April 2001 Welcome again to yet another installment of my journeys across the Arabian Peninsula! On this page I'll take you on a quick little trip into the desert just to the west of Riyadh so you can see some of the magnificent natural beauty of the region and get an idea of the environment in which much of Saudi culture has developed over the millennia. It all started with an invitation by one of my coworker's friends, who works here in the city, to drive out into an area called "The Red Desert". He rang Everett, Jeff and me up and said, "Hey, have you guys been out to the desert yet? If not, wanna go?" So we all agreed and set aside a nice sunny Friday afternoon (virtual Sunday), packed a lunch, and headed off into the western hinterlands of the city. ABOVE: if you looked at my Escarpment webpage from January 2001, you'll recognize the above picture as being part of the large geological formation which drops sharply from the plane on top of which Riyadh is built into the barren expanse of the surrounding deserts. To reach the escarpment (called "jdeeya" in Saudi Arabic) you take the Mecca Highway from downtown Riyadh west and drive for about 30 minutes past a series of dry river beds that carve their way through the Riyadh high-plane down to the low lying drylands. Just as you near the point where the Mecca Highway makes its big descent, there's a highway police check point where the Saudi security forces wave through (or sometimes stop) every car that goes into and out of the city. Like usual, we were not stopped and were motioned to just continue on westward. We drove on down the highway past the cliffs propping up Riyadh, travelling about 20km (14mi) farther from the escarpment than we had driven the first time we came here. Sitting in the back seat of the car, driven my Jeff's friend John, you can see Jeff (left), Jeff's other friend Michael (middle) and Everett (far right). During the little drive we basically all just relaxed, chit chatted, and took in the interesting views of this arid landscape. ABOVE: from what I was seeing, the escarpment is a mini-Grand Canyon of sorts in the sense that it drops off just outside the city and as you continue to travel several kilometers away from the main land-drop there is another escarpment which rises back up out of the desert here and there forming a quasi-second rim of what would be a very wide canyon. Interspersed a distance away from the ledge of the second "rim" are several free standing stacks of rock towering thunderously over the surrounding flatlands. (similar to Utah, no?) The first time I had come out past the ledge of the escarpment back in the autumn, Jeff, Everett and I hooked a sharp left on one of the side service roads off the Mecca Highway and ended up following the ledge of the escarpment around the south side of Riyadh and ascended into the city on the al-Kharj Highway. This time we drove out past the original turn off, about 15km (10mi) and then got off onto a series of lonely little side roads that were long and straight in some places, but zig-zaggy and windy in others. It didn't take long to traverse the final few kilometers of our journey and before we knew it, there we were: Mabhala Farms. Now, just like I did when I arrived there, you might be thinking, "Mabhala Farms???" but as I turned my head and looked to the left I noticed a nice big pile of orange sand. "Look! A giant pile of orange sand!" I thought as I jumped out of the car and trotted up to the orange mound. As I stood at its shifting edge I was overcome by the usual urge to whip out my camera and start photographing everything!!! BELOW: John's ritzy little company car. (Sidenote: it's the 2001 Middle Eastern version of a Chevrolet Lumina and it's quite a ritzy little vehicle, and the whole time I drove in it I ask myself, "Why doesn't GM sell this car in North America???" For anyone who cares about cars. . . I think it's built on the European Opel Omega platform (or is it the Australian Holden platform?), which perhaps explains why it's not sold in America.)

Well, as mentioned, I was armed with my camera and I ran straight into the sand dunes to snap away to my little heart's content, as evidenced by the many pictures below. ABOVE: meandering up from the Mabhala Farms gate sign terminating the roadway where we parked the car was this quaint little fence that stretched off into the distance up and over one of the little dunes nearby. I think it's a cool little shot that shows the former presence of people who have long since departed and their little wire fence now wavers slowly back and forth in solitude.

