Onwards to Kuwait

27th to 30th January - on the road again

A night spent at a motel on the road to Um Ushar - well, some of us stayed at the motel; Richard and I slept in our tent! The tent is our home and after two weeks in Riyadh we were missing it.

28th January - Across the great Dahana Sandbelt, stopping midway for breakfast - a wheat and date paste, Ha'nayni, heated with butter and traditionally eaten in the winter to stave off the cold. The recent rain had made the desert bloom - good grazing for the sheep and goats of the Bedu. At Um Ushar (named after the plant shown right, the leaves of which can be dried and crushed and the powder used as make-up, while the milky sap is a good cure for mange) we left the road to follow the course of the Batin - a wadi - running towards Kuwait. The local farmer - a very jolly looking chap and a friend of Abdullah the guide - was consulted; Abdullah had questions about the names shown on Shakespear's maps and wanted to locate the birka and wells mentioned by Shakespear in his 1914 journal. Being unable to persuade us to stop for lunch, the farmer took us across his Ushar covered fields to the remains of various wells, a birka and a 'castle' once used by pilgrims on their way from Basra to Mecca - perhaps one of the castles visited by Shakespear but we were not convinced.

The farmland consisted of flat areas of pasture, the fields marked out by water channels - the recent rains must have caused flooding a couple of feet deep as you could clearly see a 'tide-mark' on the banks of sand forming the irrigation ditches.

		Moving on up the wadi we came across an Ushar 'forest', the dry branches, shaken by the wind, making a magical tinkling sound. Close by, the remains of an old settlement - the first of many that we were to discover along the course of the Batin. As we continued through the wadi, green with vegetation after the recent rain, we could see marker stones atop the high walls either side - placed by the Bedu to mark the location of villages. Far from being deserted, the wadi is full of life - tents dotted along its length and, occasionally, permanent farms. At the next ruined settlement we knew we were in Shakespear's footsteps - his description matched what we could see in front of us; large limestone blocks that would have formed the walls of the buildings and flat slabs used for roofing. As we were driving on, Richard spotted something on the far side of the wadi and veered off to go and investigate - Abdullah and co must have wondered what on earth we were up to. It was the Muslim graveyard that Shakespear talked of, the graves all lined up to point to Mecca...


Now all we needed to find were the nine wells... and there they were, a few hundred metres later. We must have looked completely deranged, darting between each one, peering down into the darkness and marking their positions on our GPS. Some wells are up to 100 metres deep and stone lined all the way down - I cannot imagine how they were dug, not a job I would enjoy.

At the next village we stopped to buy some chicken for supper - as Richard and I waited in the Range Rover a very smart Land Cruiser pulled up alongside, one of the occupants jumped out and peered in through my window. Mindful of the fact that foreign vehicles are somewhat rare in small Saudi villages I slowly wound down the window and asked in faltering Arabic if I could help. Unfortunately that is where the extent of my Arabic ends and I had no idea what he said in reply - at which point Abdullah junior appeared and in the conversation that followed we discovered that this was the brother of the Governor of Naifhia (the village - it used to be called Thabha but two years ago Prince Naif, the Governor, ordered the change as the old name meant 'Killing') and, having spotted us driving past, he wanted to know what we were up to. He was thrilled to meet us and even more excited when he found out about the Captain Shakespear connection - of course he had heard of him! That settled it - we simply had to come back to his house to drink tea and tell him more about our journey.

Later, accompanied by Mohammed and his entourage, we went off to see the wells and ruins on the edge of the village - once upon a time there were more buildings but apparently, during the Gulf War, they were demolished by American soldiers and the stones used to build a nearby road...

Knowing that we wanted to get on our way, Mohammed offered to show us the best way up through the wadi, avoiding a large section that had been blocked off by work going on at the nearby military city. Wary of the dark clouds building overhead and not wanting to find ourselves in the path of a flash flood, we chose an area of higher ground at the edge of the wadi, close to another group of wells that used to contain the best water on the Basra to Mecca pilgrimage route - sadly the waste water from the military city has rendered the water undrinkable.

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