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United Arab Emirates · 2016

Day 4 - Rub' al Khali - The Empty Quarter

Multi-lane highway approaching a hazy skyline where the Burj Khalifa towers over mid-rise buildings and billboards.
Dubai skyline with the Burj Khalifa and towers with cranes, and an orange excavator working on sandy ground in front. A kindergarten complex with white buildings, flags and a colorful wall mural reading Little Flowers Nursery, fronted by palm trees. A blue highway sign lists destinations in Arabic and English alongside a straight desert road with streetlights and power pylons. Blue road sign on a wide desert highway pointing to Al Qua'a, Um El Zumool and Abu Dhabi Large flat-topped brown hill rising above an arid plain with fence posts and old structures Fenced camel enclosures and far buildings on a plain with red-orange dunes rising behind Camels in fenced pens with blue tarps and straw shades near the red dunes and a long fence A single truck driving away down a straight desert road toward red dunes on the horizon Straight highway leading toward distant hazy hills across an empty desert of sand dunes Road curves past a huge smooth orange sand dune with utility poles and desert vegetation along the way Highway running through desert with orange sand dunes on both sides and hills in the distance Road winding through the desert beside large smooth orange sand dunes and a rocky gravel shoulder Sandy desert with gentle dunes, scattered vegetation, and a road or fence line across the landscape Highway curving through desert with sand dunes, power pylons, and hazy mountains in the distance Large steep orange sand dune with a fence running along its crest and a few green desert bushes below Desert scene with a fence line following a dune crest, power lines overhead, and a gravel plain below A curving asphalt road winds through orange sand dunes with hazy mountains visible far in the distance. Rolling orange sand dunes spread toward hazy hills, with a low wire fence across the sandy foreground. A long straight desert highway runs to the horizon, with power line pylons on the left and a metal fence on the right. A desert road runs beside power poles and a fence, with hazy dunes, mountains, and sparse scrub in the distance. A straight desert road is flanked by orange sand dunes, power line pylons, and a fence, all under a hazy blue sky. A large ADNOC billboard in the desert displays a message about environmental protection with photos of a falcon and an Arabian oryx. A fenced roadside compound with low sheds, a tall antenna tower, and signage sits beside the desert highway. Two large electricity transmission pylons stand on a gravel desert plain with orange dunes and hazy mountains behind. Large orange sand dunes rise behind a light salt flat crossed by a wire fence and a single power line pole. Orange sand dunes sit behind a wide light plain crossed by a wire fence, power posts, and scattered pale rocks. Rolling orange sand dunes stretch toward hazy mountains, with a gravel desert and the edge of a road in the foreground. A curving asphalt road passes orange sand dunes dotted with green shrubs, with a roadside sign and hazy mountains ahead. Endless orange sand dunes stretch to hazy mountain ranges, with green shrubs and a pale plain in the foreground. Asphalt highway curving through orange desert dunes with a camel caravan walking along a distant dirt track Paved road foreground with a sweeping orange sand dune and shrubs beside a wide flat desert plain Rows of red-orange sand dunes on the horizon above a flat desert plain speckled with low green shrubs A straight asphalt highway with dashed lines runs toward orange sand dunes that rise on both sides under a clear blue sky A long ridge of tan sand dunes with a rippled sandy foreground crossed by a dirt vehicle track Soft rolling pale sand dunes under a hazy sky above an open desert plain with sparse shrubs Hazy orange dunes on the horizon above a flat dry desert plain with eroded and disturbed sandy ground A straight two-lane highway with a dashed center line runs between low tan dunes and an orange dune on the right A straight highway runs to the horizon across flat desert plain with a wire fence line along the right side A flat open desert plain of dry brown ground with a low dune ridge on the horizon and a weathered trench A vast flat sandy desert plain with low hazy dune ridges on the horizon and scattered rocks and debris A caravan of dromedary camels walks in a line across a flat plain in front of large sand dunes Scattered dromedary camels graze and walk on a flat plain before hazy pale dunes under a soft sky Huge smooth orange sand dunes fill the frame above a flat plain with only a thin strip of blue sky at top Paved desert highway with yellow center line leading toward large orange sand dunes under a hazy pale sky Straight desert highway bordered by huge orange sand dunes with a distant vehicle far ahead on the road Dusty highway heading toward orange sand dunes with warning signs and a barrier on the roadside Wide gravel plain before orange sand dunes topped by a line of buildings and tall power transmission towers Flat desert plain and orange dunes with a long building and power pylons along the distant ridge Road curving through orange desert dunes with a warning triangle sign and a blue truck ahead in the distance Sand dunes topped by a desert fort-like building complex with palm trees along the crest under a hazy sky Large reddish-brown desert camp with towers and crenellations on a dune ridge, with electricity pylons in front Highway bordered by roadside fence panels running beside orange sand dunes with a blue truck ahead Road curving between orange sand dunes with street lamps and a white car, and a fenced compound nearby Sand dunes facing a desert camp with fences, sparse vegetation, light poles and a shelter on the ridge Blurry view across a brown plain toward a distant line of low buildings and hazy orange dune mountains Highway with a billboard about preserving the environment, featuring wildlife pictures and Arabic text near dunes Wide featureless brown gravel plain with a long ridge of large sand dunes in the distance under a hazy sky Desert highway with yellow and white lines between orange sand dunes, a lattice tower, signs and a roadside fence Barren stony desert plain in the foreground with a long line of pale sand dunes along the distant horizon Desert road curving between orange dunes with a yellow and white speed bump crossing the lane and a distant tower Highway with a white center line and yellow edges curving gently between orange sand dunes under a clear blue sky Orange sand dunes in the foreground overlooking a dry rocky plain and distant hazy mountains beneath a blue sky Empty asphalt road with white edge line cutting through orange sand dunes under a clear blue sky Paved road with yellow edge lines and white center line heading straight toward a ridge of orange dunes Rear view of a white Chevrolet sedan with AVIS sign and license plate on a road bordered by orange dunes Wide expanse of orange and light brown sand dunes with ripples extending beneath a pale hazy blue sky White Chevrolet sedan driving along a desert road with orange dunes and mountains behind and rippled sand in front White Chevrolet sedan parked on the crest of an orange sand dune against a clear blue desert sky Vast orange sand dunes with a receding line of white posts marking the horizon beneath a clear blue sky Rippled orange sand dunes with a trail of footprints overlooking a dry plain and distant hazy mountains Desert road junction with a red STOP sign and white arrow marking surrounded by orange sand dunes Paved road crossing orange sand dunes, with a blue parking sign and arrow on the right side. A winding highway with a marker post crosses a wide desert plain with distant orange dunes. A paved road curves between large orange sand dunes under a clear blue sky. A curving highway lined with dark marker posts runs past orange sand dunes under blue sky. A wide flat desert plain stretches to the horizon, framed by orange dunes on both sides. A highway banked between orange sand dunes curves to the right under a blue sky. A flat desert plain with sparse surface details is bordered by distant orange sand dunes. A highway with a line of marker posts curves past large sand dunes and sparse desert vegetation. Two-lane road curving past a large orange sand dune with guardrails on the left View along the road edge showing a low orange dune range across a flat desert plain Wide desert with orange dunes, sparse green shrubs, and sandy tracks across the plain From a high dune, a black asphalt road winds across the dune field to the horizon An S-curving desert road with a white center line winding between orange sand dunes Closer view of an abandoned concrete building with dark openings, a green tree, and dunes behind Wide desert plain with a road, a distant palm grove, and a long orange dune wall on the horizon Straight multi-lane desert highway with divider posts and palm groves near distant dunes Straight desert highway with utility poles and a big orange dune on the right, buildings far ahead Desert road descending through rolling sand dunes, with the white car body visible on the left Road curving past a planted field of green trees with an orange dune range beyond A highway curves past tall streetlights and metal guardrails with planted palms and orange dunes on the horizon. A descending highway with palms and a blue sign passes a sandy ridge dotted with buildings and a tower.
Journal Notes

