Day 2 of My Sprint through Saudi Arabia: Al-Ula

I started my second day in Saudi Arabia by eating the leftovers of yesterday’s dinner, after which I headed to the old town of al-Ula. I had saved two parking lots on my phone: one just south of the old town and one just north of it. I did not like the idea of walking all the way from the parking lot into the old town under the scorching sun, but when I arrived at the southern parking lot, I found it had a whole fleet of golf carts and a minibus. I cannot conceive this whole operation to be profitable. The buses and golfcarts are free, and they depart as soon as a single person climbs on board, employing perhaps dozens of drivers. I ought to note that many of the drivers were women, which I did not find remarkable at the time, but it now strikes me as quite a large stride from the times when women were protesting in Saudi Arabia for the right to drive.

Arriving in the old town was a surreal experience. Beside the staff in the shops and cafes, the place stood entirely empty, and the main street was broad and conspicuously clean. Whoever had been leading this project had yet to furnish the evidently uninhabited side streets with amenities, so all but one or two were closed to the public. As expected, these were also lined by various shops selling improbably luxurious souvenirs. I walked to the centre of town and a little north before finally managing to find a route towards the heritage trail in the oasis. It too was impeccably manicured. The walled path ran along the perfectly regular groves and occasionally invited its travellers to rest on the seats spread out among the palm trees, each of which flaunted a bright white QR code.

I was on the point of following the path with a French group that suddenly emerged out of nowhere, but in a clearing, I found a dusty road that led further into the oasis. I instinctively followed it. As my footsteps broke the tracks left behind by criss-crossing trucks, I left the thickest groves behind me to see the majestic red mountains rise above the palms. Both the oasis and the mountains behind them lined the horizon on all sides. In the distance, a shepherd stood under a tree waiting for his sheep to scurry on their way from one grove into the other, and a truck trundled along the sandy path, vanishing once again among the trees.

When I reached a low wall which the shepherd seemed unhappy to let me cross, I curved my way left to the red cliffs. For a while, I was content to simply walk towards them and see them framed and reframed by the palm trees, but I slowly steered my steps back to the town. Just when I was on the verge of re-entering the deep grove, however, another sight caught my eye: the crumbling mud brick walls of a farmhouse. I approached it and found that these walls connected to other low walls which, when I climbed on top of them, revealed a whole maze of mudbrick field boundaries. I walked further along the elevated path made by these boundaries, watching as little green birds flitted from the trees to the walls and back. I tried to turn back towards the city, but a barking dog kept me straight on my path for so long that I only reconnected to the main road at the northern car park.

I took the golf cart into the centre again, where I still had one more item left on my agenda: to visit the fort. With so many alleyways closed, the entrance proved difficult to find, but one kind shopkeeper pointed me in the right direction. During my two days in Saudi Arabia, I have only had pleasant interactions with local people, which came as a bit of a surprise to me after hearing them continually badmouthed by other Arabs. Yesterday, for example, I was taking pictures of the landscape close to my hotel, when a man driving past gestured at me to take a picture of him. When I did, he drove up to me and recorded a video of the picture, all the while elatedly thanking me and laughing.

The fort of al-Ula is built on a rock at the very centre of the city, and the steps to the top reportedly date back 2,600 years. From the fort, one can see the cliffs running from north to south on both sides of the valley, funnelling travellers past this important stop on a road that once brought myrrh, incense, and spices from India to the Mediterranean. In the twentieth century, the inhabitants of the old town gradually left for the new town to the north, leaving behind the shells of their old mudbrick buildings for the Saudi government to take over and commercialise a few decades later.

It was eleven by the time I felt ready to leave the old city, and I began to feel hungry. Instead of heading out, therefore, I embarked on an unexpectedly long quest to find food. The central powers that determined the amenities along the main road had clearly decided to fill it with cafés and luxury shops, even throwing a barbershop into the mix, but places selling food proved remarkably scarce. After some twenty minutes and several conversations in very broken English, I rejoiced to find at least a café selling sandwiches.

