When in doubt…well just stop doubting, it’ll all be fine.
We piled into the car in the compound adjoining my own. We loaded up the car quickly, stopped to ice down the cooler and the wine, and then drove off…ten minutes down the road. We stopped again at the Panda, our local supermarket, and grabbed some barbecue implements (including a long lighter which would be a lifesaver) and extra water. At about ten in the morning we were off in earnest. Our destination was the Wabha Crater, a three mile wide, seven hundred feet deep hole in the Earth carved out by a massive volcanic explosion three million years ago.
As the driver I had absolutely no idea where we were actually going, and I only found out later that my navigator was going purely on hearsay from some other friends. This would, not surprisingly, come into play later. For now I wasn’t worried though, because I’m perpetually lost anyway. When we left the streets of Jeddah had finally dried off after the multiple deluges that engulfed the city in previous weeks.
During one storm in particular Jeddah had twice as much rain as the yearly average, and this was the third or fourth major storm of the winter. Why bother talking about rain when the streets were dry? As we drove out of the city we were treated to a rare sight. The entire desert of southwestern Saudi was awash with…grass. It was unbelievable that a few weeks earlier the entire landscape outside of Jeddah had been barren and brown, because a carpet of green had rolled over miles and miles of hills as we drove on.
One of the passengers in the car had only arrived in Saudi two weeks before, so we also felt it necessary to point out the other exciting things we found along the road.
Camel!
Sheep!
Goat!
Black Camel!
and you get the idea. The Bedouin still roam freely around most of the Saudi countryside, although larger animal farms and abattoirs are slowly beginning to take over many of the areas along the road.
The first obstacle along the highway, besides Saudi drivers, was the Mecca turnoff. Not far outside of the city of Jeddah motorists come to a police checkpoint where they are given two options. “Non-Muslims Are Obligated to turn right” reads one sign, and simply “Muslims” reads the other. The Holiest city of Islam and the resting place of the final Kabba (there were rumored to be as many as a half dozen in earlier times) is off limits to us.
So we turned right, as Allah intended, and headed toward the mountainous city of Taif. We were amazed that hundreds of kilometers outside of the city the desert greenery followed us. As we approached Taif the road started the slow and inevitable uphill tilt. Taif is located a staggering 6,000 feet above sea level, and the road leading up the mountains was in amazing shape.
As we rose, my erstwhile navigator, D. saw something atop one of the mountains. “Look at that observatory,” he said, but as an observatory would merit some kind of belief in science I immediately dismissed the idea. There was a more likely explanation for the curiously scientific looking structure. “The moon wizard!” I shouted, interrupting the conversation between the girls in the back.
The Holy Month of Ramadan, which most people know as the month when Muslims fast from sun-up until sun down cannot officially begin until a specially appointed Moon Wizard goes outside and tells the king that he’s spotted the full moon. This means that if the moon were obscured by cloud cover on the given night it could actually delay the beginning of the holiday. Even though we can predict exactly when the full moon of Ramadan will occur for the next thousand years using common sense and deductive reasoning, this strange tradition still persists in Saudi. The structure was a perfect place for the moon wizard to roam the mountaintops. (I should note that most Muslim countries no longer rely on moon wizards.) The reason many foreigners are slightly irked by this odd tradition is that it can have profound implications when trying to plan vacations for the holiday.
We didn’t have much time to muse on the Moon Wizard however because after rounding a turn up the mountain, with the shouts of camel and goat fading a new phrase echoed through the car, “Monkey!”
As we passed a large rock outcrop to our right, small and medium sized baboons began jumping up and perching on the guard rails. After a few minutes we approached a small parking lot off the side of the highway and “Holy shit look at all those baboons!”
We had inadvertently entered the fabled “monkey mountain” of Taif. As we pulled into the parking lot dozens of baboons were climbing all over the other parked cars. People were throwing food out and the baboons then clambered for more. There were no signs, no warnings, or banners, or any indication that this was a special or abnormal occurrence. I had assumed that “monkey mountain” was a destination that people had to drive to; I never imagined that the highway simply went through baboon territory.
We all picked up our cameras and got out of the car to take some pictures. The baboons didn’t really respond to our presence since we weren’t giving them any food. Then D. decided to see how aggressive they were. He slowly approached a lumbering gray baboon with a long mane of hair and it charged. It wasn’t much bigger than a medium sized dog and likely couldn’t have done too much damage but we scampered pretty fucking fast back toward the car.
