An Abu Dhabi desert safari was definitely one of the more exciting ways to start the day in the capital city of the United Arab Emirates.
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“I think this driver is really trying to push it to the limits.”
I think that Andre had a point. I was near hysterical with laughter and Rachel was completely white in pallor, her knuckles an equally pale shade as they gripped on to anything within reaching distance. The edge of the seat of the car, the door handles, her bag. Sand erupted along the left side of the jeep as we skidded down a steep dune before the vehicle levelled out, then plummeted over the crest of the next dune with zero-gravity dragging our stomachs along somewhere behind us. It wasn’t even 7am. What a way to start the day.
What time does an Abu Dhabi sunrise desert safari start? Early, that’s when.
In fact, my day had begun at 3am with the pinging chimes of my phone’s alarm, so that we were ready to depart the ship and climb into one of a fleet of jeeps at around 4am. We waited with a gaggle of bleary-eyed passengers and a scout from the ship who we had seen around but hadn’t yet met in person. The scout’s name tag read ‘Andre.’ I had never once seen him crack a smile, and he held himself in a mildly depleted manner, although in fairness 4am is not the best time to meet someone properly for the first time. I had a strangely positive feeling about this guy.
“I think he either hates his job with a passion and is overcome with misery; or he’s secretly hilarious.” I side-mouthed to Rachel.
She agreed. “In a dry, sarcastic, but secretly loves-it-when-he-says-something-funny way. Yes. I hope so.”
We left the ship as a group; passports stamped at border control and then onwards through the pristine air-conditioned Abu Dhabi cruise terminal. A gigantic portrait of the Sheikh hung above the gift shops, gazing down at us with one discerning eyebrow raised, and banners dangled from the ceiling. One single banner fluttered mysteriously whilst the rest of them remained completely still. “Oh look, that one’s haunted.” I remarked, causing Rachel to almost die from laughter.
The over tiredness had kicked in from the second we woke up, causing us both to find most things side-splittingly funny. The other tour-goers were a very sombre lot, probably due in part to the fact that it wasn’t even dawn yet, and we were mildly concerned that they’d start to suspect we were drunk. We definitely weren’t.
From Abu Dhabi to the Al Khatim Desert
In the car park, the shiny white jeeps were waiting for us. Andre the scout had placed Rachel and I into a group with him and one passenger travelling alone; a man in his early sixties. We let the passenger into the front seat and then climbed into the middle, with Andre sitting in the back. Andre looked as if he would much rather be literally anywhere else in the entire road, than sharing a desert safari in the UAE with us.
For the beginning of the journey we remained quiet, driving through Abu Dhabi’s quiet roads in the darkness. Past majestic skyscrapers reflecting the twinkling light strings hanging from palm trees on the waterfront. Further out, cruising past the onion shape domes of the Sheikh Zayed Mosque, lit up resplendently like a royal beacon. All the other cars on the road were very big and very shiny. Actually, most things in the United Arab Emirates are very big and very shiny. That’s just their style round here.
My eyes were stinging slightly just from the simple act of waking up, and eventually the neon lights of the city subsided and we were out into darker territory. I’ve been into deserts a few times before; through the dry expanse of New Mexico and Texas, and across the red wilderness of Wadi Rum in Jordan. They both felt like rugged, otherworldly places where humans shouldn’t normally be. The feeling as we neared this desert was somehow different.
Preparing the cars for the desert
We turned off of the main road after passing a garage, and carried on past a wire fence, along a dirt track which eventually gave way to sand. Before long, the jeeps all rattled to a stop, headlights lighting up the sand in white. We stayed inside our cars while the drivers got out and began working on each car’s tyres. Normal tyres aren’t so good for driving on sand; they needed to change the air pressure so that we wouldn’t grind to a halt and sink in the dunes, or bounce off of them and roll over.
“I hope they know what they are doing.” Andre remarked, peering out of the window at our driver, who was examining one wheel very closely.
“Why would they not know what they’re doing!? Oh my god.”
A few minutes later, we were off, like a tiny posse of beetles scooting across the desert floor. The headlights were our eyes glowing in the dark as we whizzed forth in tandem. Before long we’d left the path completely and were onto steep rolling dunes which we tumbled over and up and down with no idea where exactly we were heading other than into the desert. Rolling around the curve of one sandy hillock, our headlights flashed across the shapes of two camels standing upright in silence. Back around we went, slowing down to see that it was a mother and baby, both staring into the darkness, completely unbothered by the parade of jeeps whizzing around.
I wondered if we had really just stumbled across this duo by chance; or if the drivers already knew where to head. Call me cynical, but could they have even been planted there for our benefit!? That’s the thing about tourism; sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s real and what is set up like a magician’s illusion. At times we could even see the eery glow of light pollution from the city on the horizon, so how far out into the desert could we really have been?
