Open Writing

On day seven of our adventure I regretfully left the luxurious Abha Palace Hotel behind while my husband pondered his much lighter wallet.

We took the road towards Yemen which was good for a while but soon became narrow and winding, with drivers continuing to blindly overtake us at 100 miles per hour.

We drove on to Habellah, which means `the ropes' in Arabic, so named for its thick ropes hanging along the cliff face, previously the only means of getting to and from this little village.

Habellah became a deserted village when the previous residents were removed from their mountainside homes and settled elsewhere in order to make room for tourists. And guess what? It now has a cable car.

This was the best ride yet, with a short, sheer drop down to a café. Meandering paths are set amongst the remains of the old stone village.

We feasted on hot chips and fed the friendly stray kittens before setting off on an hour's stroll.

Trees sheltered crumbling stone walls and bare vines twisted lazily over long-deserted ruins. The path curved out into bright sunshine and we watched the cable cars drift overhead.

We climbed the steps to the flat roof of a semi-preserved stone house at the path's end to stare at a sheer drop into the valley below. With my fear of heights I was a lot faster going down the steps than up.

We arrived in the city of Najran just before dusk and phoned the Holiday Inn. They quoted 425SR ($140AUD) which we thought was a bit expensive for the area - and the season - but we did not yet know how difficult accommodation was to find.

I felt more conspicuous than usual in Najran, even while wearing my headscarf and abaya. People stared at me as if they had never seen a Western woman before and I actually felt naked with just my face exposed. At Amer's suggestion, I wrapped my scarf around my face and felt clothed again.

After driving from one end of town to the other in increasingly heavy traffic and falling darkness, we finally found a hotel. The rooms were dark and musty and the bathroom needed a good scrub, but we were tired. Besides, we hadn't found the Holiday Inn on our driving tour!

A giant ant (ten times the size of those at home) sprinted over the bed's headboard and I wondered what sort of critters lived under the bed.

I was (just a little) grumpy at spending the last night of our holiday in this place and things went from bad to worse when I routinely checked my blood pressure. It had shot up from a slightly elevated level to definitely hypertensive.

At eight months pregnant, that was not good. I took it again 15 minutes later and it was higher.

The worst case scenario of an induction of labour in Najran must have added a few points!

Amer made up a bed on the sofa and I raised my puffy ankles skywards.

A little while later we were relieved to find my bp had dropped to a borderline level. Still not great, but better.

Neither of us was keen to take on the wildlife in the bedroom so Amer pulled the two sofa chairs together and made a convincing job of sleeping.

By the following morning my bp was normal and so were my ankles. We decided to have a look around Najran before driving 1500kms back to Riyadh. It promised to be the longest, most exhausting day of our trip.

After driving past it twice, we eventually found Okhdood, a famous archaeological site, on the city outskirts. It is infamous for the Yemeni King's burning alive of Christians in the year 523AD when they refused to convert to Judaism.

The site looked more like a wasteland from the road, but once inside the fence we could see beyond the stone rubble and overgrown shrubs. We wandered through the site, around crumbled stone houses and strange engraved stones. There were rock drawings and the remains of water canals in the ancient settlement, which was inhabited from 500BC to the 10th century AD.
It was hard to imagine this place once thrived in its position on the frankincense trail. We were the only people there and, apart from the occasional car horn in the distance, it was deathly quiet.

I could hardly believe it when I picked up a piece of clay pottery and got even more excited when I found a second piece. On looking around there were pieces of broken pottery everywhere around the site; big, small and in between. Some had markings on them which looked as if they were part of the decorative rim of the pot, while one piece had a pretty green glaze.

The Saudis have done some excavations in the past, but it looks as though they have barely scratched the surface. I wonder about the still buried legacy of this ancient settlement and the secrets it hides.

The rest of the day was spent driving towards Riyadh. For miles and miles we did not see another town or village. It was just us and the occasional vehicle passing through the far western edge of the famous Rub al Khali (Empty Quarter).

The sand dunes were spectacular, several hundred feet high in neat rows, far into the distance. This was the desert I had imagined. It was easy to picture Lawrence of Arabia dressed in flowing robes, wandering the soaring sand mountains atop a fine golden camel.

At dusk we reached a town and filled with petrol. We still had another 700kms ahead of us so bought a delicious meal of chicken and rice and carried on down the highway.

Finally, after a wonderful week's adventure - probably the last we will enjoy on our own for a long time - we arrived home at 2am.

Ahh, there is nothing quite like a clean bathroom and familiar bed!