We rustled up some extra burger buns we had in the back seat and then moved the car slowly toward the biggest group of baboons sitting on top of the concrete barrier. As soon as the window opened and the first bun flew through the air it was bedlam. Baboons swarmed the car, jumping on the hood, around the doors, and climbing onto the roof. A few more buns were ejected and they scrambled, sometimes fighting, tossing babies, and wrestling for the scraps of bread. At one point we saw one of the larger baboons knock over a baby and take the bread from it, and in another instance one of the older, larger baboons was breaking apart a bun and divvying it up among the smaller baboons. There was some kind of order to the chaos, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
When we tired of the spectacle I put the car into drive and moved it a few inches. The response was immediate. The baboons, knowing the feeding was over, leapt off the car and moved out of the way. We continued up the mountain. We stopped at a few more scenic overlooks, each with its own smaller baboon populations clambering among the rocks.
Not too long after our brush with baboons we reached the city of Taif. It was once renowned as the summer resort for all of Saudi Arabia, but its glory had faded recently. We passed a number of old looking amusement parks and water parks that looked like good settings for a Stephen King novel on the way to the city center. All of a sudden a crisis loomed.
“The Duvet!” My navigator’s kiwi girlfriend remembered. Being an uncouth bachelor I was immediately confused. It took me some minutes to realize that they were talking about a blanket. Since we were in the midst of a fairly large city surely we could stop to pick up another Duv…”Listen,” I said, “As long as we’re being carried along in this Japanese car very generously donated by American baby killers I’ll have no more talk of this ‘doo-vey,’ you will refer to it as a blanket, or at least a ‘doo-vet.’” I tolerate no French in my car. Even a “freedom-vey” would suffice.
And so we stopped at yet another Panda, this time in Taif, to get a blanket. Unfortunately it was prayer time, this meant that we’d have to wait a half hour before anything in the country opened up. I find this to be the only really inconvenient facet of life in Saudi Arabia. Five times a day (and the times change every month) every restaurant, shop, and store in the country close down for a half hour for the population to go and pray.
When we left the store, blanket in tow, we encountered our first navigational issue. Namely, we had no fucking idea which way to go. We drove around the city a bit, exited the city, decided to turn around and go back through the city and out another direction and finally were on our way. “Er, I think we’re going in the complete opposite direction that we want to go,” said Dave as he checked the GPS on his cell phone. We turned around so that we were again approaching the city of Taif and D. called his friend to find out which road to take.
Finally, with fresh directions we went back through Taif for the third time and off to the Riyad road. After all the congestion in Taif it was nice to get back to another hundred mile an hour burn through the desert. The girls had fallen asleep in the back and D. was checking his GPS as we drove through what appeared to be a swarm of locusts. They swept in from both sides of the highway and left large purple swaths of bug blood as they smashed against the windshield. After a half hour I was surprised I still had any wiper fluid left. When one of them got caught between the wiper and the hood of the car we figured out that they were dragonflies.
Sooner or later, after my karma had taken a hit from the deaths of a few hundred dragonflies, we came to what we thought may have been the turnoff we’d been looking for. According to the hearsay (in place of actual directions or GPS coordinates the average person would use) we’d been going on, we should be able to make a left off the highway and the road would quickly deteriorate into desert, and after an hour of off-roading we’d simply arrive at the crater.
We made the left turn. The road stopped. The desert began. Providence!
We realized sometime later that every single off ramp on the Riyad road may have followed the same pattern. For now though, we were exactly where we wanted to be. When the road ended the desert was sculpted into a very easily traveled path about two cars wide, the grooves were smooth, and it went straight in the direction we thought we might have wanted to go. We were driving through the desert for a few minutes when the girls woke up in the back. “Are you sure this is the right way?” M. asked.
At that moment the sands were covered in an endless field of large, porous black rock. This is exactly the strange environment I’d seen outside of another old volcanic site in southern Oman. I confidently told the girls that if we were looking for the volcano this was as good an indication as we could get. The stones were completely unnatural to this terrain, we different from the native rock of the mountains, and spread so widely and haphazardly that a volcano was the only likely culprit. This satisfied all parties involved, so we pressed on.
