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A brief update while we are on the road in Saudi Arabia.... After a wonderful Christmas and New Year in Aqaba (the first time I had spent either in the sun) we set to work repacking and making sure that Florence was fit for the road. It turned out that she didn't really want to leave - a broken ignition switch made starting the engine a little difficult; this has been temporarily repaired with a tie wrap. Handy hint - never go anywhere without tape and as many different sizes of tie wraps as you can find. We found it incredibly difficult to leave Aqaba - and saying goodbye to Rakad and Ahmed and his family was particularly sad. Our route to the border took us back to Wadi Rum where, at last, we were able to identify the scene of Captain Shakespear's pictures and photograph it ourselves. We then drove on to Disi where we met Abdul Aziz, one of Ahmed's brothers and, after a farewell glass of tea, we followed him west to the track that would take us through the desert to the highway running down to Mudawwarah - much shorter than taking the road via Ma'an. This was the first time we had towed the trailer off road; it went well through the few short sections of sand that we had to tackle and for the rest of the drive we were on piste. However, at times we were running across bad corrugations which really bounced the trailer around and made us wonder what the contents of the trailer would look like once we reached the highway! Having camped overnight in the compound on the Jordanian side of the border, we crossed into Saudi Arabia on the morning of January 6th. We had agreed to meet the team from the King Abdul Aziz Foundation at 9.00 on the Saudi Arabian side - but what Richard and I hadn't taken into account was the one hour's time difference between the two countries and, despite our best efforts, we managed to arrive an hour late! But the rest of the crossing ran smoothly and by 11.00 we were out of the border area. We are now busy retracing Shakespear's 1914 crossing of the Arabian Peninsula - our first stage is from the border with the Jordan to Riyadh. The team from the Foundation - a guide/historian, driver, translator and cameraman - have been extremely welcoming and incredibly helpful and we have already visited several of the areas that Shakespear travelled through. I hope to post my next upate once we reach Kuwait..... |
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