Shaybah

In April, Mike and I had the fabulous opportunity to travel to Shaybah.  

Shaybah is a place in the Rub Al-Khali (/rube-ah-kah-LEE/), or Empty Quarter, which is the vast, empty desert in southern Saudi Arabia.  Here is how Wikipedia describes it:

"Shaybah Oil Field is a major crude oil production site in Saudi Arabia, located approximately 25 mi from the northern edge of the Rub' Al-Khali ("Empty Quarter") desert. It is about 6.2 mi south of the border to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, which is a straight line drawn in the desert. It is 25 mi south of the eastern part of Abu Dhabi's Liwa Oasis.

[ We are in Dhahran, near Bahrain.  Shaybah is near where it says "De Facto Boundary" just south of the UAE ] [Also, remember this map for the upcoming post about our trip to Qatar.]

(Wikipedia continues....)

"Shaybah was developed for the purposes of exploiting the Shaybah oilfield. It was established by Saudi Aramco during the 1990s, and, prior to this, only the rough tracks used by early exploration teams existed in this isolated desert region. All materials for the establishment and construction of Shaybah were transported the 500 miles from Dhahran to Shaybah by road.

"Shaybah has housing facilities for 1,000 men, administrative offices, an airstrip, a fire station, recreation areas, maintenance and support workshops, and power stations for generation and distribution. There is a 650-kilometer fibre optic cable linking Shaybah to the main radio system at Abqaiq.

"When established, the Shaybah oilfield had estimated reserves of over 14 billion barrels of crude oil and 25 trillion cubic feet of gas. Saudi Aramco brought the project on-stream in 1998. The crude is Arabian extra light, a high-quality crude grade with a specific gravity of 42 degrees api and a sulphur content of less than 0.7 percent. The oil reservoir is found at a depth of 1,494 meters and is itself 122 meters thick. The oil pipeline from the Shaybah field to Abqaiq is 638 miles long, with a further 457 miles within the field itself.  

"Shaybah's weather is extreme, with the temperature dropping to 50 degrees F on winter nights, rising to around 122 degrees F in the summer daytime. Dust storms are a regular occurrence."

OK, thanks, Wikipedia.

Shaybah is very remote and there is nothing there except for what the Company has put there since the 90s.  Otherwise, it is completely untouched desert.  It's desert like you imagine - vast, endless sand dunes.  It's amazing and beautiful.  It's very hard to capture on camera and harder to describe.  I guess it's like being alone on a boat in the ocean - it makes you feel small.

Going to Shaybah is hard to do.  The only feasible way to get there is to fly.  I suppose you could try to drive, but bring along lots of extra gas, because you are going to be out in the vast empty desert for a while.  It's 500 miles from Dhahran, and the Company had to build the (only) road to get there.  Not to mention, they probably wouldn't let you in the gate when you got there, anyway.  There is an airstrip, so the Company can fly its planes back and forth to Dammam (the airport near Dhahran), but they are Company flights and you have to have a Company reason for going there.  

Not to mention that it's a man-only facility.  There are 1000 men there who work to extract the oil and gas, no women allowed.  

But every now and then, they arrange a trip for employees and their dependents to go there to sightsee.  It's enormously popular, so everyone signs up and they hold a lottery to see who gets to go (which is limited by the number of seats on their 7-something-7s - 200ish, I think?)  We signed up for the most recent lottery, and HOORAY, we got picked!!  Off to Shaybah!   

Also, thank goodness Gramama was visiting - we didn't even have to arrange babysitting.  It's a day trip - bus to Dammam airport in the morning, hour long flight on Company plane to Shaybah, lunch, bus tour, climbing on sand dunes, dinner, flight back, and bus from the airport back to camp.  Gramama was not allowed to go (only employees, wives, and children), so we decided to make it a date.  Thanks, Gramama!

How exciting!  Here we are in the private Company airport.  It is its own building on the Dammam airport grounds.  There are two gates. 

Because it's all Company folks, the security is not very tight.  It's actually rather nice.  They made the women go through the metal detector, but nobody had to remove shoes or belts or put their laptop in a plastic bin, etc etc.  No boarding passes, and no arriving two hours early, either!

There are the Company planes. 