Unfortunately after ten minutes our smooth, wide “road” began narrowing a bit. Eventually we were following a single set of tracks and the small stones on the sand were beginning to ping the undercarriage like shrapnel. As one set of tracks began turning to deep sand I’d switch over to another set of tracks. After another ten minutes we’d switched tracks a dozen times. The horizon beckoned though, in the distance the land rose evenly in what looked like the outline of a giant crater. Driving through that desert, without any landmarks, the apparent lip of a crater staring us in the face, I immediately understood why Oases shimmer to dehydrated travelers in the desert, wishful thinking overwhelms logic.
We soon passed what turned out to be anything but a giant crater and did the only thing we could do, keep going. Unfortunately, without a large path, the large black volcanic rocks became part of the path. As I gunned the Honda’s engine through places of deep sand I’d inevitably swerve into a large rock making a teeth clenching clung against the undercarriage. We continued going in basically the same direction, toward where we thought the crater might have been if we were actually heading in the right direction when we left the highway…maybe. The sound of rocks pinging, banging, grating and scraping the belly of the car continued and the path we were on, and most of the subsequent single sets of tracks then turned sharp left around a small hill. It seems like we’d been in the desert for hours, but it was probably only 35 minutes or so. I decided to stop the car and reconnoiter the hill to see if we could see anything in the distance. We all got out and stretched out as we walked to the top of the hill.
When we got to the top of the hill, the oasis stared us in the face. A set of mountains loomed in the distance. D. and M. could swear those are exactly the mountains they saw in pictures of the crater. Surely the hearsay we’d been going on said we’d be off-road for an hour and it had only been thirty or forty minutes of punishing off road driving. All we’d have to do is follow the tracks around this hill and continue on toward the crags in the distance. We’d practically made it.
Reality, unfortunately, sunk in quickly. When we got back to the car we took a good look at it for the first time since we’d been in the desert. A piece of plastic was dangling from one of the wheel wells, another piece was hanging, but still functional beneath the engine, and something was leaking. I would put all of these squarely into the bad things category. I reached down and yanked one piece of plastic off the car, it didn’t seem too important, but the leak was another story. I backed the car up a few feet and the four of us leaned over to inspect the puddle on the ground. We touched it and smelled it but I don’t think anyone went so far as to taste it. It wasn’t oil, and it wasn’t gas. It was clear so it wasn’t anti-freeze. D. and I knew about as much about cars as we did about planning a road trip. M. stepped up to the plate though, and she had a theory. “It’s probably just water coming from the exhaust, which doesn’t affect the car’s functioning at all.” She had apparently ripped a whole exhaust out of an old truck one road trip in New Zealand. D. and I took the jack out of the car and jacked up the car, and then the men sent one of the women scurrying under the car to take a look. After a rather anxious few minutes (the jack didn’t look all that stable) she kind of confirmed what might have been the case.
At this point we had a choice, we had another hour to hour and a half of daylight, should we continue on toward the random mountains in the middle of the desert that might have been the random mountains in Wikipedia shots of the crater, or should we turn around and camp car closer to the road, where D. would get signal again and find the actual GPS coordinates of our destination. Back toward the highway we went.
I hardly noticed the sky darkening, but as we drove back on a fairly good path the skies opened up. The rain came suddenly and for a half hour a trip that was turning bleak was beginning to look like a defeat. The path was smooth, but every rock banging against the undercarriage had me wincing on the ride back. Then as suddenly as it began, the rain stopped. We found a place with soft sand between a few desert shrubs and decided to make camp. The road wasn’t too far away and D. was getting signal on his phone again. As soon as we got out of the car though, another problem confronted us, the wind was whipping around like crazy, and it was cold. We had another hour or so until sunset and we’d have to put everything together and get the cooking started before it got too dark to see.
M. put the grill down behind one of the shrubs and almost magically (thanks in no small part to the small lighter D. didn’t want to buy at the first Panda) she got the fire going. D. managed to get his tent up, but we had trouble figuring out where to put that the wind wouldn’t blow it around, because under a few inches of soft sand, the ground was hard as rock. The measly tent stakes provided with our tents didn’t have a prayer of staying in with the wind. The second shrub provided enough cover for the first tent, but the tent B. and I would share wasn’t going anywhere. We put it next to the other tent but the stakes just wouldn’t stay in. Then a burst of inspiration took D. We took four plastic shopping bags out of the trunk, filled them with sand, and placed them on the corners of the tent. Huzzahs all around.