ABOVE: here's a nice pic that I made by combining five individual shots I had taken with my digital camera. If you scroll back and forth you'll be able to find the slight mismatches between the shots, as this image was *extremely* difficult to stitch together! If I were to give this image a name, I think I would call it Finger Print. The ABOVE is perhaps one of my favorite shots from Saudi Arabia thus far. No people. No animals. No trees. No water. Just a razor sharp slice in the sand made by a persistent wind blowing across an arid and desolate landscape. ABOVE: here's an interesting picture showing how the wind whips across the dunes and scoops up sand causing these significant drops to be windblasted into what would otherwise be a rather nondescript mass of redness slowly slithering past the broken escarpment in the distance. ABOVE: I shall title this picture Life on the Ledge. As in the other pictures above, you can see the beautiful wind swept wrinkles in the sand to the right, a cleanly cut, shadowed incision made into the sand (center), and a plenitude of biological traces in the left side of the image. Starting in the upper left, there's a lonely little shrub growing in the warmth of the sun. Just beside it to the right you see the automotive tracks of some sort of sport utility vehicle that apparently whisked its way past this very point in the not so distant past, and just beside the darkened ledge you can see a squiggly little trail just under the reddish skin of the sand dune. Appearing like a varicose vein, this little subsurface tunnel was made by one of the various burrowing desert creatures whose tracks were visible all throughout the dunes running from one outcropping of shrubbery to the next. In a land where the sun can easily kill you, these creatures have obviously discovered that it is best to stay out of direct contact with its deadly rays and therefore travel through this superheated world under a protective cloak of sand. Well, sooner or later everyone's gotta eat, so we figured that having our picnic on top of this random sand dune would be as good a place as any, so Jeff dropped his backpack in the sand and pulled out a nice little Saudi blanket unfurling it upon the ground. We secured the corners of the blanket by placing whatever various objects Jeff could pull from his bag o' goodies which included two sacks of food and beverages, and a nice little hand-made Saudi basket with our chilled sandwiches contained therein. Of course, this turned out to be a bad way to keep the edges of the blanket from blowing around in the slight winds since the more we ate, the less weight there was to weigh down the blanket but it sufficed for a little while at least, and once the food was gone we just used our stuffed, relaxed selves as blanket weights! From left to right: Jeff, Michael, John, and Everett. ABOVE: me, sand, and MORE SAND!!! Title of the picture: The Tourist Apropos? ABOVE, from left to right: moi, Michael, Everett and Jeff atop a nice little sand dune.

LEFT: Traversing Arabia RIGHT: Here I am standing atop quite a tall sand dune with the sun behind me and my shadow stretching down the face of the hill. It's kind of crazy how the topography of the dunes is barely visible in these images, which I suppose has something to do with the fact that there is little color variation/contrast in this monochromatic environment to alert the eye to rises and falls in elevation. ABOVE: as we walked up to the peak of the highest of the sand dunes, we got a commanding view of the surrounding area. To my surprise there was a nice little farm just on the other side of the dunes and it was really interesting to see the green contrast against the orange in the foreground and the beige-white rock of the desert escarpment in the background. This is yet another example of the desert slowly being transformed by agriculture which is made possible by the trans-Arabian water pipe-line bringing in life giving water from the Arabian Gulf (the Persian Gulf). I'm not quite sure how the farmers keep the sand from blowing onto their crops, but apparently it works, or else they wouldn't be doing it, eh? ABOVE: little animal tracks across the sand. After enjoying our bird's eye view of the desert from atop the highest dune, we figured we should start hoofing it back to John's car since we had been gone quite some time and perhaps he drove back to Riyadh without us! Fortunately, when we returned we found him snoozing behind the steering wheel sitting in the shadow of a Milkweed bush and we weren't marooned in the desert after all. The walk back to the car was easy enough though - all we had to do was follow our tracks! Once back at the vehicle, we brushed the sand off our feet, hopped inside, and headed further into the desert to a place which we called The White Desert (for lack of a better name!), that had once been ancient seafloor but was now an uplifted and eroded area of cliffs and hills. Onto the White Desert! Links Megasite / Saudi Links