The last time I was on a desert drive trip, it was to a place called the Edge of the World. Or at least we tried to go there. We gave up after George drove aimlessly on the highway for a few hours. This time Gafoor drove, and all he had to do was drive. I made sure that finding the way was our job. Destination: Graffiti Rock I. Date, Friday, July 9. Participants: Mike, Juergen, Larry, and me.
Going west out of Riyadh, the plateau ends rather suddenly and drops into the low flat valley area that runs northeast to southwest.. The layered sandstone landscape near the drop rather resembles the Grand Canyon. Some of rock formations remind me of perhaps Monument Valley of the American West. The highway to Makkah and Jeddah cuts through the rocks and descents steeply into the valley. Graffiti Rock I, where we were headed, is somewhere down in the valley close to the escarpment.
The desert driver guidebook said that this was a two-wheel drive trip, so we took the GMC. The other SUV didn’t have a permit for travel at the moment anyhow. Off the highway, there was about four kilometers of tracks along the foot of the escarpment. Graffiti Rock was visible in the distance. The tracks on the ground, however, were barely visible and very confusing. This area of the desert was mostly hard sand packed with small rocks, but the danger was the patches of soft sand. We almost got stuck in sand once. We got out of the GMC, and the truck was able to pull itself out. Gafoor was wary of going on further fearing that the GMC would get stuck in sand. Since the boss, Mike, told him to go and directed the way, he went on. No more than a few hundred feet later, we were stuck again. This time for real.
We tried to push it back. Not a chance against a two-ton truck. My hand got burned when I touched the chrome fender without protection. Gafoor took out the jack. With no solid ground to push again, the jack was useless. It’d just sink into the same soft sand. We put some cardboard pieces beneath the wheels. That wasn’t too helpful. Grinding the wheels would only whip out more sand and sink the truck even deeper. A guy I know from the client’s subcontractor L filmed an educational video on desert survival. There had been fatalities in the past when the subcontractor’s crew got stuck in the desert. The advice was to bring along a sand ladder and a shovel. Dig yourself out if you can. Stay with the car in any case. We had a two-wheel drive and neither a sand ladder nor a shovel. Although within cell phone reach and no more than one or two kilometers away from the highway, we were not ready to give up yet. Hey, I got a Swiss Army knife.
As luck would have it. Right next to where we were stuck was what looked like a feeding station for camels. It’s made from pickup truck side panels. It had two or three panels stacked up on each side to make a square box. The panels were welded or bolted or screwed onto a few vertical posts. One panel was already loose, and we pulled it off. Mike and Juergen forced another one off and stripped away the post that came with the panel. It took some effort, but hey, you can always count on shoddy Saudi workmanship. We dropped down on our hands and knees and dug some sand out. We slid in the panels and told Gafoor to step on it. The wheels caught the panels, and off the GMC went.
We had spent a hour to get the truck out, so it was fairly obvious that no more attempt to drive to the Rock would be made. I estimated the Rock to be four kilometers or about one hour away on foot. What the heck, we decided that we’d walk there. Gafoor put a dirty rag over his head to shied it from the sun and joined us. Larry said that his pocket thermometer registered 42C. Come on, he had it in his pocket. It got warmed up. Oops, the body temperature is 37C.
Admittedly, trekking in the desert at eleven was a bit crazy. The hike turned out to be only a half hour or about two kilometers. The desert had quite a bit of vegetation, animal footprints, and dung. There were also truck tracks, so we were not exactly very far from … other humans – to say civilization would be an exaggeration. There were a few barbwire fences radiating from the Rock. Not surprisingly it’s used as a landmark to demarcate properties. In the distance we could see some houses and camels.
We climbed the rock, which looked no more than 50 or 60 feet tall. One big piece had a flat and blackened surface. It’s brown if you chisel the surface off. Some markings on the rock supposedly date back to third millennium BC, but I had no way of telling. A lot of the graffiti are obviously far more recent, mostly with people’s names and date – such and such, 1900. We hung around the rock for about a half hour, trying to hide in the shade, even though there wasn’t much shade around noon. Then it was the half-hour trek back to the GMC.
We took the two panels with us. When we were safely on solid track, we dumped the panels like a bunch of bandits.
Terrence
Riyadh
Friday, August 6, 1999