Empty quarter

Brave or stupid, call us what you want, but we set off and found the road that we wanted to the Empty Quarter.  You can take an easy option and go on the tar roads all the way down the side of the UAE border, or you can do it the hard way - like us - and go off road. As we all know very well, the desert is not something to be taken lightly. Precautions were taken... We bought new fashion flat plastic jerry cans for extra fuel, we took extra water and we took a bit of extra food just in case of a breakdown. Our normal gear always includes some recovery stuff, a multi purpose little spade and our camping must-haves.  We try to keep it as light as possible simply because when it comes to off-roading you don't need a lot of stuff making noise and hopping around behind you and it is much easier to set up camp every night when you have less to unload after a hard day's travel. Going to the Empty Quarter is hard travelling and to boot, Summer all of a sudden showed up and it was a whopping 42 degrees when we hit the road late on a Thursday afternoon, 2 weekends ago. (Time flies!)
We do not purposely get lost, but sometimes we are let down by the maps we could find over here in KSA. The last update must have been done before all the new roads were built and sure as God made little green apples it does not include a 10th of all the tracks all over the place. To be fair, these would be impossible to map because they only exist untill the next sandstorm obliterates them. So we can try and map our route for people to follow, for our own records and also if we wanted to follow the same route again, but even Garmin has lost the plot here. The best part of getting lost - or as we prefer to call it: taking the scenic route - is the scenery that you so unexpectedly rock and roll into. The best way to describe the Empty Quarter is to say that it is shit scary awfully awesome and EMPTY.  No people for literally hundreds of kilometres, no animal life except for a few lizards and insects, no roads and eventually you also run out of tracks to follow, no water, no fuel stations, no phone reception.  Our turning point came when the GPS also started to malfunction.  Even for people with lion hearts, one has to be wise enough to know this is it, this is NOT a place to go to when you have no back-up. 
The bits that we have seen however, were spectacular and left us wanting more. The dunes are just astounding.  The silence at night drones like an old generator.  There is a sense of absolute peace and a strange freedom to standing on a massive dune, looking out and just seeing the reds, yellows, ockers, silvers, blacks and whites that make up this tumultuous landscape. Silver stones form lakes at the feet of 250m high dunes. Black lava rocks are scattered evenly, like somebody took a giant pepper grinder and twisted it all over the show.  Wow, it would be a brilliant place to have a rock concert!  Even though the days were hot hot, the nights cooled down quite a lot, which was very pleasant. And then you have the stars, silvery moon and just about the best sunrise you can imagine...
Yes, we want to go again!!
As a point of reference, our piece of the Empty Quarter was between Harad and Shaybah, a part of the desert that is called Al Jafurah. Next time we will go to Al Layla and do the AD dahna part, but hopefully with other bravehearts tagging along.