Shaybah

Wow! It's no wonder people at this reunion say over and over that Shaybah was the highlight of their experience in Saudi! Shaybah was unbelievable for so many reasons.

Background on the area is that oil (and LOTS of it) was discovered in Shaybah in the 1960s but it's located in the middle of the Rub al Khali desert with nothing around it, so it remained pretty untapped until recently. This Aramco "town" they built is a true miracle of modern man's power.

Basically, they cleared millions and millions of tons of sand out of the way and built an airstrip out there and then built an oil and gas processing plant in the middle of the huge (1000 foot) red sand dunes. It's 500 miles to the nearest town and the most inhospitable terrain in the world. That's why it's called "The Empty Quarter".

We took a bus to the (private) Aramco airport in Dammam, then took an Aramco plane to Shaybah. I had no idea how nice and luxurious their planes were! Wow! An hour flight and we touched down on a runway with towering red dunes on all sides of us.

They have built an oasis in the middle of nowhere - litterally. It was very, very hot there - much warmer than Dhahran, so I can only imagine how hot it gets in the summer. A sense of claustrophobia kicked in..... knowing I was pretty much surrounded by an environment I would not last long in.

We drove around the HUGE oil processing plants... called GOSPs - Gas and oil separation plants. There are several of them and they are building more.

Apparently, very few people live there full time, and most everyone who goes there is male... even the restrooms were unmarked as mens and womens.

Most people work there and fly home at the end of the day, and if they're really unfortunate, only on weekends.

At the end of our trip we were set free to run up and down the huge red sand dunes. Most of us collected sand to bring home and it looked just like paprika! Just an amazing experience. I wondered how on earth they manage to keep the shifting dunes from engulfing everything, but Shaybah is a miracle of modern man... reminding my that very little is truly impossible.