Moab or Phoenix?

Neither city offers a beach vacation, and in both places swimming is something you fit around other plans. Moab has the shallow pools of Mill Creek, Ken's Lake and sandbars on a cold, fast Colorado River, which are good for cooling off after a hike but not for a lazy afternoon.

Phoenix has more organised water. There are reservoirs such as Saguaro Lake with small beaches among desert cliffs, tubing on the lower Salt River, and large resort pools with slides and lazy rivers where much of a summer stay is spent.

Moab's food is fuel: big portions of burgers, tacos and pizza on Main Street, with a few more ambitious Southwestern dinner spots and queues on busy evenings. Utah's alcohol rules make a drink with dinner more formal than many visitors expect.

Phoenix has a cuisine of its own, rooted in the Sonoran borderlands: carne asada, paper-thin flour tortillas, Sonoran hot dogs from evening carts and family-run Mexican kitchens. It also has serious pizza and bread and polished resort dining in Scottsdale, though eating well usually means driving across town.

Moab's culture lies out on the cliffs, not in the town. There are Ancestral Puebloan and Fremont petroglyphs along Potash Road and Kane Creek and dinosaur trackways nearby, but the small Museum of Moab fills a morning at most.

Phoenix has institutions worth planning a day around. The Heard Museum's Native American collection is among the best anywhere, the Musical Instrument Museum is absorbing, and Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West is an architectural pilgrimage. There is no old centre to wander, though, and each sight means a separate drive.

Moab barely has a night out. A couple of brewpubs fill with bikers and rafters telling stories, the town is quiet by eleven, and the real attraction after dark is a sky thick with stars.

Phoenix offers a real choice of scenes. Old Town Scottsdale has clubs and rooftop bars, Mill Avenue in Tempe runs on students, and downtown and Roosevelt Row have craft beer and cocktails for a more local crowd. The districts are far apart, so plan on one per night and a ride-hail home.

Phoenix has good desert hiking right in the city. Moab, though, is one of the world's great outdoor bases. Arches begins minutes from the motels, Island in the Sky and Dead Horse Point look over a maze of canyons, and the Slickrock Trail, the Whole Enchilada descent, climbing at Wall Street and river trips on the Colorado give every day a different sport.

Phoenix's strength is having wild country inside the city: scrambles up Camelback Mountain and Piestewa Peak, the trails of South Mountain and saguaro forest in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve. Sedona's red rock is about two hours away. It is a fine base for hiking, though not on Moab's scale.

Most outings from Moab are into more landscape. The towns nearby are small, Bluff with its pioneer stone houses is about two hours south, and the best cultural trip is to the Ancestral Puebloan sites at Edge of the Cedars and Hovenweep.

Phoenix has more places to choose from within a comfortable drive. You can visit the hillside mining town of Jerome, Prescott's saloon street, the cliff dwelling at Montezuma Castle and Sedona, or head south to Tucson for its adobe barrios and Mission San Xavier del Bac.

Moab suits active, school-age children who love scrambling over rock. Short walks to Sand Dune Arch, dinosaur tracks, gentle raft floats and Junior Ranger programmes keep them busy, but unfenced drops and summer heat make it hard work with toddlers.

Phoenix has more to fall back on: a zoo, an aquarium, the Arizona Science Center, a children's museum, water parks and resort pools with slides. Add spring training baseball in March and it copes far better with younger children, provided you come in the cooler months and accept long drives.

You will need a car in both, and the difference is one of scale. In Moab you can walk Main Street and cycle a paved path to the Arches entrance. Beyond that you rely on long desert roads and dirt tracks, and a high-clearance vehicle or an outfitter's shuttle gets you further.

Phoenix is a vast grid of arterial roads, but it has a light rail line linking the airport, downtown and Tempe, plus ride-hailing for the gaps. That makes a few parts of a visit possible without driving.

In Moab, shopping is practical: bike, climbing and camping shops, rock shops full of geodes and fossils, and a few galleries selling Navajo jewellery and weavings.

Phoenix offers real retail. There is a luxury mall in Scottsdale, an open-air centre near the Biltmore, and boutiques and Western wear in Old Town. For Navajo and Zuni silver, Hopi katsina carvings and pottery, the museum shops and reputable galleries give a wider and more reliable choice than Moab's.

Phoenix is the easier place to keep costs down. Chain hotels along the freeways are fair value all year, summer rates on resort rooms drop sharply, and Sonoran Mexican food is cheap and good. The main extra cost is a rental car.

Moab is a small town with too few beds for spring and autumn demand, so plain motel rooms carry resort prices, and rafting or jeep tours add up quickly. The way round it is camping: public campgrounds and free dispersed camping are cheap, a park pass lasts a week, and winter is much cheaper.

Moab's one real draw is the Moab Music Festival at the end of summer, when chamber concerts are held in canyon grottoes reached by boat. Outside that, expect a weekend band in a brewpub.

Phoenix has the regular seasons Moab lacks. The symphony plays at Symphony Hall, Arizona Opera and Ballet Arizona perform through the year, and touring Broadway shows come to Frank Lloyd Wright's round ASU Gammage. The Musical Instrument Museum also has an intimate concert hall, though most of the programme runs from autumn to spring.

A trip to Moab tires you out more than it rests you. Its few massage studios mostly treat sore cyclists, and the restful moments are quiet ones: red cliffs at sunset or a cabin up in the La Sals.

Phoenix and Scottsdale are a classic American resort retreat. Large spas at the foot of Camelback Mountain offer treatments using sage, clay and agave, along with several pools and golf, and the dry winter sun makes a lazy week easy. Neither city has hot springs or a public bathing culture.