Saudi Diaries — Part 9: AlUla — Ancient Oasis Living Its New Life

I woke up before my alarm, again.
For a moment, I didn’t know why. Then I saw the light coming through the gap in the curtains — soft, gold, almost liquid — and I remembered where I was. AlUla.
I got up and pulled the curtains open and just stood there. A few palm trees swayed lazily in the courtyard. Beyond them, rising out of the earth like they’d always been there and always would be, were the rock formations. Massive. Ochre and rust and pink, depending on where the light hit them. Standing guard over a valley that looked like it had been waiting millions of years for someone to notice it.

The only sound was birds. No traffic, no construction, no hum of air conditioning units. Just birdsong and the faint whisper of wind moving through stone.
My first thought, still half-formed with sleep, was simple: this doesn’t feel real. It felt like a dream I was still having with my eyes open. And I would spend the next two days wondering whether that feeling was AlUla, specifically — or whether everything in this country had started to feel like that.

The Oasis and the Rocks That Are Not Just Rocks
Later that morning, we drove slowly through the oasis, and I understood why people describe AlUla in almost religious terms.
The palm groves go on and on — thousands of date palms, tall and straight-backed, their fronds catching the light and throwing soft green shade onto the ground beneath them. Against the red-gold rock walls that frame the valley, the green feels almost impossible. Like someone painted an oasis into a desert just to prove it could be done.

And then there are the rocks themselves. I want to be careful here because “rock formation” sounds so clinical, so geological, and what I saw was nothing like that. These are not rocks. They are sculptures — carved slowly, patiently, by wind and sand and time, over spans of time I can’t actually picture in my head. One looked like a castle with towers and battlements, weathered by some ancient siege. Another looked like a sleeping giant, curled on its side, waiting to be woken. Each one seemed to hold a story I would never fully know, and somehow that made them more beautiful, not less.
Driving beneath them, I felt small. Genuinely, physically small — the kind of smallness that has nothing to do with self-esteem and everything to do with scale. And to my surprise, I found that I liked it. There’s a kind of relief in feeling small next to something that old.

People Who Looked at the Same Rocks
I’m not a huge history person, usually. I nod along at museums, and more than once, forget everything by the parking lot. But something about AlUla made the past feel close enough to touch.
Long before anyone called this place AlUla, the Nabataeans lived here — the same people who carved the famous rose-red city of Petra, just across the border in what’s now Jordan. They were master builders, and here, in this valley, they carved tombs directly into the rock faces: elaborate, precise, facades chiseled into cliffs that must have looked, to them, like blank canvases rather than obstacles.
Their largest site here, Hegra, is Saudi Arabia’s first UNESCO World Heritage-listed location. I stood near enough to see the tomb facades from a distance, and it hit me in a strange, quiet way: these people looked up at these same rocks. They walked these same paths, felt this same heat, saw this same golden light in the morning. They are gone now, but what they made is still standing, still speaking, two and a half thousand years later.
That’s the thing about AlUla that I didn’t expect — it’s not a place that makes history feel distant. It makes it feel like the room is still warm.
​

---

Mirrors and Mud Brick
But AlUla isn’t only about the past. It’s equally invested in proving it has a future.
A few years earlier, they had built Maraya, said to be the world’s largest mirrored building — a huge geometric structure standing alone in the desert, its surface reflecting the surrounding rock formations so completely that from a distance it nearly disappears into the landscape. It’s a strange, striking thing to see: ancient stone reflected in glass and steel, past and future looking at each other. It felt like a deliberate statement, and a smart one — AlUla isn’t asking to be preserved behind glass. It’s asking to be lived in.
We wandered through AlUla Old Town, a heritage village of more than 900 mud-brick houses, narrow alleyways winding between walls the color of the earth itself. Some of the wooden doors looked like they hadn’t been opened in a hundred years. Walking through it felt like moving through a place time had forgotten — and then, just as quietly, remembered.
This, I thought, is Saudi Arabia in miniature. Ancient and modern, standing shoulder to shoulder, neither one apologizing for the other.
​

