The Empty Quarter

I will never forget that evening in 1984, when Richard came home from work and asked me, "How would you like to move to Saudi Arabia?"  I think I just stared at him for awhile.  I remember thinking, Who is this person and did he say what I think he said?   But after dinner we got out the atlas and there it was--The Rub al Khali, a vast expanse of desert covering nearly a third of the Arabian Peninsula.  It is one of the largest sand deserts in the world with sand dunes as high as skyscrapers.  It had the ring of Timbuktu to it and I was hooked.  "Only if you take me here," I said, pointing to the scrap of nothingness on the map.

The first order of business when we got to Saudi was to buy a four-wheel drive.  The Land Rover we purchased took us far and wide and on many camping expeditions into the interior of Saudi Arabia.  We camped often at the edge of the Empty Quarter.  As you can see from the above photo, we couldn't make it very far.  Whole trucks get swallowed up by the desert.  It is easy to get lost and it is HOT.  The average temperature is 117 degrees and it gets a mere l.4 inches of rain annually.

On one of our camping trips, we met a man from Australia driving out of the desert.  His job was to maintain the weather stations down there.  "But mostly I keep out the Bedu," he said in his thick Aussie accent.  Unbelievably, there are still Bedouin caravans that crisscross the desert.  These are hearty folks, to be sure.  We met a few on our adventures.  We had tea with the men.  The women were ordered to stay in their tents.

Salt fields on eastern edge