Leg 01 - On The Road - Kuwait to Medain Saleh, Saudi Arabia

27 Oct 09

On the road at last. Route to Saudi border easy, 6th ring road, route (rte) 70, past my old work, but a couple of hrs driving. All borders are different, but this reminds us of past days in Brunei where we needed 9 stamps out and 10 stamps to return when going to neighbouring Kota Kinabalu. You have to work out which offices to go to and which order to do them in. At this crossing they are in a good order to go straight through. Interest shown in: passports, car registration doc (Kuwait), triptyque (import/export doc for car – though not valid in Saudi!), purchase 3rd party insurance and customs. At Saudi customs, because the 2 customs officers were too busy drinking tea on the side at 1 in the morning, the 1st assault on the vehicle is by a couple of 3rd World nationals. Their brief and interest is to unload your vehicle. They were careful but all was coming out of the back, including the fridge which I have not unplugged yet! Approach customs officers at speed – suddenly all stops once they see the task- our 4x4 is full up to the roof and the roof rack is well loaded – only the kitchen sink is missing. The officer asks a couple of dutiful questions abpout boxes which look slightly unusual – brown box, gas BBQ; camping gaz light visible though window. Not having the triptyque stamped in was slightly unnerving, but convince myself that is okay – we will find out when we try to export the vehicle to Jordan!

28 Oct 09

We are tired, but have a huge distance to cover for Al Ula (centre for Mada’in Saleh) in the first day and only I can drive – women not allowed to in Saudi. Have to get onto the pipeline road first, which parallels the Iraqi border. It looks straight forward on the map, but at Hafr al Batin the old road goes square style around the town. Okay, I can almost remember that, but there are new roads, sadly lacking signs in English or scribble. Have to rely on compass directions and some spacial awareness, eventually find the pipline road which is only a few miles south of the town. We are off on the major NW trek across the arabian peninsula. 346 miles (ml) before we reach Ar-Ar and turn off.

Navigation will prove interesting – depite searches we found no worthwhile maps of the Middle East until Turkey. So we have Google earth which all the planning was done on – mme! There is the first problem. The detail you view on Google earth is partially saved in cache, so even if not connect to the internet you can view partially zoomed in detail. That would be okay if this was not a brand new computer which in the crisis management we have used to prioritise too many tasks running up to departure was connected to Google Earth only to load and prove it worked. Yes you got it, we have no, that is no, cache detail in this computer. Our other 2, respectively in sea and air freight to the UK, have lots of cached detail of all our planning. We can run this netbook in the Pajero as it has both a large battery and I fitted a mains inverter to power the recharger etc. Opening Google Earth produces a brown smudge of the planet, but does give our saved pinpoints. My project to take all their latitude and longitude references and put in a cross-referenced excel spreadsheet (!) came to nought, so as we drive Chris has to extract and handwrite down the references. I can use these to work out where the next turn is using our handheld GPS. Its not a clever GPS one of the earliest made, so it just gives a position,no mapping or rte detail. The netbook also has GPS, but the company Dell bought into have no mapping of the Middle East (EU will be okay). So the netbook is again a basic GPS for use as a back-up here. No, we have not GPS’d our way to friends houses in Kuwait. Straight roads are easy as you can just watch one of the co-ordinates coming down to the turning point, but twisty roads can be troublesome.

A sleep stop is required – pull off pipleline road into a road construction area and sleep in truck. 2hrs, a quick breakfast and off. We have 2x 20 L spare fuel canisters inside the truck, but this short-wheelbase Pajero only ha s 70L tank, so whenever it drops to about half we fill up. It’s also a leg stretch opportunity. Haven’t calculated the mpg we are getting – is obviously worse than the usual 17 mpg with the weight and drag of the roof rack. May do that in an idle moment! – the Pajero works in kilometers, though I have made a dual mls/kilometers speedo face all the distances remain in km. Our planning has been done in miles to ease the mental assessment of distances we can cover, but we now find the downside of that – in this rudimentary navigation a km plan would have allowed an easier tie-in to the distance driven.

Ar-Ar looks interesting, don’t have time to go in. Stop for petrol – Chris into adjoining mini-market. No sooner in than prayer time is called; have enough time to buy basic foodstuffs for snacks and out. Store is locked up during prayers – we remember this from our Saudi time. We cruise the road a couple of times in Ar-Ar as our lat/long ref does not produce the expected turn off or road number. It accords with a “wrongly” numbered road, but there is a lot of road construction in the area. A v kind Saudi stops us and asks if he can help – we find a town name that he and I can comprehend and he points us off down the “wrongly” numbered road. It is running in the right direction so paralleling the planned rte but about 5 miles to the east of it. It’s a fast new road so we stay with it. I’ve a feeling it’s a slightly longer rte which I chose not to use – that planning was about 4 months ago, arghh.

This continues in the right direction until the town of Sakaka. Well, this town doesn’t feature in our plans. The only reference we have is on a Lonely Planets (you will soon work out that this is our bible - suits our tastes to a tee) map; black and white, a one page map of all of Saudi Arabia. No surprise then that this gives no useful detail. The town itself doesn’t give useful detail either, few signs and all in scribble. So we will drive around a bit, we know the direction we want to leave in; then we will ask, why can you never find a person to ask when you need them. Right, arabian techniques required – ask neighbouring cars at traffic light stops. 4 people later, most v helpful, we are on the “wrong” side of town, but it feeds into a correctly pointing road. All the way we have had difficulty relating planned road numbers to the roads we were on. This was further confused by a plethora of new construction. Finally we think we have cracked the code. Not only are the new roads brandishing new numbers, but the complete system in this area has been re-numb ered. Yet another fallback navigation method bites the dust. We did find an interesting little castle in Sakaka, but have to press as time is going critical and it’s late afternoon. The limited navigation options will be extremely difficult at night.