The Booking Disaster
Now that I kinda told you what’s there to see in AlUla, I have to confess something.
If you’ve been following this series from Part 1, you’ll remember: we didn’t really plan this trip. We packed, we booked flights, and we went. Spontaneity had served us well in Jeddah and on the road to KAEC. AlUla, it turns out, had other ideas.
After checking into our apartment, tired and sun-happy from the drive, I opened the booking app to sort out the “official” AlUla experience — Hegra, the guided tours, the off-road SUV rides through the desert. I scrolled. I refreshed. I scrolled again.
Everything was full. Every single tour. Every ticketed experience. Hegra — the whole reason people fly across the world to come here — fully booked, days out.
I stared at my phone in something close to genuine panic. We had driven across the country (getting close to 1.500 kilometers) to see one of the most extraordinary archaeological sites on the planet, and we were, functionally, locked out of it.
Abdulaziz, to his enormous credit, found this hilarious. I did not, at first. We spent a solid five minutes calling ourselves stupid — for not booking ahead when we actually knew how popular AlUla had become; for assuming that “we’ll figure it out when we get there” would work here the way it had worked everywhere else. Eventually, the ridiculousness of it caught up with both of us, and we were laughing so hard we had to sit down.
Here’s the thing, though: looking back, I think this was one of the most honest travel moments of the entire trip. Not the fixed itinerary, not the perfectly timed reservation — just two grown men, outsmarted by an app, laughing at themselves in a beautiful apartment in the middle of the desert.
​

What We Did Instead
Harrat Viewpoint. We drove up a winding mountain road with no real plan beyond “up.” At the top, the entire oasis opened beneath us — palm groves like a green jewel set into gold, the rock formations scattered across the valley floor, mountains fading into haze in the distance. We hadn’t booked this. ​

Nobody had scheduled it for us. It was just us, the wind, and a view that made the booking disaster feel almost like a gift. Once up on the viewpoint, entirely by chance, we caught a group of fire jugglers performing  — sparks arcing against the darkening sky, the desert cold starting to creep in around us.

Elephant Rock. We arrived in the early evening, when the light turns everything amber. Elephant Rock is enormous — a single natural formation, shaped over millennia by wind and water into something that genuinely does resemble a giant standing alone. There were other people there too, tourists and locals and families, all doing the same thing: standing quietly, looking up, not saying much. Nobody needed a guide to explain why it mattered. The rock did that on its own.

Just driving. We spent hours taking roads with no particular destination, stopping whenever something caught our eye. That’s the strange gift of AlUla — even the accidental views are spectacular. A hilltop turn revealing the whole oasis stretched out below. A small herd of camels ambling across the road, entirely unbothered by our car. Boxes of fresh dates that somehow found their way into our apartment that evening — but that story deserves its own chapter.

AlUla Old Town, on our own terms. We wandered it without a guide, without a map, just following the alleyways wherever they led. I ran my fingers along the mud-brick walls — rough, warm from the day’s sun, older than either of us could really comprehend. Worn stone steps. Wooden doors closed on rooms I’ll never see inside. I found myself imagining the people who once lived here: the families, the merchants, the children who ran through these same narrow lanes centuries ago. It didn’t feel like a museum. In the middle of it all, there were cafés, restaurants, and a few shops still open, people still living their ordinary lives around us.

Near the end of our walk, on the way back to the car, we passed a small, unassuming building at the edge of Old Town: Alitham Mosque, also known as the Mosque of Bones. The imam was at the door, preparing for the maghrib call to prayer, only a few minutes away — and yet he invited us in anyway, without hesitation. Inside, I looked up at a ceiling built from palm tree wood, dark and weathered and impossibly old, the kind of craftsmanship that makes you go quiet without meaning to. We stood there for a moment, guests in someone else’s holy place, grateful and a little humbled.

What I Learned in AlUla
I came to AlUla expecting a checklist. Hegra. The tours. The UNESCO plaque. The photo everyone takes.
I didn’t get those.
What I got instead was AlUla on its own terms — the views I stumbled into, the sunset I didn’t plan for, the silence at the top of a mountain, the Old Town explored with no itinerary, the oldest mosque I’ve ever set foot in, a desert road with camels crossing it like they owned the place. I got the feeling of AlUla, rather than the checkmarks.
And maybe that’s the real AlUla — not the ticketed experience, but the place itself. Ancient, staggering, generous. Waiting for you to meet it wherever you happen to show up.
I left AlUla with a bruised ego and a full heart. I didn’t get the perfect itinerary. I got something better — I got a story. I got to fall in love with a place I’ll never forget, even though I never saw it the way I’d planned to. AlUla didn’t get checked off my list. It moved to my “visit again” list instead. And maybe next time, I’ll actually book in advance.
As we drove out the next morning, I made myself a quiet promise. I would come back. I would see Hegra properly, tombs and all. I would plan ahead, for once.
But I’d also remember this: the best travel memories are rarely the ones you plan. They’re the ones that happen when you finally stop planning and just start living.