We were more than an hour late leaving, although now I can no longer remember why.  Anyway, when it was time, we just walked out onto the tarmac and got on the plane.  Cool!

This is the view looking back at the Company terminal as we went out toward the plane. 

Our plane was the Al-Khobar. 

Up the steps.

It was free seating once you got on.  Note the veiled lady on the right.  Amazing - those women are like chameleons. 

View from our seats of the rest of the passengers getting on.  

It was VERY dusty in Dammam that day.  The sky was kind of grey-white. 

Just after takeoff.  Yes, we have to BREATHE that air.  

Once we got above the dust, the sky was...BLUE!  It was the first blue sky we had seen in a long time.  Look at all that yucky dust down below. 

They let all the kids go up and look at the cockpit during the flight. 

Bye bye blue sky, here we go down again.  It was actually much clearer in Shaybah.  The flight took an hour. 

On our downward approach, we began to see the desert below us.  It was like looking at pictures of the surface of Mars.  

A road!  That must be the Company road to Shaybah, because there are no other roads out here.  Roads?  Where we're going, we don't need roads.  

The reddish part is the red sand dunes, which are VERY high.  The white shapes in the middle are the sabkhas (/sub-kuhs/), which are low salt flats.  (This is the same term as when we were digging for sand roses.)  Shaybah itself was built in a sabkha. 

Something man-made.  Must be getting close.  

Here we are!  Landing.  

Notice how high the dunes are compared to that car on the road. 

Here is the compound of Shaybah.  The compound at Shaybah is not like the compound here.  The "commissary" is like a tiny gas station convenience store because all the men eat solely at the dining hall.  They have a mosque and a pool and a rec room, and there are dormitories for the men, and that's about it.  You could walk the perimeter of the place in about 20 minutes. 

This is the only picture on this post that I did not take.  It's from a friend of ours who also was on the trip.  I like this picture because I think it does a better job than my own of portraying the enormity of the dunes. 

And....time to get off.  It was only about 100 degrees when we arrived, but it was so dry that it was comfortable.  

We all got off and took a huge group picture, and then we were loaded onto buses and taken to an outdoor poolside lunch.  

Rememeber, this is Saudi Arabia...everyone eats on the floor.  That's a veiled woman in the foreground. 

Oh good, somebody thought of us Westerners.  Hooray!  Here's where we sat.  (Incidentally, even through we did not bring our kids, lots of other people did.  There were kids running all around, and I could hardly go two seconds without panicking oh-my-god-I-don't-see-any-of-our-kids-and-we-are-right-by-this-pool-where-are-they???  And then remembering that they were not with us.  I'd have two seconds of peace and then re-panic all over again.  Let it go, E, they are not here!!)

Anyway, after the lunch, we got back on the buses and had a driving tour of the compound.  It was very short, as the compound is not very big.  See the road up the dune in the background?  That is the road to the Big Tent, which was our final destination. 

Random pictures of the compound. 

These are the dormitories.  

Dunes.  

I took this one for my husband.  STP = Sewer Treatment Plant.  I have had to re-learn, because at home they call them WWTP = Waste Water Treatment Plant.  Also, GOSP = Gas Oil Separation Plant.  They take the oil that they drill from here and separate out the natural gas.  There are three or four of these a short drive away from the compound. 

Click on this link to see Shaybah from space...(the runway is at the north side of the compound, and the other areas of civilization you see are the GOSPs).  Then zoom out to see how remote it is. 

We finally drove up the road to the Big Tent, which turns out to be an actual building that is decorated to look like a tent on the inside.  This is the view from in front of the Big Tent.  

In front of the Big Tent, Shaybah in the background. 

Inside the Big Tent.  

Saudis usually have these kind of couches lining the walls. 

Tables are set out for our dinner in a few hours.  That fence is where the overlook is.

Behind the Big Tent are the dunes.  We spent most of our time exploring the dunes looking like Mike does now.  It was SO amazing and overwhelming and unique and vast and difficult to take in that we had the cameras glued to our faces. 

PLEASE click on the pictures after you've read the post to see them bigger.  It will give you a better sense of it!

Walking up the dune right behind the Big Tent.  It looks low, but it was really high!

Looking back down the dune at the Big Tent and Shaybah in the background.  Again, altitude very deceiving. 

