“Let’s see what the Empty Quarter has in store for us, because every time I hear something worse,” Cristina Gutiérrez told Mundo Deportivo. “When you tell the Saudis you’re going into the ‘Empty Quarter’, they all look shocked and grumpy,” he added. This is just one example of the many opinions heard in the Dakar bivouac in the days before stages 10, 11 and 12, days marked in everyone’s calendar due to the arrival of the Dakar caravan in the dreaded ‘Empty Quarter’ , translation to English of his real name: Rub ‘al Khali, that is, the ‘Empty Room’.
Your name is no accident. It is a territory with such extreme conditions, where summer temperatures can reach up to 55ºC during the day and temperatures of 0 degrees at night and is very wide, with about 1,000 km in length and 500 km in wide, which is said to have no life in it. These days, the Saudi part of this desert, which extends its borders to Yemen, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, will have the participants of the Dakar Rally as great guests. Cars from the toughest race in the world have entered the 2020 Marathon stage, a fast round trip from Haradh to Shubaytah. But this time, Dakar has fully entered the lion’s den, in the middle of a land capable of losing sleep for the most experienced explorers.
No wonder the Saudis look worried. The stories told about him are not very positive. This is how the only one completely immersed in this desert, the leader of the general classification and current Dakar champion, Nasser Al-Attiyah, remembers it.
“It’s difficult. When you have to go to the ‘Empty Quarter’, you always have to go with a large group of people. A single car cannot enter here, because it is very difficult to get out of here, almost impossible. you can die. Without fuel, because the sand is almost a thousand kilometers from end to end. To travel 1,000 kilometers you need two or three days. The dunes are slow, difficult, and you have to be a good pilot, have a very good strategy -navigate so as not to get lost, because there are no signs or references visible, they are just dunes. There is nothing. No point of reference”, explained the Qatari to MD. And this is that if he enters the Rub ‘al Khali alone, he has many ballots of being stranded on a dune and dying in the sun, due to pure dehydration.
“Some entered and did not leave, died. If you go to Youtube or search the Internet, you will find it”, the Toyota driver pointed out. We listened to him. He is right. We saw, for example, the case of a Qatari couple who were found dead in 2013, separately, in the middle of the Saudi area of the ‘Empty Quarter’. Security forces from the Ministry of the Interior found the couple’s car with a woman’s body inside. They conducted a search in a radius of 10 km and also found the body of the husband. What happened to them was that their car overturned in the sand. The man went out to ask for help. But he found himself in the middle of a trap. No one for thousands of kilometers. Both died of dehydration under the strong sun. . Underground lies one of the richest oil deposits in the world. On the contrary, water is more than scarce, less than 0.032 liters of water in a whole year.
The ‘Rub Al-Khali’ or ‘Empty Quarter’, with an area of 650,000 square kilometers, is no less than one of the largest sand deserts in the world, the largest disturbed desert on the planet, and covers most of the lower part. third part of the Arabian peninsula. In it, there are dunes that are very complex and there may be dunes that reach 300 meters.
In stage 10 this Wednesday, the pilots will have an appetizer of what they will see in two parts of the marathon stage (11 and 12), in the middle of nowhere in the Empty Quarter, with kilometers and kilometers of dry lakes followed by chain of sand that can be short, or tens of kilometers.
It is a dangerous place for the locals. They are afraid of him. So you need to have a special permit to explore this desert in depth, or settle for exploring the paths that are at the extremes of this place full of mysteries. One of the most famous is that in the middle of this desert is the lost city of Ubar, which is referred to as the city of towers in the Koran and which also appears as one of the enchanted cities of The Thousand and One Nights. Lawrence of Arabia called it “the Atlantis of the sands”, a city full of wealth, founded in 3,000 BC and becoming the capital of the desert incense trade route. They say it ended up being buried by the sands of the Rub al-Khali until it disappeared completely. Competitors wear scout hats. They face one of the most feared corners of the planet. They went in search of Dakar glory.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Rose Herman and I work as an author for Today Times Live. My expertise lies in writing about sports, a passion of mine that has been with me since childhood. As part of my job, I provide comprehensive coverage on everything from football to tennis to golf.