The groundwork laid, I moved the car in front of the cooking bush to cut off the wind a bit and we setup camp and got ready to eat. M., who is one tough cookie, sat down in the wind cooking all of the food as I scampered back to my tent to wrap a light blanket around me. Living in the Gulf had completely sapped me of my tolerance for the cold. We had some burgers and chicken skewers and a little couscous, D. opened up the two bottles of apple wine someone had fermented at home and given him as a gift, and we feasted.
The day, despite some setbacks, had turned out pretty great. We hunted down some sticks that had fallen off the bushes and thrown them on the hibachi after we finished eating. Myself and D. being men immediately responded to our primal urges to make the fire bigger and scurried around the desert with flashlights looking for more firewood. The girls didn’t take long to follow. After an hour we’d burned everything close by, but the desert provides…if you decide to start pulling whole small shrubs out of the sand. After we’d burned all that we discovered an entire ecosystem of roots dotting the ground. We went around kicking these out of the sand and burning them as well. Amazingly, what looked like a completely barren patch of ground had yielded enough sticks to keep the fire going for almost three hours. When we were out of wine and fire it was time to go to bed.
The night passed without incident for me, since I’m the one who snores. I woke up in the early morning to a strange sound coming from outside the tent. When I opened the tent flap I was staring at a white Toyota pickup with two Bedouin inside the cab. After being surprised, then exchanging pleasantries, and then being a little creeped out, I got out of the tent, zipped it back up and put on my shoes.
When I got out of the tent things took a turn for the strange. The driver got out of the car, wearing not only the typical thobe (white robe) and sandals, but he had a giant fur lined coat over this thobe that went down to his sandals. He walked to the bag of the truck and pulled out two huge branches and laid them on the sand. Then he pulled out some hay and a small water bottle filled with diesel fuel and tried to start a fire with matches. Let me try to translate my Arabic into English and his Arabic of which I understood about 10 percent into English jibberish:
Me: Please, thank you, no thank you, no problem.
Bedu: No problem, turtle Pikachu, dirka dirka, Praise be to Allah
Me: Yes, no, thank you, no thank you, sleeping, fire bad, no problem, no please thank you.
Bedu: (Running through matches like crazy) donkey meth lab, problem dirka boogy sideshow, fire good, Odin tampon, dirka, by the will of Allah.
Me: thank you, no thank you, no problem, please thank you, no please
At this point the Bedu simply mumbled as his friend in the truck laughed, and then he got in the truck and drove off, leaving the empty box of matches, diesel fuel, hay and branches on the ground. I was perplexed to say the least. In the back of my mind the whole time was the fact that we had girls with us, and I wasn’t exactly sure what the reaction would be. I hadn’t really interacted with any Saudis outside of the city of Jeddah, the most liberal part of the country.
After they’d gone everyone else got out of the tent, amused at the streams of babble and the gifts they’d left behind. The first thing we did was kick over the coals that were still burning from last night and break apart the branches and start up another fire. It was cold and wet in the morning. We were coming out of our malaise and beginning to pack things up when our visitors returned…with breakfast!
They were amazed that we’d managed to turn their sticks into a fire where they had failed to do so, there were many dirkas of congratulations to go around. We sat down around the fire putting eggs, or beans, or some kind of paste into Arabic bread and gorging ourselves on the free food. I’ll save you another round of translations, but unfortunately for us the level of Arabic between my three co-campers made mine look like fluency.
What we got from our fireside chat was that D. and M’s tent was a little sissy tent and there’d be a big problem if it rained while they were sleeping in it. We figured out that the two men were brothers, (since I’d forgotten the word for brother I simply pointed to them and asked if they had one mother and one father) and that they lived somewhere close by. We discovered that they liked the girls, a lot. They asked me if they were my sisters, and I immediately replied that they were our wives. Sisters are fair game in Saudi Arabia. They offered to take us to their home, and offered us rides on their camels, but we tried to explain that we simply wanted to go to Wabha. They looked at the car and also said that this was a big problem. The brother of the pyromaniac took me off to the side and began drawing a cryptic map with a bunch of circles and lines in between, attempting to explain why going to Wabha would be a problem. Naturally I had no idea what he was saying or drawing.
