Sunday, November 27, 2005
En route Shaybah – Riyadh
Partly cloudy, 25 degrees C

It’s dark now and we’re flying back over the Rub’ al-Khali toward Riyadh. The Rub’, or the Empty Quarter, is so called because even the bedouin steered clear of the place as resources were so scarce. It’s a place where sand dunes rise up to 700 feet from the bedrock, and the bedrock, when it’s actually visible, is usually alkalai flats. This is one of the last truly remote places on earth, next to the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, and the farthest reaches of the Amazon rain forest.

Naturally, in a continent that’s virtually swimming in oil, there’s an oil and natural gas field beneath it all. In 1997, Saudi Aramco started work on Shaybah, a logic-defying attempt to construct not only oil wells but three gas and oil separation (GAOS) plants, a pipeline, residential compound, and fully functional airstrip capable of landing a fully loaded 737 coming down from corporate headquarters in Dammam two or three times daily. This in the middle of a region that gets a yearly average of no recorded rainfall and routinely hits 55 degrees C (roughly 135 degrees F) in the middle of the summer. Sounds like fun, neh?

For our visit, we didn’t get the 737 – We were on a Dash-8, as I mentioned earlier, which is a prop-plane of the sort I keep swearing I won’t fly and I’m not even on the tranqs! Of course, we’ve been on a plane every single day of this trip so far, so I may be a little bit acclimatized to the experience. That and there’s no weather in the Kingdom – it’s always bright and clear, and smooth rides help Chris not whimper and moan through plane rides.

We landed in Shaybah a little too late to catch sunset over the dunes, but we did get to see them in the residual light. The sand out here looks a little like Lowry’s Seasoned Salt – it’s a dark ochre occasionally mixed with a lighter version in the same palette that’s been bleached out by the sun. We clowned around in the sand for a bit, gathering samples up in the water bottles helpfully provided by the local staff. They weren’t empty … some of us chose to chug, others discreetly emptied them beyond the nearest dune.

After the sand came a brief presentation on the history of Shaybah, helpfully laid out for you above. Aramco has a neat film department. I mean, their stuff is hokey like the rest of the instructional film genre, but it’s a quality kind of hokey. I did finally figure out where Shaybah is, exactly (get a map and pay close attention: it’s 20 miles south of the Saudi Arabian border with the United Arab Emirates. If you drew a 45 degree angle to the southeast from Abu Dhabi, the UAE’s capital, and another 45 degrees to the southwest from al-’Ain in the UAE, Shaybah would be roughly where they meet).

After the presentation came a poetry reading from a young author that I sat next to at dinner last night in Dhahran. She comes from a long line of Makkan scholars (Makkah = Mecca) and was raised in the Saudi Aramco compound. She writes poetry in English, because she doesn’t feel she can do justice to the way that Classical Arabic poetry was written. Her English stuff is phenomenal, and she deals with a lot of issues that are In The News a lot. She comes to Texas frequently, and I made her promise to tell me the next time that she does because she could get a huge crowd for one of her readings, and she’s got stuff to say that’s worth hearing.

Dinner was served bedouin style – in a pit, with no utensils. The food was great, and I’m the only one not currently groaning because I had the sense to stick to the vegetarian stuff and avoid the roast lamb! (I figured someone else might want to use the bathroom on the plane at some point, so I’d be nice and not eat the lamb.) The dude from Cheboygan actually had a helpful comment – he suggested that the high protein content in red meat might be the reason that it’s never sat well with me. I’ll have to look that up to make sure it’s not in the same camp as some of the other things he’s said today, but it makes sense, I guess?

After dinner, another one of our number – a truly distinguished gentleman who is genuine enough to not need to put on airs and act pompous – thanked our hosts and said something to the effect that we could all get on a plane back to Washington when we landed in Riyadh and he would feel as though he had seen everything he needed to. I kind of agree – it’s astonishing to think how much we’ve done in such little time! It’s a bit mind boggling, but things begin anew in Riyadh, a city I hear compared to Dallas unfavorably. It’s always a new adventure, I suppose.

It’s still pitch black over the desert. Lots of stars, though …