The dunes were like nothing I had ever seen.  As far as you could see in every direction, there was nothing but these orangey-red dunes and sky.  The sand was VERY hot in the sun and cool in the shade.  We took off our shoes and walked barefoot.  It was very fine, and almost completely pure sand.  It was very much like a new snow, where you walk forward into undisturbed territory.  

To give you a sense of scale, those are people walking up the dune in the middle left.  

Panorama of the view from the first dune.  

We hiked up the next few dunes and got to more undisturbed areas.  The scale of it was mind boggling.  And all of it is just giant piles of sand.  That's a LOT of sand!

The curves are so graceful, yet severe.  

As far as the eye can see...

Most people stuck closer to the first dune.  There was a big sand cliff right there (yes, the steep one) and anyone who had brought a sled could sand sled down it.  Lots of people did - it looked fun!  We walked around on the tops of the dunes most of the time, but when we headed back, Mike did jump off the sand cliff a couple of times. 

Up here, we were way up high on the top of this ridge.  It was very surreal - we were hundreds of feet in the air on top of this big mountain, with no railing or guard.  And it was not scary.  Or even intimidating.  Because it's sand. 

Here was a three-way intersection of dunes. 

I love this picture because I think it's particularly graceful, includes the infinity of dunes, and even has a person thrown in for scale. 

Shaybah is Arabic for "old man" because it's said that the dunes look like the back of an old man's hands. 

Watch the sand blowing across this dune.  

The wind smooths one side and wrinkles the other.  The sunny side was so hot you could not walk on it - well, not for more than a split second.  The shady side was cold.  

When we did walk on the sunny side, we could step right on the ridge and sand would flow like water down the shady side.  It poured, just like a liquid.  The wind smooths everything back out pretty quickly - depending on wind speed, usually in a matter of hours. 

From way up high, there's Shaybah, and that's our plane.  Note the people climbing up the sand cliff on the left. 

Sand pouring down the dune.  Look how high up we are!  Look how steep!  It was not even scary.

This is a movie of the sand pouring down the dune. 

  

This one looked like a pyramid to me.  

Mike found some camel tracks.  

 

I like this one, too. 

After Mike jumped down the sand cliff a couple of times, I did it too.  But once you jump down, you have to climb back up!  It's so steep, it's like climbing a ladder, but the ladder keeps collapsing under you as the sand flows down the hill under your feet.  It is very physically exhausting!  I did make it back to the top, but I needed to rest (read: collapse) before moving on. 

And then the sun started going down.  It changed all the colors.  

Dinner was on the terrace overlooking Shaybah. 

And then when it got dark, we were bused back to the airplane.  It was great - we just walked onto the plane, no security at all!  They knew exactly who we were, as there was nobody else there except the locals.  Easy, fabulous! 

BUT, after two aborted takeoffs, they announced that one of the doors was broken and we had to get off again.  The maintenance crew on site was very minimal, and the Dammam crew was unable to talk them through a fix.  So we were stuck there!  They decided to send another plane from Dammam to get us, but they had to call the on-call pilots, wait for them to get to the airport, and then fly the plane down there.  We were supposed to leave at 7pm, but our new departure time was 1 am!  

Luckily, the compound manager kept the commissary and the rec room (which usually closed at 10 pm) open for the likes of us.  

Here we are walking to the commissary from the terminal.  

The commissary sold the barest of necessities for a group of men, like chips, sodas, frozen uncooked fish, batteries, women's lotion and shampoo, and down winter coats.  Sounds like crazy Saudi to me!  You know, because it does get down to 50 degrees at night in the winter.  And because some men like to use women's shampoo.  (???)    

(By the way, the face Mike is making there is supposed to indicate shivering.) 

Then we went to the rec room and played pool with friends until midnight.  Then the two of us walked around the perimeter of the compound and ended up at the terminial.  We watched the replacement airplane land, and then we all herded on.  We were in the air by 1:30 am, back to Dammam about 2:30 am, and then with the hour-long bus ride back to camp, it was nearly 4 am before we got home. 

Thank goodness we didn't bring the kiddos. 

But wow, it was still totally worth it.  What an amazing place.  I am so glad we got the opportunity to go.