Eventually the agreed to guide us to the crater and we were elated. We hastily packed everything up, crammed the tents down, and stuffed everything into the trunk and back seat. One of the brothers wanted to drive my car for me, but after some time they dropped it, got in their truck, and led us through the desert. They took off at a pretty good clip and I was struggling to both keep up and not destroy what was left of my car. After a few minutes they stopped in front of fence.
We got out of the car and the Bedu were smiling wide, they’d taken these hopeless foreigners to where they needed to go. It was certainly A crater, but it was only about 20 feet across and a few feet deep. One hole’s as good as another to them I suppose, they live here. I immediately got down on the ground and told the Bedu to watch me. I drew a small circle in the sand and pointed to their crater. I drew a bunch of similar sized circles and then one very big circle that obviously dwarfed the others and pointed to that. The reaction was immediate, but first they wanted to take pictures with the girls.
That finished we got back into our cars and sped off through the desert. After ten minutes or so we got onto a paved road. After hours of driving in the rocky desert the road felt like glass. Not a minute after we’d gotten on the road we heard a pretty loud noise coming from the bottom of the car. At first we’d thought that we punctured a tire. We stopped on the side of the road and our guides stopped and reversed back to where we were.
The massive piece of plastic that had come half off from under the engine was now almost all the way off, but it was still too far from the edge of the car for me to yank it off completely. Our Bedu friends came over and had a look, muttering “no problem” before going back to their truck. Before I had time to react the driver was coming back toward our car with a massive curved knife that looked lick a sickle, you know the one on the Soviet flag, and in one motion he sliced the fucking thing right off the bottom of the car. The girls on watching him approach were laughing hysterically. Another small crisis averted, another piece of my car moved from attached to the car to into the trunk, and we were off again.
Our guides stopped on the side of the road another couple of times in the next half hour and each time we were more confused that the last. The first time we stopped M. and I got out of the car and it quickly became apparent that the Bedu were not following the look but don’t touch rule with our Kiwi companion. After accepting the gross groping of our guides the first time M. no longer got out of the car when we stopped and I think it disheartened our new friends a bit. We drove past a few towns and stopped to get gas, where the gas station attendant informed us that we were very close to the crater (which had a paved fucking road leading all the way up to it). Eventually the Bedu came to a stop in front of some steel pylons. We stopped next to them and when we got out the crater wasn’t more than twenty feet away from the car, and it was immense.
We jubilantly got out of the car, grabbed some small supplies and cameras and trotted down to the edge of the crater. We took pictures, and I tried to teach one of the Bedu how to properly throw a rock, but he kept staggering mid throw and almost tripping over himself, and when we told them that we wanted to walk down to the bottom of the crater they left us. We thanked them heartily and hiked over to the trail carved into the steep cliff face of the crater. When we started hiking down there were a few Saudis with hammers and instruments and a couple of Indian porters carrying a drill and some gear. I asked one of the men if he was a geologist. Not only was he a geologist working for Taif university, but he’d gotten his PHD in the U.S. For those of you not prone to visiting big holes in the ground, a geologist is about the most perfect person you could possibly meet in the situation and I grilled him for a few minutes. According to his research the caldera erupted nearly three million years ago, and he was going to spend the day drilling core samples out of the upper rock.
We left our geology friends soon after and meandered down to the beautiful salty remnants of the lake that once filled the crater. After all the hoopla and drama to get there, we probably only spent a couple of hours at the crater itself, there wasn’t much more to do than take some pictures and drive back home. We ate the last of the food in the parking lot. I pointed out to my navigator that we’d passed three rather imposing mountain ranges on the way here, one of which was likely the one we were going to drive to the way before, and it would have been physically impossible to get here through the desert. The Bedu had totally saved our asses.
We drove back, stopping briefly to feed the baboons again on the way back through Taif and toward Jeddah. Coming back we went the back way around Mecca and the massive clock tower (the biggest in the world) was visible beyond a range of mountains. Otherwise we returned home without incident in our unstoppable if not slightly battered Honda Accord. We were treated to one of the most beautiful sunsets I’d ever seen in Saudi, radiating a deep red over the thousands of cranes at the Jeddah Port.
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