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Where do I begin? Nothing could have prepared us for our month in Saudi Arabia - it far exceeded our hopes and expectations and Richard and I are extremely grateful for all the effort that was made to ensure our visit ran smoothly. 6th January 2003 At long last, Saudi Arabia. After dealing with border formalities (made extremely easy by the presence of Abdullah, our translator and the man with the unenviable task of planning each stage of our journey to Riyadh) we stopped just outside the border area to meet the rest of the team from the King Abdul Aziz Foundation - Abdullah Al Shaye, a guide with a vast knowledge of Saudi Arabian history; Ibrahim the cameraman; and a driver who travelled with Abdullah the fixer. I think the driver was meant for us - after all, the team had no idea whether we had been off road before and I don't think they relished the thought of having to dig us out of the sand. After the traditional welcome of coffee and tea, we spent an hour or so looking through our copies of Shakespear's map of his 1914 crossing of the Arabian Peninsula (all the while being filmed by Ibrahim - something that took me a little time to get used to) before setting of for Tabuk and the comfort of the Sahara hotel.... We had worried about what we would do with the trailer - while our drive through the desert from Disi to the Ma'an - Mudawwarah highway proved the Range Rover and trailer are a combination that would be capable of traversing reasonably severe terrain, the fact remained that the Range Rover takes a real pounding when travelling off road, especially with the additional burden of the trailer. With the trailer in tow the Range Rover also becomes less manageable and we knew that ahead of us lay soft sand dunes which need to be taken at speed - not good for a trailer crammed with delicate diving equipment, most of which belongs to Bauer and Hydrotech! So we were relieved to discover that a freight company in Tabuk would take the trailer across to the Kuwaiti border for us, making life a great deal easier for us. 7th January 2003 With the trailer safely dispatched the night before, we had an early start (7.00 am - rather a shock for Richard and I) and drove out of Tabuk on the motorway, heading towards the eastern end of Jebel Tubaik. Shakespear's route had taken him through the jebel - a route that was, apparently, too difficult for us to tackle in the vehicles. We picked up Shakespear's trail once more close to an area called Busaita - off road again, travelling through a vast area of farmland - irrigation systems similar to those we had seen in Libya, creating 'green circles' in the sand. Clear of the farmland, we were joined by a guide in a Toyota pickup that is now the prefered form of transport in the desert and followed him to the local desert 'police station' where we were able to work out the location of the areas marked on Shakespear's 1914 map.
Awash with coffee and tea we set off across Busaita, a flint covered desert plain, in search of a hill known as Maizilla. The hill located we stopped for lunch, giving us the opportunity to learn more about the area from Abdullah Al Shaye. It wasn't long before a large herd of very fluffy looking camels padded into view and stood forlornly around our picnic spot, clearly upset by our reluctance to share our food with them. Initially we had planned to camp by the wells at Arfajiyya, but having spent rather longer than anticipated with the police we had to stop early to find a spot to camp. Our first choice was next to everyone's idea of a perfectly shaped sand dune - until we disovered that many camels and goats had visited the spot before - not a particularly pleasant place to pitch your tent
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