Climbing the sand dunes
Light pollution aside, the sun was still asleep when all the jeeps came to another standstill, this time in a straight line side by side. The drivers got out in silence and after a while, we realised we should probably get out as well. Most of the other passengers stayed close to their corresponding vehicles, not quite sure of what they should actually be doing. To clarify, we were not 100% sure what we should be doing, either, but when it dawned on us that we would be staying in this spot for the foreseeable future, we decided to branch out and climb to the top of the highest sand dune we could find.
Climbing to the top of a sand dune, it turns out, is no mean feat. The sand shifts from beneath your feet with every step, pouring back down the slope again and threatening to take you with it. It was altogether a hilarious experience, and after slightly too long we reached the top. The inky black sky had turned into more of a smudgey colour, and down below we could make out the silhouettes of the other passengers standing by the cars.
“They look they’re having a great time,” we remarked.
We had decided to trek across the dunes because we wanted to get the most out of this experience and standing by a jeep for 45 minutes just didn’t seem like the best way to do that. However, Rachel decided to take it one stop further by attempting to roll down a sand dune, a decision which I wholeheartedly supported but was also terrified to try myself. Those dunes are steep old fellows. Turns out I had nothing to worry about, and Rachel didn’t make it that far downhill before coming to a halt and deciding it might be best to stick to the top after all.
“Doesn’t matter! We are the real fun ones! I can’t believe they just paid €130 to stand next to a jeep in darkness!” Andre cackled, gesturing to the majority of our fellow passengers below. He was really starting to come out of his shell.
“Let’s look for some camels.”
We navigated our way across the ridges of sand and up and down slopes as it shifted again and again with us. In a dip in the distance we could make out a collection of dark shapes huddled together. Could this be the elusive herd of camels we were searching for?? “IS IT CAMELS!?” Rachel asked aloud.
But upon closer inspection I deduced- “I think it’s bushes.”
It was indeed bushes. Alas. I didn’t realise that bushes could actually grow in this type of desert, where the actual earth must be miles beneath your feet, covered by tonnes and tonnes of fine granules of sand. But these very dark, scrubby-looking bushes were indeed growing here in the desert; I spent a lot of the way back to the ship later wondering how deep their roots were and whether they ever just got blown away when a dune vanished in a sandstorm.
Sunrise over the Abu Dhabi desert
The smudge grey was turning into more of a smokey mauve as we turned away from the camel-bushes and headed up onto another dune in the opposite direction. We sat at the top talking and watched the pale yellow circle of the sun float gradually and peacefully over the horizon, creating a glowing pink stripe either side of it in the cracks in the clouds. This wasn’t the glorious riot of colour that I’d had in mind, but it was still beautiful. As light crept over our surroundings, we could see the dark outlines of trees dotted here and there across the white dunes, power lines crossing the space, and the swirling tracks of the jeeps which looked like a life-size zen garden in the sand. In the far distance behind us we could just make out the skyline of Abu Dhabi, reflecting the morning sun.
Although we were technically in the Al Khatim Desert, we really weren’t that far into the wilderness at all.
The Abu Dhabi desert safari
“Time to go!! Yallah!! Yallah!!”
The drivers broke the silence as I tipped a small beach out of each of my shoes. We were quite far away by this point, and our driver got impatient and decided to drive up to us instead of dilly-dallying any more. We apologetically got into the jeep, and off he took us, turning on some European music to keep us all happy.
“Do you have any of your music we can listen to?”
“My music? Emirati?? Arabic??”
“Yeah! Please!?”
Only too happy to appease, the driver put on some kind of Arabic rap a split second before the convoy of jeeps queued one behind the other at the top of the steepest dune yet. One by one each vehicle vanished over the top, and then it was our turn. All I could see in front was a wall of sand, as we sped almost vertically down the steepest gradient I’d ever encountered. This was mental. Rachel was panic-screaming, I was panic-hysterically-laughing, and Andre was clinging on for dear life and staring fixedly ahead with wincing eyes and a Cheshire-cat grin.
The way there had been fairly hair-raising, but as it had been under cover of darkness we weren’t completely sure of what was going on. In daylight, it was a whole different story. Tidal waves of sand were flung up on either side of us as we rounded invisible corners and slid at all slopes and angles over the sand. I was terrified, but loving every second.
“Oh my god oh my god oh my god!” Rachel exclaimed.
“Andre are you having fun?” I asked.
“It is a little more than I expected.” He confessed nervously. “I think this driver is really trying to push the limits.”
