This was Day 2 of our enforced “Out of Africa” experience.
Dubai is a much more developed and comfortable location than anywhere we have been in Africa during the recent weeks. As a result, I am a little worried that Andrew might start to lose the mental grittiness that I have managed to build in him during our time away together in Africa.
Consequently, we spent today at Liwa Oasis, which is as barren a desert as you could find anywhere on the planet. The visit involved a round trip drive of 787 kilometres from Dubai, south-west to Abu Dhabi, and then a couple of hundred kilometres further inland to the very edge of Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter. With temperatures exceeding 50 degrees Celsius and strong hot winds blowing sand in our faces, I was hopeful that the experience might help Andrew overcome his natural adolescent tendency towards comfort, sleep, eating and resting.
Actually, we both found the day extremely stimulating and enjoyed the experience very much – in Andrew’s case, I suspect, partly for the sleep he managed to get while I was doing the driving :-)
Liwa Oasis is a 150 kilometre long belt of villages with near-surface water, set within a huge surrounding field of extensive sand dunes, the largest of which (the Moreeb Dune) is said to be 287 metres high. They say ‘you can’t miss it’, which is true because the road ends when it hits the dune! To a large extent, however, it was the drive to and from Liwa Oasis that was even more enjoyable than the destination. The late afternoon sun on the dunes formed beautiful abstract patterns with light and sand, and when we came upon a herd of camels making their way over the tops of the dunes, it was one of those exquisite and magical desert experiences that is not easy to forget. For much of the trip, we were driving on isolated roads through mesmerising drifts of sand blowing in wispy patterns across the bitumen; this would not have been a good place to have a car breakdown. Fortunately, the quality of the roadway was consistently excellent, and for much of the time, we were driving at a speed of 150 kmh without any sense of moving rapidly whatsoever.
Meanwhile, the border tensions between Eritrea and Djibouti that forced Andrew and me prematurely out of Eritrea seem to be worsening. This website http://www.ww4report.com/node/5723 purports to give some background to the conflict, and the current meeting of the African Union has made the dispute the second most important matter on its agenda (after the situation in Zimbabwe) – as described in http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-07-01-au-demands-eritrea-withdraws-from-djibouti. I wonder how many people around the world are actually aware of this conflict on the Horn of Africa.
