Words + Photos By: Marina Bruce
Over the last three years I’ve been lucky enough to follow some amazing people over the sands of Liwa and in doing so have clocked up close to 100 days there with sand under my tyres. Now it’s time to create some routes of my own so I’m planning forays into all the Liwa areas over the next few months. Since it was the last weekend in August, and the daytime temperatures were still hitting 45°C, I chose the easiest terrain to begin – the area between Madinat Zayed and the Arada/Ghayathi road – and a few friends accompanied me on a two-day scouting trip. As it was still too hot for camping we based ourselves at the recently renovated Liwa Hotel.
The desert changes all the time; wind and rain cause subtle changes in the dune structures, and man and machine create new gatch tracks, and industrial projects as well putting up every off-roader’s nightmare – fences. We assembled early on Friday to enter the desert a few kilometres south of Madinat Zayed, taking advantage of a new gatch to lead us down to an old abandoned Toyota truck which is where we engaged 4WD and headed west. Every so often you see something in the desert that strikes you as bizarre; enroute we found a digger painted with the Scottish Thistle – in a previous life this JCB was holding up traffic around the narrow roads of Fife, but now it’s here with the pylon/gatch building team.The convoy also stopped to take photographs of some modern day Bedu herding an enormous herd of camels with their 4x4s.
Google Earth is my best friend when it comes to finding routes through the desert; from many hours poring over the satellite imagery, I’d plotted an easy route through some spectacular scenery. No two sand dunes the same, and if you off-road frequently in an area you will quickly be able to navigate using some as landmarks, but for this trip, our tracks were loaded into our Garmin Montanas. We always recommend that your convoy should always have at least one GPS device between them. I should say that it is possible to drive on dunes all the way from the deflation point to the exit point, but the purpose of this trip was to track the new gatch, locate potential camping spots and to establish a short intermediate level Liwa route of around 60km.
We took a smooth path through a spectacular landscape; the dunes in Liwa are like no other with tricky crests, massive slipfaces and soft bowls to keep your attention focused. Our convoy had all been taught and had practised descending slipfaces safely; the car is riding an avalanche of sand and it is vitally important to keep it straight and to know what to do if it skews sideways. If you are lucky you will hear the roar of the “singing sands” as mentioned by Wilfred Thesiger in his book “Arabian Sands,” which is caused by the tiny particles of sand moving together.
During August, considerable rainfall was experienced across most of the UAE so it was no surprise to see more greenery than one would normally expect in the summer. Where there is foliage there is often wildlife to be found and we weren’t disappointed; we saw more than 30 gazelles over the course of the day, some in pairs but two reasonably sized herds too. We held back a few minutes each time to let them get away from us, making the most of the breaks to grab some great photos. We also found a spiny-tailed lizard, known locally as a dhaub which was playing possum and had it not moved its tail, I would have driven past convinced it was a dried up branch.
In establishing a route it is important to create some recognisable waypoints and it proved difficult in this area as all the dunes were massive/smooth/impressive and there were very few man-made objects we could use.
With all the wildlife stops and pauses for photography we took about 2.5 hours to cover the 33km to reach a solar-powered oasis, which can also be accessed from the E15 road via a gatch track.
It is surprising how many oases you will find deep in the desert; this one was 25km from the Arada road and the workers were very pleased to see us. We’ve been here a few times before and always give them some small gifts of food and cigarettes and in turn they gave us some lovely sweet dates.
This is going to be a main waypoint for my route, from here you can easily get out of the desert on the gatch if, for instance, you have a car with mechanical issues, but you can also travel north of this over some great dunes to reach civilisation and this is the option we took. We found some lovely fast and smooth driving through massive bowls with gentle ascents and other challenges along the way. I’m taking a group from Oasis Offroad down here early in October so we took the chance to identify a few likely camping spots to enjoy a night under the stars with very little light pollution.
After dune driving for 58.8km since leaving the abandoned Toyota truck, we exited the desert at an underpass on the E15, inflating our tyres and travelling the 80km or so back to the hotel at Misaira’a. We took the chance to prepare our cars and cool boxes for the next day by filling up with gas and replenishing our ice supply before going to the hotel to enjoy a restful afternoon by the pool.
Next morning we returned to the same deflation point and took a route about 10km north of the previous day’s drive; I’m certain the sand here hasn’t seen rain since last winter as it seemed as soft as talcum powder in places. We had more stucks and self-recoveries than the day before even though the route was exactly half the distance, underlining the need to build in contingency time even for very short and easy drives!
The terrain here is, in the main, very easy as the dunes lie in a north-south pattern with huge sand plains in between but we were unlucky with the condition of the sand and the pre-planned route led us into some extremely technical dunes. Thankfully we had winches in our convoy which were called into service when all attempts at self-recovery had failed.
We visited some water tanks which look like palaces from a distance as they are perched atop dunes and have windows painted on them. There are also many chimney-like structures poking out of the sand and these are caps to gain access to underground water. We all took the chance to make a wish as we dropped dirhams into these 21st century wishing wells, while the scientifically minded in our group calculated that they were around 150m deep.
All too soon it was time to hit the blacktop once more and after inflating at an ADNOC we went our separate ways home.
Our deflation point at Madinat Zayed was approximately 175km from Abu Dhabi, 285km from Dubai and 265km from Al Ain. The Liwa Hotel is some 60km beyond. All the roads linking these cities either are dual carriageway or have three lanes in each direction and, despite the remoteness of the area, there are ample gas stations and food outlets. It is a long distance to travel to get there but the dunes are sublime and like no other in the world, so it’s well worth the effort. Some say “you haven’t seen the desert until you’ve been to Liwa” and I totally agree with them!
