A big failed day

Sorting out the car

The hotel breakfast was an awesome buffet.  We fuelled up big time at 0740 and departed on our road trip at 0900.

First up, we went to the Budget office to report the slight suspension or shock absorber noise and hopefully change to a different car.  It wasn’t serious but we have 11 days and a lot of kilometres to cover and we couldn’t risk anything going wrong.

This took about 1h45 to sort out, starting with explaining the situation, getting a manager to OK the change, systems problem, doing the paperwork and finally inspecting the new car.

It was again a Toyota Corolla but a slightly newer one with lower kilometres.  We were told that there would be a small price differential that we were happy with.  [Edit:  They didn’t charge the small differential in the end.]

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Looking for Al Rabatha

We hit the road again at 1100, starting our road trip in earnest.  Our destination for the night is Al Hait, about 215 km away.  But E had a specific interest in attempting to go to Al Rabatha, a relatively unknown archaeological site.

The research I had done was that it would add about 300 km to the journey.  On a map, it looks like going an extra block on the map but each side of the square block was about 100 km!  The research also suggested that a 4WD is necessary as the roads do not go all the way to the site, for which I had the GPS coordinates.

I had briefed E on the high likelihood of not being able to reach Al Rabatha as far back as May and repeated it briefly at other times. Despite that, E was keen to give it a go.  I was more tha willing to go along because he was happy to take me to places on this trip which he had visited before.  This was the least I could do for him.

Once we got out of the city, the roads were dead straight.  After over an hour, I took the wheel for 45 mins before handing it back to E around Sukhaiberah.

Around this time, we had a disagreement on the location of Al Rabatha.  Google Maps and independent GPS coordinates that I had, suggested it was on the northern side of the road.  However, E’s information from Maps.me suggested that it was on the southern side.  No wonder, the various navigation discussions we had didn’t make sense to each other.

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Continuing north-east for a further 30 mins, we were pleasantly surprised to see a road that could lead us to the coordinates that I had.  The road did not exist on Google Maps.

After about 15 mins, the non-existent road became truly non-existent.  So far, we had been doing better than expected.  E was ready to give up but I said that we had come a long way for him to give up now.

The ground here was quite compact and a bit gritty, so E was comfortable going offroad a little to try talk to the people whose cars were parked in the desert.

We had no luck seeing anyone when we got to those cars.  We continued further offroad heading in the direction of the coordinates that I had.  Looking on the map, our progress was slow.  After 25 mins offroad, we gave up around 1440.

Fortunately, E had tracked our offroad drive.  Otherwise, we would have had some difficulty locating the road that led us here.

Getting stuck

We took a different path back to the main highway reaching a petrol station about 2h after we had given up.  Here, we noticed that there was a sign pointing towards Al Rabatha, through an opening in the fence at the petrol station, going into the desert.

At this point (in time and also location-wise), it became clear that Google Maps and the coordinates I had found were correct and the Maps.me location wasv wrong.

E decided to venture down this path briefly before abandoning it.  While doing a U-turn, we got stuck in the sand.  It had happened rather suddenly when we hadn’t expected it.  I was grateful that it hadn’t happened a couple of hours ago when we could have been stranded unnoticed for days.

Dressed in his beige thawb, E started to walk towards the petrol station for help.  I called out “Take a photo!”.  He gave me a very angry look, as he’s not into really capturing his travels on camera.  He probably thought “Instagram” but what I really meant was for him to have a photo to explain the nature of the problem, since our Arabic was limited.

We paid some locals to pull us out.  They had asked for SAR80 at first but asked for SAR100 when they had done the deed. Including the petrol fill-up afterwards, we were set back a further 30 mins and recommenced our drive around 1715 to Al Hait.

Our nightstop

After just over 2h drive from the petrol station, we arrived at Al Hait, staying at Rafeef Al Shamal which I had booked over WhatsApp.  This is a small town with not many options and it was the only town within driving time after attempting to find Al Rabatha.

It was quite cold in Al Hait and I had to turn the aircon on to heating mode.  We enquired about the lack of towels but was told that this was a very cheap place (and it was).  The place was clean (if you don’t look under the bed) and the sheets were spotlessly white.  The kindly obliged us with a WiFi router upon request.

A dog came into the reception area while we were there.  I was quite surprised as I thought dogs in Saudi Arabia were close to non-existent.  I had read that there are some in law-enforcement as and working dogs but private ownership and strays are quite unheard of.

We took dinner in a restaurant, seated on the floor in private cubicles, eating rice and chicken with our hands.  We treated ourselves to a hot chocolate at a café before settling in for the night.

The day’s summary

We did a total of about 550 km (about 8 hours) including the detour to look for Al Rabatha in vain.  It would have been 215 km (2h25) otherwise.  The outcome of the day was exactly as I had expected and feared, and the opposite of what I had hoped. However, absolutely no regrets.

Today’s approximate routing according to Google Maps.