With that Rachel and I both burst out into even more hysterical laughter. What a time to be alive.
A short history of camels in Abu Dhabi
The speed decreased and the terrain levelled out. Again we pulled to a stop, and we realised that it didn’t matter that we hadn’t stumbled upon any more camels in the desert; we had arrived at a camel farm.
Wire fences surrounded groups of camels towering majestically above us, elegant eyelashes batting over their glossy black eyes. I know they’ve got kind of dodgy teeth, and knobbly knees, but there’s something quite beautiful about camels I’ve always thought. In an unconventional way.
Like gap-toothed catwalk models staring back from the cover of Vogue.
Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks so. Camel beauty contests are incredibly popular across the Arab world, and annually almost 40,000 female camels (the male ones are a bit too aggressive), rock up to the UAE’s Al Dhafra Festival to compete for the top prizes. These contests have happened for centuries, although it’s a tradition which has been revived fairly recently in the United Arab Emirates, which only became a country in 1971. Camels must walk elegantly, have long slender necks, nice sized humps, wooly coats and perfectly drooped lips to rank highly.
Of course, it’s the owners who are the real winners, not the animals. And as the prizes have got sizeably bigger there’s been a big crackdown on cosmetic procedures for competing camels. Some owners were injecting silicon into camels’ humps and botox into their lips to get a closer shot at the top spots.
Camels are no longer really needed for their original main purpose of transporting their owners across the desert, so as well as competing in beauty pageants, camels are also renowned for being top racing animals; camel racing is the UAE’s top sport. And aside from the gloss and glamour of beauty queens and super-racers? Camel meat is a delicacy which is often served at important occasions like Eid, and camel milk is drunk and used to make products like chocolate as well.
The camel farmers sat nearby and watched as we said hello to the creatures behind their barbed wire fences. There were a few babies sitting with their mums, and one rather poorly looking young chap sat in a much smaller pen than the others, bleating sadly. I’ll be honest; it was hard to tell whether the camels were well-looked after or not, because I have no idea about what it takes to care for a camel.
Dates and coffee
We made it back into the cars and travelled a bit further along, to the petrol station we had passed earlier on. We pulled into the car park and were offered complimentary tea or coffee from the back of a truck. I was very grateful; I had felt fairly awake but the tiredness was creeping back in and I was also starving, so I took the handful of dates I was offered as well. They were delicious. We stood like a group of shell-shocked penguins in the cool air; I was shivering mildly and had lost the ability to hold a conversation out of over-tiredness.
An army vehicle pulled up on the forecourt opposite us and I watched over the steam of my coffee as one of the two men got out to go and grab a snack from inside the garage, taking his massive gun with him. The United Arab Emirates is a fascinating place.
Tips for a sunrise Abu Dhabi desert safari
What should you wear on a desert safari in Abu Dhabi?
For starters, wherever you go in Abu Dhabi, dress conservatively. Hot pants, and to be honest, shorts of any kind- for women, especially- are a big no. Long sleeves are a must, as are covered-up cleavages. The higher the neck, the better. As we were visiting in January, the climate during the day was similar to being in the Canary Islands– springlike and very bearable.
So I chose to wear layers: a long, long sleeved dress, with a jacket over the top. I wouldn’t recommend sandals to anyone visiting the desert in Abu Dhabi; they’re just not practical when the ground moves so often from beneath you. I wore my trusty Vans, which worked fine although they filled up with sand quickly. Rachel wore jeans and a long sleeved top, with a jacket. For that temperature, our outfits were downright marvellous. (Although it’s true that I was shivering by the time we got to the coffee-drinking portion of the morning.)
How long is an Abu Dhabi desert safari?
Most desert tours, regardless of which company you go with, take about four or five hours and will normally pick you up and drop you off at your hotel. Our tour officially began at 4.30am, and we were back in time for breakfast at around 9am.
How much does an Abu Dhabi desert safari cost?
This depends on what time of day you go, how long you want the tour to last, and which company you book with, but a desert jeep tour in Abu Dhabi will cost anywhere from around €35-€90. Add-ons include dune surfing, camel riding or breakfast or dinner in the desert- but we stuck with the basics. If you’re visiting Abu Dhabi on a cruise ship and book a tour with your cruise operator, bear in mind that the price will be higher than if you book yourself.
Book an Abu Dhabi desert safari
This is a sunrise Abu Dhabi desert safari bookable through Viator, which also includes camel riding in the desert. The tour is consistently highly rated and the benefit of booking through Viator is that if you change your mind you can cancel for free.
And if you don’t fancy a pre-crack-of-dawn wake up call, you could always book a desert safari in the evening. See sunset over the desert, enjoy a traditional show, and a desert dinner on this tour.
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