maxingout
Adventurer
GRANITE BATHOLITHS - BEDOUIN WELLS - ABANDONED VILLAGES OF THE ARABIAN SHIELD
When things don't work out as planned, what should you do? Put a for sale sign of your Defender and hope that a Bedouin with lots of cash shows up to put you out of your misery? Sit around and feel sorry for yourself because you are high-sided on the sand dunes of life?
I don't think so. If you don't have a snatch strap, and you are all alone in the dunes, then it's time to get out the shovel and start digging. Once the sand no longer touches the chassis, you will be on your way.
When plans don't work out, you keep on digging, keep on fixing, keep on navigating, and keep on driving.
I high-sided my red Defender on top of this dune because I was driving too slow when I went over the crest. That's what happens when I live my sand dreams. Sometimes I get it right, and sometimes I don't. This time I didn't.
The one thing I don't do is complain about being high-sided in the dunes of life. Of all the billions of people inhabiting planet earth, I am one of the few people who have had the privilege of high-siding my Defender on this particular dune in Saudi Arabia. It's a very exclusive club.
If you don't want to have problems, you should drive your Defender into a 40 foot shipping container and move right in. Don't come out into the real world where challenges and difficulties abound. And if you want to be really safe, deposit your shipping container ********** dab in the middle of a meteor crater. The odds are astronomically low that a meteor will strike twice in the same location. Talk about being safe - that pushes the equation of safety to exponential levels. You will also maintain the value of your Defender as it sits pitifully in the 40 foot container. If you take enough antidepressants, you may not even notice that you don't have a life.
But that's not what Defenders are for. They are for living your dreams. You are supposed to get high-sided. You are supposed to sink down to your chassis in the bull dust. You are supposed to get up to your axels in mud.
One of the things I like about my Defenders is that they are all the same. Some may have a diesel and others a petrol engine, but they are all dream machines. Defenders are made for living my overland dreams. Defenders are always up to the task, and they fit any size of dream.
That's enough about my Defenders. It's time to focus on my granite dreams.
We left Riyadh and headed northwest into the Wahabi section of Arabia. Heading up to Majaama, Buraidah, and points further northwest takes you into the heart of Wahabi Land. Some expatriates are fearful of traveling in this conservative region of Arabia, but our experience has been uniformly good. We have found the people to be helpful and friendly in all our encounters.
A Land Rover Defender sticks out like a sore thumb in the land of the Toyota pick up truck. Bedouins prefer small Toyota pick ups that are big enough to transport a camel and light enough to be proficient off-road. Many of the pick ups have only two wheel drive, but they perform well even in the dunes. If you know what you are doing, you can go just about anywhere you want with a two wheel drive Toyota pick up.
A properly driven Defender can go amazing places with two wheel drive as well. We traveled in the company of a Defender that had a broken rear differential. The driver spent the morning removing the gears in the broken differential, and then he resumed his trip after disconnecting the rear prop shaft. He drove for an entire week in the large dunes of the Empty Quarter using only front wheel drive. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you don't listen to the naysayers and you give it a try.
Green Defender fills up with gas before heading out into the desert. Arabian gas stations may have up to twenty five gas pumps, and each station sells Bedouin camping gear. Bedouins don't go to REI to get their camping supplies. Their local gas station has it all. Everything you need to survive Bedouin style is for sale. Cookers, propane, tarps, clothing, water containers, fuel drums, knives, hardware - it's all there.
Filling up our jerry cans and long range fuel tanks is always an adventure. People stand around and watch us fill 13 jerry cans and ask us where are we are going. We often wonder where we are going as well.
When fueling is complete, we lock the car and check out the Bedouin camping gear at the gas station. It's tempting to buy some souvenirs, but our car is already too full. If we get any stuff, it will be on our way back to Riyadh after we have lightened our load by camping for a week in the desert.
After driving hundreds of kilometers northwest on the main highway, off in the distance we see granite batholiths rising out of the desert sand. They look interesting, and it's worth a detour to check out the granite. Camping in granite monoliths is high on our list of perfection. We turn off the highway and pick a track that takes us toward Granite Land.
Anytime we spot granite batholiths on the horizon, we turn off road to check them out. A ten kilometer detour on a two thousand kilometer trip is trivial. We might even discover a great adventure.
This particular patch of granite contains approximately sixty square miles of batholiths and outcrops. There is plenty of granite to go around. We won't run out of things to explore any time soon.
This satellite photo focuses on a patch of granite that is about two miles wide and six miles long as viewed from 37,000 feet. A smorgasbord of granite awaits Team Maxing Out. In some areas, isolated small batholiths emerge from the Arabian Shield. Small outcrops make awesome places to have lunch and to make a quick climb to the top. Larger more complex batholiths involve more climbing, but the added altitude offers a much better view of the granite all around.
This patch of granite is about one mile wide and a couple of miles long as viewed from 7500 feet. In just a few minutes you could locate at least a dozen places to set up camp in the granite paradise. You get the best of both worlds in these campsites. You set up your tent in sand, and fifteen minutes later you are climbing on the granite. Places like this reinforce my belief that there is no limit to how good my life can become.
Our actual campsite is in a box canyon with a nice selection of boulders for privacy among the acacia trees. Although it doesn't rain often or long in the desert, the granite outcrop has prominent grooves worn in the rock created by running water. Flash flooding won't be a problem even if it rains during the night because we are upstream of any flooding.
Just for fun, I loaded Google Earth and moved the cursor to Saudi Arabia. I did not have the latitude and longitude of our campsite, but I knew that this particular granite field was about ten kilometers north of the highway about halfway to Medina. We had never been here before, and we knew nothing of this area.
I wondered if satellite photos could be used to locate our campsite. I could not imagine any reason why Google Earth would have satellite photos of this remote location. This would be a good test of how well Google Earth covers areas of little apparent importance to anyone in the world except a few Bedouins and a handful of curious campers.
I followed along Medina Road on the map, and I knew that the granite field was north of the highway. I checked out a few possibilities and within a couple of minutes, I located the granite field. Now the challenge was to see if I could locate the campsite using nothing more than the photographs that I took of the terrain.
There was a Bedouin village on the edge of the granite, and I used that to orient the satellite photos as I searched for my campsite. In less than ten minutes, I located our campsite. In this photograph, I pasted a picture of our Green Defender into the satellite photo at the exact location of our campsite. Comparison of the boulders in the satellite photo with the boulders in the actual campsite confirms that these are photographs of the same point on planet earth. The white grooves worn into the granite batholith next to the campsite match on both sets of photos.
The satellite photo shows the campsite from an altitude of 4100 feet. The actual photo of the campsite with Green Defender is taken at an altitude of 200 feet from the top of an adjacent batholith.
I have to admit that this freaks me out more than a little. I am sitting in Phoenix looking at my campsite using satellite imagery. It's amazing and creepy to know that detailed satellite images exist for every inch of planet earth. Using resources available to everyone, I can view the finger print of planet earth. Imagine what governments and superpowers can do with their satellite imagery. Bad Boys don't have any place to hide. Of course, Good Boys don't have any place to hide as well. I hope that all of this technology is never turned against the good guys. Very scary.
There is a Big Eye in the Sky watching everyone every day, and the Big Eye is not God. Top Secret Dudes all around the world are watching planet earth, and they all have agendas that are probably different than yours. These satellite photos are a potent reminder that all is not well on planet earth, and the technology is already in place to make the world a much different place than it is today.
If push ever comes to shove, and if you are on the wrong side of an evil global agenda, there will be no place to hide.
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