Still huge distances counted in the 100s of km, but we at last intecept the planned route on a lat/long point and with our new found knowledge to ignore road numbers we are off. So far have correctly obeyed he 120kph speed limit of Saudi – there’s another good reason though, the Pajero has an annoying speed beeper at 120 which does NOT GO AWAY. Well we are now into permament speed beeper and it is going dark. As we go up into the mountains the reality of speeding is that the Pajero can only manage about 5-10kph above the limit. Using compass headings will be more important in the dark as spacial awareness reduces dramatically. We have a boy scouts handheld type of compass, which is accurate, but have to climb out of the truck to use away from the metal. I also bought a neat little watch-strap compass – saves rummaging to find a boy scout, but still for use away from iron/steel. The Pajero has a compass – let’s use that. Not tried it for a couple of years now – “recalibration required”. Driving in slow circles in a remote village garage forecourt to recalibrate certainly attracts attention – better press and get out of here.

[Slowly we’ll catch-up with real time. Loading this on 5 Nov a week late (!) We’ll spend a long time at Syrian border today (& tomorrow) as we still don’t have a visa!]

Once we intercepted our original route the points all came up okay, but fatigue set in again so a “short” nap was partaken of. Good thing Chris woke as I was a gonner – a full night could have passed – would have saved a night’s hotel bill ... no such luck, after a couple of hrs Chris woke and I was back at the driving treadmill. It was close, when I nod I always pick myself up – but a couple of occasions must have been close!!! Some big hills were crossed as well – Pajero’s altimeter reported about 4800 ft – no wonder we couldn’t drive any faster, and some impressive rosks passed at the roadside in the ¾ moon. Will we have a full moon in Wadi Rum in 2 days? Survived, got there about 0130 day 2 – 27 hrs and 1060miles driven. Zzzz. Uh oh – almost forgot to say – on arrival, hotel (Arac Al Ula) has us booked for next day; obviously not read v clear e-mail of a month ago. But does this mean that our guided tour (1½ day) is also for the wrong days. As I’ve changed the game plan, it turns out not to be a problem. Truck is so heavy that do not want to drive desert in our 4x4 but use guide’s own transport .... All was re-booked in the morning. For now, they’re not exactly busy so we are fitted in and dead to the World. Miss breakfast, have a late a la carte breakfast.

29 Oct 09

Seek out Mohammed – hotel manager. Our booked guide doesn’t have own transport – can he fit in ours. No chance unless he looks like a kitchen sink ... Mohammed got us a new guide with the ubiquitous Toyota pick-up; he’s ready to rock & roll at 12 but we are still gathering our wits and nip downtown to buy the rations we didn’t have time for in Kuwait. We have plenty of time so look up the old railway yards and find some of the railway debris left by Lawrence (of Arabia, of course). The camera is already busy – not a popular piece of kit in Saudi, so Chris is not surpised when our activity appears to have tipped off the local police and we are questioned. Well, actually, I am questioned, Chris remains in the aircon luxury of the truck. Ultimately I conclude that our independance is attracting their attention – more later. For now – the stop and questioning makes us an hour late, but Abu Sultan (son of Sultan (1st son) Abdulaziz Sultan correct name) is great (mobile: ). He is ex Saudi Air Force engineer and police officer of 20 yrs. Tempting to relate, but I stick to original plan of being an engineer under contract in Kuwait. He knows all the police and we are not troubled anywhere, but they are asking why we do not have a police escort – ‘cos we are independant travellers, more later. Abu is good, he takes us to all the spots I’ve planned, plus a couple of others and includes the desert railway (rather than in town) remains of the railway Lawrence attacked. We

are done in an afternoon and have time for tea and chin wag with some of his mates, then the sunset from a local peak. I’ll leave the pics to speak for themselves. Mada’in Saleh is described as Petra’s second city, it covers a larger area than Petra, but is not a city, rather a collection of burial buildings and some domestic dwellings. As Petra, Jordan it is a series of buldings carved into the rock faces. The carving is done top down, a few are unfinished, and several are in isolated stand-alone rocks and so are more impressive. It is in an area of dramatic rock peaks rising from almost flat sandy desert valley floors –a bit like

Wadi Rum. Overall it offers a dramatic mix of Petra’s carving and Wadi Rum’s scale – all 3 have the red sandstone; perhaps the Nabatean empire should be renamed the red sand empire... Abu Sultan having done so well we have a leasurely start in the morning and go into town to see what is one of the best examples in Saudi of an old mud-brick town. In, I think the 80s, the Saudi government encouraged/forced the abandonment of most old townships and moved many people into permanent accommodation. Bedouin,for example, near Riyadh were given a new township, cars and told to be taxi drivers. These abandoned old towns have generally weathered to nothing, but here in Al Ula there is a lot of the old town surviving and there is strong local support to renovate and make some of it a tourist attaction. With Meda’in Saleh already recognised as a money spinner, there is unusually an awareness of what tourism can bring to an area. So for an hour or so we wander the old town and are not bothered by anyone, though watched occasionally by the police.