Saudi Diaries — Part 8: The Camel on the Highway and the Sand Storm

​The towers of KAEC were still visible in the rearview mirror when Abdulaziz said it.
“Now you’ll see the other side of Saudi.”
He said it simply, eyes on the road, as if he were mentioning the weather. But the words settled into me with weight. I had seen the ancient — Al Balad’s coral-stone alleys, narrow enough to touch both walls at once. I had seen the future — KAEC’s glass towers rising out of reclaimed coastline like a promise not yet kept. Now, apparently, I was going to see something older than both. Something that didn’t care about either.
The cranes shrank first, then the towers, then the neat grid of streets that didn’t have buildings on them yet. And then there was just the road. Flat, grey, endless, with heat shimmering off it in waves that made the horizon look liquid.

​I didn’t know it yet, but in a few hours I’d be questioning my own eyesight, eating the sandwich of the Middle East, and standing — quite literally — face to face with a camel that looked like it had a lot of personality to show. This was the day the desert finally introduced itself to me.

A Stop in Yanbu
Yanbu arrived differently from Jeddah. No corniche full of evening strollers, no skyline trying to impress you. Just a working port city, salt-streaked and unbothered, going about its business. Ships sat at anchor in the distance. The streets felt purposeful rather than picturesque — a city that builds and ships stuff, not one performing for visitors.
That's the Industrial Yanbu, the one that I saw. If you are into diving this i your place! (check it out here)
We needed fuel. The gas station was plain— concrete, fluorescent light, the smell of fuel hanging in the heat. But just a few streets into town, a place we searched for: Shawarmer.
"Ten more minutes," Abdulaziz said, already driving toward it. "We need to eat something. It’s time for lunch."
I had eaten shawarma like sandwiches before — in European cities at 2am, from carts that promised more than they delivered. I assumed this would be the same, just with better weather. I was wrong in a way that genuinely surprised me.
The smell hit first — the slow, fatty perfume of meat that had clearly been turning on that spit for hours. Then the sound, a soft hiss as the knife shaved it off in ribbons. The bread was warm, almost steaming when they wrapped it. And the thum — the garlic sauce — was nothing like the white yogurt-based sauce I'd had before. This was sharp; it carried a punch, emulsified into something closer to a weapon than a condiment. Pickles added a clean, sour crunch against all that richness.
I took one bite and stopped talking for a second, which Abdulaziz noticed immediately.
It dripped, of course. Shawarma always drips. Last time something dripped, it landed on my thobe — this time, no thobe to protect, just my light blue shirt, which now had a small garlic-and-meat-juice constellation spreading across the front. I hadn't even had the chance to wash the thobe from the last incident. A pattern was emerging.

"This," I announced, mouth still full, "is the best shawarma I've ever had in my life."
Abdulaziz looked at me, then at the half-eaten wrap in my hand, and laughed — a real, head-back laugh.
"Yakhee, this is just a normal shawarma. From a plain chain shop. It's good — but there is much better."
He wasn't wrong, probably. I'd learn that later, on this trip and others. But in that moment, sitting on a plastic chair at a random shawarma shop in Yanbu, garlic sauce on my shirt and sun in my face, it was perfection. Sometimes the best travel memories aren't the ones you planned for. They're the ones that happen a few hundred meters from a fuel pump.

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The Sea Disappears
Back in the car, the Red Sea — which had been somewhere off to our left since Jeddah, a constant blue companion — began to fade. I hadn’t realized how much I’d come to rely on it being there until it wasn’t.
The change crept in slowly at first. The air outside seemed to carry a different quality, drier, sharper, more demanding. The scattered green — date palms, the occasional irrigated patch — thinned out and then vanished altogether. What replaced it was rock. Not gentle hills, but dramatic, broken formations, rust-colored and jagged, as if something enormous had clawed at the earth and walked away satisfied.
I kept turning my head, trying to take photos through the window that I knew wouldn’t capture it. These weren’t postcard mountains. They looked like they’d been struck into existence — violent, ancient, indifferent to how long they’d been standing there.
“I’ve never driven this road either,” Abdulaziz admitted, glancing at the rock walls passing us. “First time for both of us.”
That surprised me. I’d assumed he’d seen all of this before — that for him this was familiar ground I was discovering for the first time. But no. He was discovering it too, just from a different starting point: not as a foreigner falling in love with a country, but as a Saudi rediscovering how vast his own country actually was. We sat with that for a while, both of us quiet, watching the landscape rearrange itself around us.

