Day 278: Dadan and Jabal Ikmah

Jan 6 - Take another bus tour, like yesterday, but to a few sites representative of civilizations that pre-date the Nabataeans. This tour starts at 8:00 and costs about $37 for the three of us.

Three pre-Nabataean cultural groups known to have inhabited Al-’Ula are the Dadanites, Lihyanites, and the Minaeans. The history of the three is a bit intertwined, but generally the time period of their influence is from the 8th century BCE to the time of the Nabataeans in the 2nd to 1st century BCE.

Dadan was the principle town of the Dadanites, but only a tiny fraction of it has been excavated. What is open for viewing now are their rock tombs, in the cliff face on the eastern side of Al-’Ula.

The second stop was at Jabal Ikmah, in a canyon on the western side. Here, people began recording events and talking about their gods from an early date, and the tradition carried on for centuries. There are examples here of many written scripts, along with petroglyphs of animals and musical instruments.

Tour is over after this, so go in search of lunch. It is Friday so many places are closed. We find a tiny place open along the main highway, and are invited into the kitchen to pick out what we want to eat.

Turn north and head though plenty of fantastic sandstone landforms for about 40 minutes to the Harrat Uwayyrid Nature Reserve. Go on to a dirt track into the desert.

The track ends at Rainbow Rock, a sandstone arch like several we saw in Wadi Rum weeks ago, but much larger.

Tire pressure light comes on as we head back on the dirt track. I’ve been waiting for this sort of trouble since the day we drove up the escarpment to Ta’if. There were so many sharp rocks on the road and the tires on this vehicle are not the best. I check around but do not yet see the issue, so we drive south toward Al-’Ula. A few km north of town I can feel the front right dragging so pull off the road. Sure enough it is flat. Have to find a 4x4 laying by the roadside to put under the jack, as the surface everywhere here is just soft sand. Fortunately, this rental has all the jack parts, and a good spare.

First order of business in Al-’Ula is to replace the flat, which was easy enough to find at a service station. A new one cost 280 SAR ($75).

Back to the hotel late afternoon. I go downstairs to pay our room, and get into a long conversation with the hotel manager, Nadim. He is Bangladeshi, from Dhaka, and I take this opportunity to ask about what it is like to work in KSA. The situation of foreign workers here is similar to that of Kuwait, UAE, and Qatar*, in that they are here at the invitation of the government only and at any moment could be deported. As foreign workers they have no rights and no recourse in the event that working conditions are unsafe or hours excessive. He confirms that this is the case in KSA, and says that really it is all about the boss they work for. That person can either be fair or not. In his years in KSA, all but one boss have been good (the one bad boss, in Jeddah, did not pay him at all for the three months of work he did). He estimates that 10% of employers are nothing but trouble and don’t hold up their end of the work contract, but the rest are fine. At any rate, at least there is work here, unlike in Bangladesh.

*One has to look no further than the controversies around Qatar’s preparation for the FIFA World Cup last December. Qatar’s system of migrant labor is called kafala, in which companies sponsor foreign workers to take part in specific projects, hence the workers can only take part in that project and are sent home when the work is done. Many have their passports confiscated to ensure control of their movements. The work conditions are at the convenience of the sponsoring company, and not regulated by any independent labor rights agreement. Estimates of how many workers died in these Qatari FIFA projects vary wildly, from 500 to 15,000.