WHAT’S THIS ALL ABOUT?
The Rakayib Camel Caravan was organized and funded by the Saudi Camel Club, which was established by royal decree in 2017 in order to promote Saudi Arabia’s culture, history and heritage, particularly the significance of the camel in Saudi society. The Empty Quarter, or Rub al Khali in Arabic, is about 650,000 km2 in size and thus occupies an enormous portion of the kingdom (about 30%!). Most previous expeditions into this vast sea of sand have only gone part-way into the desert or touched the fringes of it. Only a handful of successful crossings by camel caravan have been documented so far, most notably the expedition by Bertram Thomas and St. John Philby in the 1930s and several journeys by fellow Englishman Wilfred Thesiger in the late 1940s. The Rakayib Camel Caravan was slated to be the third, although several other expeditions are listed on Wikipedia. Regardless, this journey was undoubtedly going to be a huge source of national pride for the Saudi Camel Club, the Saudi government, and all people involved.
The project was basically meant as a vehicle to promote tourism and showcase Saudi Arabia to the world. “We are open for business” was the message. The idea was that a big group of Saudis and foreigners crossing the world’s largest sand desert would garner enough publicity to tell the world about the winds of change that are currently transforming the kingdom. A PR campaign documented by a group of instagramers, influencers and journalists. Among the participants most of us didn’t care much about the media attention – it was the price to pay for a once in a lifetime opportunity to cross the biggest sand desert by camel. After all, it was fully organized from start to finish and hardly cost us a penny to participate.
In the run-up to the caravan a website and social media accounts were set up to promote Rakayib and invite adventurers from Saudi Arabia and around the world to participate. This was all done rather haphazardly and on an extremely tight timeline. Most people who ended up joining the caravan found out about it only a couple of weeks or less before it kicked off, which meant there was very little room for last-minute changes and cancellations. In the end we were 81 participants instead of the planned 100, enough for the project to go ahead and certainly a good size group. The 18 international guests were due to meet in Riyadh on February 19, then travel to the starting point at Ubar in the far south of Saudi Arabia right by the Yemeni border. This is where we met our Saudi fellow adventurers to go through a two-day preparatory camp. Official kick off of the caravan was February 24 and we crossed the finish line in Yabrin near Riyadh on March 19 – four days earlier than originally scheduled.