreeb, the dune at the end of the road, is about 300 m of sand at a gradient that closes to traffic during the hill climb each winter. Sleep out here and allow a full three hours back to Abu Dhabi airport in the morning — it is further than the map makes it look.
Good to know
Entry is the easy part of this trip and still worth getting right. EU and EEA passports are stamped in on arrival for ninety days in any hundred and eighty; the UK, US, Canada, Australia and Japan among a few dozen others get thirty days, extendable twice for a fee at an immigration centre. Six months of passport validity is checked at the desk. The lists are revised more often than they are reported, so read the current one against your own passport rather than a forum post. What actually catches visitors out is medicine, not visas: the UAE controls a long list of drugs sold over the counter elsewhere — codeine, tramadol, some ADHD and sleep medication, anything containing CBD — and arriving with them undeclared and without a prescription is handled as a narcotics matter rather than a paperwork one. Go between November and March. From June to September the coast sits in the low forties most days and goes past 45°C in July and August, with Gulf humidity on top of it, and the mountain and desert days on this route become genuinely unsafe rather than merely unpleasant. A car is not optional past day four: intercity buses connect the main towns but nothing runs to Dhayah, Al Bidya, Mleiha or the Liwa dunes. Dubai's Salik gantries charge automatically and the rental company rebills them with an administration fee per crossing; since 2025 the rate varies by time of day. Speed enforcement is by camera, fines attach to the hire car and are settled at drop-off, and Abu Dhabi's motorways do not carry the tolerance buffer that Dubai drivers assume — set the cruise control to the posted number. Roads out of Hatta and around Dibba cross into Oman, and standard UAE hire agreements exclude the country entirely, so check the policy before taking a mountain short cut. Sharjah is dry: not licensed venues only, but the whole emirate, including alcohol carried through it in a boot. The working week runs Monday to Friday with the federal public sector stopping at noon on Friday, a change made on 1 January 2022, so government offices keep hours that do not match the rest of the Gulf. Sharjah went further and put its own government on a Monday-to-Thursday week; its museums open late on Fridays, and a Friday morning in Sharjah is the one that catches people out. Ramadan begins in early February in 2027 and moves about eleven days earlier each year. Restaurants have not been required to screen off or shut since 2021 and most do not, but eating, drinking and smoking in public during daylight remain offences and that applies to visitors as much as anyone; opening hours shorten, and the evenings are the best time of the year to be in the country.
Shorter or longer?
Add two or three days from Liwa: north to Jebel Dhanna and the twenty-five-minute ferry to Sir Bani Yas, where Sheikh Zayed's breeding herds from the 1970s became a park with several thousand Arabian oryx and gazelle on it, then the public ferry from the same port out to Delma, two hours each way and only a few sailings a day, which was a pearling island long before anything on this coast was a city.
Dubai, Sharjah, Ras Al Khaimah with Jebel Jais, and the east coast, then straight back. Keeps the creek, the fort, the mountains and the oldest mosque; cuts Al Ain, the capital and the desert, which is to say it cuts the older half of the country.