19.11. Crossing Rub Al-Khali, the first dune

When the sun rises in the desert, the light drives you out of the tent before the heat, it was around 20 degrees at night, so it was pleasantly cool. Children use the ubiquitous sand, even though it is rather stony here. We pack and continue our journey. We finally see what we missed last night. Well, not by much, the desert around the highway is flat, without dunes, only occasionally it is varied by the number of power lines. Rub Al-Khalí is a desert with the largest continuous sandy area in the world (there are extensive rocky areas in the Sahara), but even here, along the edges of the desert, there is a so-called flat desert, i.e. a barren, sandy and stony area without dunes.

Suddenly we see several cars standing by the road. Is there something there? Ota asks. I look at mapy.cz, there is a road to the border with Saudi, I quickly look at iOverlander, nothing there, then geocaching.cz. There is a cache near a hole and there are also dunes in the photos, so we turn it around (it's not a problem here even on the highway, you just need to cross a strip of sand) and we're rolling along the sandy road, it's 35 km. I read the listing that the water table is high in this area, so some bushes and trees are thriving here, and we will see the first bushes and trees soon.

On wp we find a small lake, but rather a puddle, and there is a salt crust here and there on the sand around it, which only confirms to us that the water in the lake is also salty. Towards the end of the road, we are already driving through sand, we are careful at first, but small mounds of blown sand cannot always be bypassed, so we slowly find out the possibilities of the car. So far so good. We stop at a large fenced hole, which is a sinkhole, at the bottom of which there is also water, we believe that it is salty. On the way back, we stop at a large sand dune and the children climb to the top of it at lightning speed. They like it so much that they ignore the heat and want to be here all day. It's beautiful here, but we continue back. We are grateful for this unexpected detour, because without it the crossing of the desert would have been quite boring.

The next night we want to sleep in the dunes near Ubar, ideally we would like to be there before it is still light to enjoy the sunset. It has a few catches. The first is that the path, which is shorter and chosen by google, has an absolutely horribly wavy surface, so it's like driving on corrugated iron. Instead of 1 hour, we drive for 3 hours at a speed of 25 km/h, it's really hell. The second catch is that the dunes, which seemed to be right next to the road on the map, turn out to be desert after a 3km offroad drive from the road, so we end up camping right next to the "road" around 10pm. Fortunately, only 2 cars pass by during the night, one stops, he asks if we need help or if we need to sleep at his house, very nice, but we are happy here and the children are already in the tent.