My next destination was the Harrat Viewpoint. Perched precariously on the edge of the cliff that towers to the east of al-Ula, the spot offers a birds-eye view of the green valley surrounded by jagged red cliffs. To get there, I took the car along the steep and narrowly winding path, hewing closely to the 20 kmph speed limit and praying that the engine would not overheat after leaving the car in the sun for three hours. When I reached the top, I was surprised to find a pizza restaurant as well as several circular pits for seating. They had no roofs, so of course they were all empty.

After taking a few pictures, I headed back down again, taking the speed limit even more seriously than I did on my way up. Out of some belated and useless recognition that the engine would be better off with the air-conditioning off, I rolled down the windows to feel the wind in my hair; the breeze on the cliff had been cool enough for me to wear a jacket. This was when my struggle to fill the rest of the day began. I had booked a guided tour of Hegra with a pickup time of half past three, hoping that I would catch the sunset just as we reached Qasr al-Farid. It was only a little past twelve o’clock, so I decided to go down my B-tier list and headed to Jabal Ikman.

At the gate to Jabal Ikman, the guard told me I could only buy tickets from the tourist office or on the website. Since I had not been able to make my roaming work, I was forced to drive back for some ten minutes to the park where the office was located. However, when I reached the building some ten minutes later, the lady at the counter told me that all the tickets to Jabal Ikman had been sold out – as were the tickets to practically everything else. The one place the lady suggested that did not require tickets was some café in a crag, but it seemed like a long drive with an unclear payoff.

After taking advantage of the office Wi-Fi to read up on my messages and to reassure my dad that I was still alive, I decided to drive to some of the places the lady did not mention as being sold out. I figured that even if I could not enter them, I would see some nice mountains on the way. I ruled out going to the Elephant Mountain out of hand, as the receptionist had told another group of tourists before me that the road to the mountain was closed until four o’clock. I ascribed this to a concerted plan by the Saudi tourism bureau to encourage people to spend more time in Al-Ula, as the afternoon is also when people generally go see Hegra (there are tours in the morning, but the sun shines on the biggest tomb in the afternoon).

Instead, I drove to Dadan. There was not much to see from the parking lot, but the employee on shift told me that I would not be allowed to continue to the site by myself – this too, then, was a ticketed area. I noted with interest that the visitor centre had several empty glass displays and a spare room piled with air conditioners. From Dadan, I drove to the Maraya Concert Hall, which is really a set of mirrors that reflect the red mountains and the desert. There too, I pulled up by a booth simply to confirm that I would also need a ticket. The employees did not seem to be aware that they had all sold out and were still telling hapless tourists that they could buy them online.

Having at least achieved my objective of driving around, I drove back again to the visitor centre and waited for my 3:30 bus to Hegra. To my surprise, the bus only filled up to one quarter: We switched buses at the car park in Hegra, where the rest of the bus was filled with people who drove to Hegra themselves. I am not sure where they heard that this was an option, as I would have done so myself had the official pages been a little clearer on the matter. The bus took us to four different sites, beginning with an open square space carved into the rock, which the guide said served as a forum. The other sites were all tombs resembling temples in the rocks, with different patterns like eagles and medusa heads carved onto their pediments.

Most of the tombs were built around the first century CE in the heyday of the Nabatean Kingdom. Based in Petra, the Nabatean Kingdom stretched all the way from the Sinai Peninsula in the west to Jordan in the east and the Hejaz in the south. The kingdom was annexed by Trajan into the Roman province of Arabia in 106 CE, after which the trade routes that brought Hegra its wealth shifted to the coast and the Red Sea. What was once the second largest city in the Nabatean Kingdom thus began its steady decline.

For dinner, I bought six mozzarella sticks that I ate while driving to the airport, all the while cursing the practically invisible speedbumps. I reached it about two and a half hours before departure. Thus began my overnight pilgrimage to Medina. Since there was no direct flight at a convenient time, I booked a flight with a layover in Riyadh, where I would spend six hours in a sleeping pod before setting off again in the morning.