East of Khurais and Stuck in the Sand – KSA

A long long time ago the eastern half of Saudi Arabia was under water.  As a result there are a lot of marine fossils and coral and limestone to be found when out and about in the desert (or the bouldering wadi we went to which was all limestone).  Our guide book has a day trip to a bit of desert known for shark’s teeth fossils just to the east of a small town called Khurais, about 2 hours from Riyadh.

With a lunch packed and a SUV full of gas we headed out on the 40 East.  Normally the book is pretty good about the directions but for this trip our final destination was listed as 3 km past a pumping station and then turn left and go for an additional km.  Well the 3 km came and went and there was some disagreement about where this turn off was.  As there were several options and we could see tracks heading out (and I foolishly have little experience in Saudi sand driving and I’ve always had 4WD and I figured these tracks must get used and we’d be fine in our SUV) I picked a line of tracks and went for it.  Rookie mistake!  Within a few hundred feet we were stuck and anything I tried made it worse…none of my snow experience was paying off here.

We do have a few emergency items in the Silver Dinosaur (formerly Camel but now stuck and not going anywhere, destined to die and get buried for a million years) but we don’t have any sand ladders or even a proper shovel.  We do have an ax though and so I started trying to dig us out.  To my amazement, I wasn’t getting anywhere fast with the sand.  At this point the Dinosaur was buried up to the front faring and the more I dug the more sand seemed to seep back into the pit I was making.

At this point I was pretty frustrated, both with my stupidity and the underwhelming performance of the Dinosaur! (Later highlighted by a very friendly Bedouin in his Toyota Helix 4WD who came to check on us while we were picnicking- obviously having no issues in the sand and likely the source of some of the tracks we had seen heading off into the desert)

And then something completely awesome happened.  A big rig driver saw my plight, did a u-turn, came back to where we were stuck and started to pull some rope and chain from his rig.  And then when he realized the didn’t have enough he flagged a second rig down.  So we got everything chained together and he pulled us out of the sand with his big rig, easy peasy.  Shani took a video because of course it’s normal for a big rig to have an SUV chained to it going the wrong way on the freeway, this is Saudi, after all!

So, huge lesson learned.

We did end up finding a lot of coral and maybe some teeth, or some pointed rocks.  We’re calling them teeth.

 

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Video here – MVI_5522

 

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