Leaving Riyadh and Through the Desert to Buraydah

Ushaiqer Heritage Village.

Some of the ruins and some of the reconstruction.

The houses are linked by alleyways to avoid the sun and heat.

One of the original doors made from palm wood.

Inside the rebuilt home...

and from the second floor.

From the roof.

Beautifully rebuilt.

This is the reconstruction of the village Mosque.

Our first together meal for lunch.

The desert I expected to see.

One of the crop circles I tried to describe.

Some bleak and lonely places.

Domestic camels, there are no wild ones in Saudi Arabia.

The date and sweet export shop.

Tuesday, January 20th.

We saddled up and boarded the coach at 8:30 and proceeded to drive out of Riyadh on the same congested road we drove on yesterday to Dirihah and back. It took an hour to get out of town past innumerable construction sites until we got out into the barren desert, but even here you could see that people/companies have been changing the land. We drove through a sandstone hilly area where there must be water beneath as there were areas of palm tree groves. After two hours we stopped at a dying gas station for a pee stop, squatter toilets, but the promised Dunkin Donuts coffee shop was gone. So, we drove north-west to the Ushaiqer Heritage Village, a winding maze of alleyways and mud-brick houses. Nearby springs and palm groves made this a convenient stopping point for ancient pilgrims to Mecca. Much of the site is in ruins or very stages of disrepair, but some of the houses have been reclaimed by descendents and reconstructed, so it's still partially inhabited today, and there is a lot of government protection work going on here to ensure that it retains its character for future generations. We were allowed to enter one of the rebuilt houses and see it from the inside. What a different world that was! It was beautiful and comfortable (but I’m not sure why anyone would want to live out here in the desert in a partially built town with nothing around it in the way of things to do or places to shop). There was a young man there who welcomed us with a very light caramel coloured Saudi coffee. We go up the stairs to the roof for a view over the whole area. Really a fascinating view into times gone by.

From here we drive on to Buraydah. The area is one of the country's biggest date producers, and we had the chance to sample some dates and dipped one into tahini sauce, which is crushed sesame and tastes similar to peanuts. There were hundreds of products available, mostly sweet and treats that I did not recognize, but there on one of the shelves was Pringles and Nutella… As we were exploring they slowly turned off the lights to signal that they were closing the shop as the call to prayer was going and the staff were all going to the mosque to pray. Yannis quickly paid for a few things and we boarded the coach for our short ride to tonight’s hotel, which is a Best Western. I have a twin share room with my ‘ghost’ partner as Yannis put it.

We drove a lot today and I thought we’d see vast wide open spaces, and we did but, I was amazed by how wherever we went the landscape has been changed, altered, scraped and littered by humans. There was evidence of people everywhere. We saw some sand dunes, some sandstone hills, a few sheep and camels and surprisingly quite a bit of farming. There was an area where they use watering rigs that pivot on one wheel in a large circle. As a result the fields are circular which can be seen better from the air. They grow some alfalfa and grain crops in the middle of Saudi Arabia. Who knew?