General

The last day of the journey was the long one. It began in the city, with the skyline in the mirror and the Burj Khalifa standing over it, and it ended a hundred and fifty kilometres south west of Abu Dhabi, on the northern edge of the Rub’ al Khali, the Empty Quarter, in a landscape of orange sand that runs to the horizon in every direction. Between the two lay four hours of desert road, several police checkpoints, two towns, a camel farm, and a great deal of nothing that is worth the drive in itself.

The route leaves the city on a multi lane highway and heads south west across a plain that grows emptier by the kilometre. There are signs to Al Qua’a, to Um El Zumool and to Abu Dhabi, and there are long stretches in which the only structures are an electricity pylon, a fence, and the corrugated containers and water tanks of a road maintenance outpost. Then the dunes begin: at first a low ridge on the horizon, then a wall of red orange sand standing directly beside the tarmac, with the road doing what the sand allows it to do, curving and climbing and descending through the dune field.

The destination was the oasis of Liwa, the largest settlement on the northern side of the Empty Quarter. Liwa lies about ninety eight kilometres south of the Gulf coast and about a hundred and fifty kilometres south west of the city of Abu Dhabi, and it stretches some hundred kilometres from east to west along an arc that curves to the north, made up of about fifty villages, with the centre of the oasis at Muzayri. It is the last green place before the sand sea begins, and the road from the coast runs the length of the arc with the dunes always on the left hand side.

