So near, and yet so far. It is a phrase that crops up with regularity in everyday life; a pithy idiom applied to everything from an amusingly incorrect answer in a quiz-show jackpot round to the sliced shot that whizzes past the post, and loses a football team a major final.

It might also, just as easily, be applied to Algeria.

Because, in its relationship with travellers at least, Africa’s biggest country is exactly that. So near, in that it lies little more than two hours’ flying time from London, its north coast pushed so far up into the Mediterranean that its capital Algiers shares a line of latitude (36°N) with both Malaga on Spain’s Andalusian shoreline, and Ragusa at Sicily’s southern tip. So far, in that it might as well be at the other end of the continent, so small a pull does it exert on international visitors. The number of tourists who fly to Algiers each year is comparatively slight; a scarcity made all the more notable by the contrasting popularity of Morocco and Tunisia – its neighbours to, respectively, the west and the east.

There are several good reasons as to why Algeria is such a ghost in the planet’s travel plans. Some are complicated, and embedded in history; others are rather more prosaic (you need a visa which, while easy to obtain, adds an extra stage to the planning process).

However, at the root of the matter is a simple reality: Algeria has scant interest in being a mainstream holiday destination, or in marketing its 750 miles of (by no means unattractive) seafront as a hotspot for fly-and-flop beach breaks. It is, in short, happy to ebb along in its own world, and at its own speed. If your main requirement of a holiday is easy summer sunshine then, perhaps, you should look elsewhere. But if you would like to pay a visit to learn more about its heritage and wonders then, splendid – the door is open.

Last month, I had the chance to push through this door, and peer into a country that, in a matter of the initial few hours, let alone the following 12 days, brought a long list of adjectives to mind: Fascinating. Spectacular. Welcoming. Beautiful. Tough. Remarkable.

Oh, and big. Algeria’s size – as already mentioned, it is Africa’s biggest country – is inescapable. You only need to glance at the map to notice this – the manner in which it stretches all the way down from those Mediterranean tides, deep into the dust of the Sahara, its lower borders rubbing against Mali and Niger more than 1,400 miles away to the south. With this, Algeria is a country of distinct geographical layers: the majority of its population clustered in the cities (Oran and Constantine, as well as the capital) on, or near, that northerly shoreline; the Atlas Mountains rising as a hard ridge behind them; the sand of the planet’s most famous desert spreading out – incomprehensibly huge – beyond.

To travel through each of these starkly different landscapes over the course of two weeks is to see enough of Algeria to begin to unpack its mystery (and to appreciate its majesty).

That said, on first impressions – and then second and third as well – Algiers struck me as oddly familiar. It is a far more modern place than you might expect, eschewing the souk chaos of (for example) Marrakech for a calmness and a sophistication. True, its casbah, the Unesco-listed kernel of the city, rings with the clutter and cacophony of the medieval era, its little alleyways and higgledy-piggledy houses cascading down the hill towards the harbour. But Algeria was in French colonial hands for 132 years, and until as late a year as 1962. And while this period of control came to a bloody conclusion – a revolution whose success is saluted in the colossal concrete of the Martyr’s Memorial (Maqam Echahid), which towers above the city from an adjacent hilltop – it has softer echoes too. Several districts resemble Paris, or at least Marseille, in their boulevards and gardens. The old Central Post Office, built in 1910, could easily be just off the Champs Elysees. French is still widely spoken – while croissants and baguettes pile up on breakfast tables.

Of course, this is just one chapter of a story of many sections. There were 10 of us in the group which set off from Algiers – bound for Constantine (which, built above a series of ravines, has earned its dramatic nickname, “City of Bridges”), but also for the glorious Roman sites which adorn the north-east of the country. In a time when the archaeological treasures of Libya – Leptis Magna and Sabratha – remain desperately tricky to reach, the likes of Djemila and Tiddis are astonishing alternatives, their flagstoned streets and fallen temples telling tales two millennia old. Then there is Timgad, the enormous ruin whose own tagline – “the Pompeii of North Africa – does not over-sell the legend of a place which was lost to western knowledge between the eighth and 18th centuries. To amble around the site in the warmth of an Algerian afternoon – the sun hammering at the stones of the theatre and the remaining columns of the Temple of Jupiter – is a rare privilege; the kind only really accessible to those who wander beyond obvious places and beaten paths.

Nor that Algeria’s marvels are limited to what various historical Europeans left behind. From Timgad, the road carries us south-west, through the Atlas wall, past the Ghoufi Canyon – a wide scar in the sandstone, as photogenic as its Grand namesake, away in Arizona – and on into the Berber realm that existed long before the Romans came south.

At Ghardaia, a series of hilltop citadels live in a time warp, maybe 500 years behind the rest of the world, maybe more – its residents deeply conservative in both their religious beliefs and their dress, but full of greetings, and keen to show off their home to these strangers in their midst. At Timimoun, meanwhile, the Sahara takes a firm grip, the sand a sticky orange, flowing on towards the horizon, dunes swelling up so stereotypically that they could be a child’s drawing of the desert. We finish our journey here (before a two-hour flight back to Algiers), sipping mint tea as the sun sets – still, in real terms, not so far from home, but relishing the distance as the shadows lengthen into the hot evening.

Chris Leadbeater is a full-time travel journalist, working for the Daily Telegraph. He travelled with Wild Frontiers on the 12-day “Algeria: Crossroads of the Maghreb” tour.