Manama

Manama sits on an island that civilization has called home for four thousand years: this was Dilmun, the garden-land of Sumerian myth where Gilgamesh came looking for immortality, and its layers still show — a fort by the sea stacked epoch on epoch, tens of thousands of ancient burial mounds rippling the suburbs, and in Muharraq a UNESCO 'Pearling Path' threading the merchant houses of the trade that made Bahrain famous before oil made anyone anything.

The traveller walks through the Bab Al Bahrain into the souq for cardamom, gold and shawarma; crosses to Muharraq for the pearl houses' coral-stone majlis rooms and the island's best machboos; climbs Qal'at al-Bahrain at sunset, where the tell under the Portuguese fort holds the Dilmun capital itself; and drives south to the Tree of Life — a four-century mesquite standing alone and inexplicably green in bare desert, the island's favorite mystery.

The Guide's practical counsel: Bahrain is the Gulf at its most easygoing — visas simple for most, distances tiny, museums excellent, and the National Museum's Dilmun halls the right first hour —; winter is the season, and Formula 1 week in spring books the island solid; modest dress travels well, and the causeway to Saudi Arabia makes Manama a natural first or last chapter of a larger Gulf sail.