Writer Melissa van Maasdyk in conversation with desert tour guide Karim Rushdy
As much as we love a five-star hotel, when temperatures start dipping towards the 20s, little beats the luxury of camping under a desert night sky and waking up to a vista of endless dunes.
Apart from its beauty, the desert has a special energy, perfectly described by author Antoine de St Exupery in The Little Prince: “One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs and gleams.”
It has to be experienced to be understood, and for those who don’t know where to start with camping, you might like to tag along with Karim Rushdy, who has led desert safaris in Abu Dhabi for the past 35 years.
Born in Egypt, Karim undertook hotel-management training in Munich before coming to Abu Dhabi in 1985 to work as a night manager at The Hilton Hotel. Then in 1988, when Abu Dhabi’s very first tour company, Sunshine Tours launched, he was enlisted as a German-speaking city guide before starting their desert-safari division.
“It was uncharted territory as there were no guidebooks and no GPS or mobile phones,” he says. “I was given a couple of four-wheel-drives, along with the services of two Syrian drivers who had worked for oil companies in the desert, and off we went with a map and a compass.”
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It was a challenging process of trial and error, which meant that some of his first guests got lost in the dunes and had to help dig the cars out of the sand, making his tours seem more like survival camps than relaxing excursions.
But along the way, he has learned to read the desert like the back of his hand and how to get out of the trickiest situations, all of which he shares on the desert-driving courses offered by his company, Rub Al Khali Tours.
“As tranquil as the desert is, it can also be perilous,” he says, “so it’s essential to get some 4×4 training before heading out and to invest in some key equipment.”
Karim learned just how important it is to have recovery gear to hand when he got stuck in a sabkha in the Liwa Desert.
“These dried-up salt lakes, dating from the time when the area was under the sea, fill up after rains,” he says, “but their salt crust can make this hard to see. As a result, he found his vehicle sinking into a deep, watery trench that felt like quicksand.
“Luckily, we had several tow ropes with us and were able to pull it out,” he adds, “but it’s a lesson to be on the look-out for hazards all the time, and never to go out in the desert alone; you should always be in a party of at least two cars.”
No matter how skilled one is, Karim says you’ll inevitably get stuck in the sand at some point but there are straightforward techniques to get yourself out and learning them is part of the fun.
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You could join Karim on a one-day or overnight safari, either in one of his 4×4 vehicles or tagging along on your own (privately or in a group). We chose the tag-along option, which involved meeting Karim in Liwa (on the tar) and, after reducing our tyre pressure, following him into the desert and up and down dunes for a couple of hours with instructions via walkie-talkie along the way.
On arrival at his blissfully isolated camp, surrounded by the Empty Quarter’s soaring dunes (including the highest in the UAE), we climbed one of them to take in the sunset, then descended to find a barbecue underway and a surprise in the form of Karim’s Bedouin friend Mubarak, who regaled us with stories about life in the desert before oil’s discovery, while we ate and drank tea around the camp fire.
Then it was to bed in a cosy tent, waking up to a breakfast of scrambled eggs and coffee with camel milk, before heading off to Mubarak’s camel farm en route home.
The fact that Bedouin culture is still alive and well in Liwa is another reason Karim loves this particular desert most of all, and it makes a trip to the area both an outdoor adventure and a cultural experience.
For more information visit arabiantours.com
For more things to do, visit Yalla Abu Dhabi