The day ended on a dune ridge above one of the oases, at a camp built in the shape of a fort, with crenellated walls, towers and a courtyard, standing on the crest where the sand meets the planted ground. From the roof, in the last light, the oasis was a dark green band with the dunes rising behind it, and beyond them, for hundreds of kilometres, the Empty Quarter. The name is no exaggeration. It is the largest continuous body of sand in the world outside the Sahara, and from the top of a dune in the evening it looks exactly like what it is called.

History

The Empty Quarter has been inhabited, sparsely, for as long as there has been anyone to inhabit it. Its people belong to a number of tribes whose territories meet in the sand, among them the Al Murrah, with the largest area, and the Banu Yam and Banu Hamdan in the south, while in the United Arab Emirates the Bani Yas, the tribe of the ruling families of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, had their summer settlements on the northern edge of the desert and their grazing in the interior. A few road links now connect these settlements to the oilfields and the water sources that keep them going.

Before the sand made the crossing impossible, there was trade through it. Caravans carrying frankincense from the south of Arabia crossed what are now impassable stretches of the Rub’ al Khali on their way north, until about the year 300. The desertification that closed the routes has been going on for millennia, and the last traces of that trade survive in a form nobody expected: camel tracks invisible on the ground still appear in satellite images.

The first non residents to cross the desert deliberately were British explorers in the early 1930s. Bertram Thomas and St John Philby both made documented journeys into it and Philby crossed it, and their accounts created the image of the Empty Quarter as the last blank space on the map of Arabia. It was Wilfred Thesiger, however, who made the place his own. Between 1946 and 1950 he crossed the desert several times with Bedouin companions, mapping large parts of it and travelling in the manner of the people he travelled with, and his book Arabian Sands, published in 1959, remains the classic account of the region.

Thesiger’s first camel expedition had left Salalah in Dhofar in October 1945 and reached Tarim in the Hadhramaut in February 1946. His first large crossing began in October 1946, again from Salalah, with a party of Bedu who were not all willing to continue, and it is from these journeys that the modern knowledge of the interior comes. In June 1950 a United States Air Force expedition crossed the desert from Dhahran to central Yemen with the support of the Smithsonian Institution, testing desert survival procedures as much as it explored, and the crossings have continued ever since, on camel, on foot and with vehicles, among them an on foot crossing from Salalah to Liwa in 2013 and further expeditions in 2020 and 2023.

Liwa itself is the oldest continuously inhabited place in the story, and its history is the history of water rather than of sand. The oasis lives from the aquifer beneath the dunes and from the date palm, which tolerates salt, shade and heat and produces a crop that can be stored for years. The villages are built where the water is closest to the surface, and the older parts of them are still made of the mud and stone of the plain, with watchtowers and forts of the kind that a settlement on the edge of tribal territory needed. In the twentieth century the oasis became the heartland of the Bani Yas and then, with the roads and the oil money, a place within reach of a weekend, and the camps and hotels that now stand on the dune ridges above the palm gardens are the newest layer of a settlement pattern that is thousands of years old.

Geology

The Rub’ al Khali is a desert covering most of the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula, spread across parts of Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, and it is part of the larger Arabian Desert. Its extent is about 650,000 square kilometres, which places it among the largest sand deserts on earth, and it measures roughly a thousand kilometres from north east to south west and five hundred kilometres across. The surface falls from about eight hundred metres in the south west to near sea level in the north east, and most of it consists of ergs, fields of sand dunes that reach two hundred and fifty metres in height, with plains of gravel and gypsum between them.

The sand itself is the reason the dunes have the colour they do. It is reddish orange, and the colour comes from feldspar in the grains, a mineral that survives weathering better than the darker constituents of the original rock. The dunes are not travelling in the way that dunes in a film travel. Sand blows from the surface constantly, and the ripples on a dune face change with every wind, but the shape of the large dunes remains remarkably stable, most probably because moisture drawn up from the surrounding salt flats into their base holds the sand in place. Those salt flats, the sabkha, appear in the east of the desert as brackish pans, among them Umm al Samim, and they are the boundary of the sand sea on that side.

Between the dunes there is more than sand. Along the middle of the desert lie raised, hardened patches of calcium carbonate, gypsum, marl and clay that were once the beds of shallow lakes, and the dating of them gives the recent climatic history of Arabia: they existed in periods about six thousand to five thousand years ago and again about three thousand to two thousand years ago, and they are thought to have formed during spells of cataclysmic rainfall similar to present day monsoon rains, most of them lasting only a few years. In the Mundafen area in the south west, some of the lakes lasted much longer. Chipped flint tools show that people were there when the lakes were, although no human remains have been found. The climate now is hyper arid, with annual rainfall generally under fifty millimetres and mean daily relative humidity falling from about fifty two per cent in January to fifteen per cent in June and July.