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The Camel
We passed through Yanbu Al Nakhal almost without noticing — a scattering of low buildings, a tired date palm grove, and what felt like a complete absence of people. It had the stillness of a place time had simply forgotten to visit. No cafes, no signs, no movement.
And then, on the shoulder of the road, there was one local observer — a camel.
Just one. Standing perfectly still, watching us approach the way you’d watch weather pass — with mild, almost hidden interest. We slowed, half-expecting it to bolt. It didn’t. It simply turned its head slightly, fixed us with an expression that managed to be both completely blank and somehow deeply unimpressed, and let us go by.
I twisted around in my seat to keep watching it until it disappeared from view.
There was something almost absurd about it — a country racing toward Vision 2030, building futuristic cities out of desert sand, and here, on the actual roadside, was the oldest resident of this land, utterly unbothered by any of it. No interest in our speed, our schedule, our destination. It had nowhere to be. It had already arrived, several thousand years ago, and it was still here. We were the temporary ones, passing through its country, not the other way around.
I didn’t say anything for a few minutes after that. Some things don’t need to be narrated in real time.

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The Sand (Storm)
It started as a smudge.
Somewhere between Yanbu Al Nakhal and AlUla, the horizon ahead lost its sharpness, blurring into a soft, sepia-toned haze. The sunlight changed color — gold turning to something murkier, almost bronze, like the world had been shot through an old Instagram filter. I remember thinking it was beautiful before I understood what it actually was.
Then the wind hit.
It came sideways, in gusts strong enough to feel it in the car. Sand began streaking across the road in long, low ribbons, hissing against the windshield. Within minutes, visibility collapsed — the rock formations, the road markings, even the horizon itself dissolved into a churning wall of beige and gold. The world outside the windows simply stopped being legible.
I was, frankly, thrilled and kinda spooked. Both at once, in a way I didn’t know was possible. This felt like the desert finally showing its true face — not scenic, not photogenic, just raw and enormous and completely unconcerned with our small metal box moving through it.
Abdulaziz’s reaction was the most unexpected thing I’d witnessed the entire trip.
He sighed.
“Just some wind and sand,” he muttered, easing off the accelerator and leaning forward to squint through the haze. He wasn’t scared. He was annoyed — mostly about the paint on the car, and the headlights, and whether this would chip something on the car he’d need to deal with later. His calm wasn’t bravado. It was boredom. For him, this was just another day.
I was having one of the defining sensory experiences of my life. He was having a minor inconvenience involving car maintenance.
The wind howled against the glass. Sand pelted the doors like static, like thousands of tiny needles thrown by something invisible. The engine note changed, maybe just in my head… 
And then — as suddenly as it had begun — it broke.
The wind dropped. The haze thinned. Sunlight returned, clean and full, like someone had pulled a curtain back. We drove for a while in a silence that felt different from before — not awkward, just there. Both of us, I think, quietly processing what we’d just been inside of.

The First Glimpse
The road kept climbing gently, and the rock formations around us began to grow — not just in size, but in power. Shapes that no longer resembled ordinary geology. Towers. Arches. Forms too deliberate-looking to be accidental, sculpted by nothing but wind and unimaginable amounts of time.
We rounded a bend.
And there it was.
I’m not going to try to describe it properly here — that’s a story for the next chapter, because it deserves more than a closing paragraph squeezed in after a sandstorm. But I can tell you this: I had seen the photographs. I had read the descriptions, the breathless travel articles, the documentary voiceovers.
Nothing — absolutely nothing — had prepared me for this.
The drive was over. AlUla had arrived.