The dunes record the wind of the past as well as the present. In the Miocene Shuwaihat Formation of Abu Dhabi, the fossilised dunes contain a record of the prevailing wind directions at the time of their deposition, which is how the ancient wind pattern of the region has been reconstructed.

Water, the thing the desert does not have, is stored below it. The Quaternary sands of the Liwa area form an aquifer of continental and aeolian sands laid down during the wetter phases, holding groundwater that fell as rain tens of thousands of years ago and has not been replaced since at the present rate of rainfall. The oasis is a place where that water comes close enough to the surface to be reached by wells and by falaj channels, and the agricultural fields that appear among the dunes at Liwa are the visible result. The aquifer is also a strategic resource, and the relationship between what is drawn from it and what seeps back into it is a subject of study in its own right.

Under all of it lie the rocks that pay for the roads. The Shaybah oil field, discovered in 1968, lies within the Rub’ al Khali, and the South Ghawar field, discovered in 1948 and the largest oil field in the world, extends southwards into the northernmost part of the desert. The petroleum is hosted in the carbonate and sandstone reservoirs of the Arabian shelf, the same sequence that lies beneath the coastal cities hundreds of kilometres to the north east, and the infrastructure of the oil industry, fences, pylons, roads and pipelines, is part of the landscape a traveller drives through.

Wildlife survives in this environment in forms that are adapted to doing without water. The dunes and the gravel plains carry insects, reptiles and small mammals, and the vegetation, where there is any, consists of shrubs and grasses that appear after rain and set seed before it dries. Larger animals have been lost and, in one case, recovered. The Arabian oryx, a white antelope of the desert, was extinct in the wild by the early 1970s, was kept alive in zoos and private reserves, and was reintroduced from 1980. It was classified as endangered in 1986 and, in 2011, became the first animal ever to be moved back from extinct in the wild to vulnerable on the Red List. It is listed in Appendix I of CITES, and the wild population was estimated at about 1,220 individuals in 2016, with six to seven thousand more in captivity. Its activity pattern follows the heat of the day in a way that has been studied in detail, and the herds that now stand beside a desert road at dusk are the result of a programme that took fifty years.

Things to See

The first sight of the day is the city itself, seen in the mirror on the way out. The highway climbs away from the creek and the bay with the skyline on one side, the Burj Khalifa above everything, and cranes and an excavator still working on the edge of it, because Dubai has not finished building itself and probably never will. Then the towers shrink in the haze, and the last of them disappears behind a billboard about environmental protection that carries a falcon and an Arabian oryx and nothing else that a driver would remember.

What follows is the road. It runs straight for kilometres at a time between dunes that stand above it on both sides, orange sand with a line of thin green shrub at the base and a fence along the crest, and then it curves, climbs and drops again because a large dune was in the way. Blue signs point to Al Qua’a and Um El Zumool, junction signs order a stop, a speed bump painted yellow and white crosses the lane before a tower, and a half built compound with an antenna mast stands off to the right with nothing else around it for twenty kilometres.

The desert between the dunes has its own detail. A camel farm lies behind wire fencing, with pens of straw shades and blue tarpaulins, and the animals stand on the open plain in front of the red dunes in a caravan of twenty or thirty, walking in a line with the light behind them. A single truck drives away down a straight road towards the horizon. Elsewhere there is a flat topped brown hill above an arid plain, an abandoned concrete building with dark openings and one green tree beside it, and a stretch of salt flat, pale and cracked, crossed by a fence and a power line with the dunes rising behind.

The oasis appears gradually and then all at once. The first sign of it is a palm grove on the horizon and a line of orange dune beyond, then planted fields with green crops under blue plastic mulch, irrigation pipes, and street lamps and traffic signs among the trees. The road runs along the arc of the oasis between the palms and the sand, past a roundabout with a large coffee pot monument, and climbs a ridge to the camp, which stands on the crest with crenellated walls and towers, more fort than hotel from a distance.

The evening on the dune is the point of the whole day. The sand underfoot is soft and fine and still warm an hour after the sun has gone, the ridges turn from orange to red to grey, and the tracks of a dozen vehicles and a hundred footprints lead down the face of the slope towards the flat ground. A line of white posts marks a fence along the crest, and there is nothing beyond it but more dunes, all the way to the Saudi border and past it. In the last light the oasis below turns dark green.

References

  1. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Rub’ al Khali. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub’_al_Khali
  2. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Liwa Oasis. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liwa_Oasis
  3. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Wilfred Thesiger. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_Thesiger
  4. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Arabian oryx. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabian_oryx
  5. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Dune. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune
  6. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Aeolian processes. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolian_processes
  7. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Sabkha. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabkha
  8. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Al Ain. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Ain
  9. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Al Ain Oasis. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Ain_Oasis
  10. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Abu Dhabi (emirate). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Dhabi_(emirate)
  11. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Bani Yas. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bani_Yas
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