The Empty Quarter: The Bab Al Shams & Banyan Tree Al Wadi

The UAE has some amazing desert resorts. Unfortunately, I didn't see any while I was there in April. Mostly, I want to go because I think the hotels would be beautiful and unique. I also want to go because the open desert holds a mystic for me that is complicated to describe. Check out the two hotel sites below, and then, if you have time and patience, you might consider wading through the novel underneath them. 

The Bab Al Shams Resort

Banyan Tree Al Wadi Resort

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When I was young my dad used to rent a VHS machine and a couple of tapes on special occasions. One birthday he brought home a copy of The Neverending Story.

Recap: Kid loses mother, wanders into a bookshop, steals a "dangerous" book, and is transported into a fantasy land where an anemic childlike empress and her universe are consumed by evil force referred to as  "The Nothing."  Kid rescues everything by giving empress a new name and living out a fantasy life from wishes she grants including chasing down school bullies on Falkor, the plush pink comic-relief dragon.

I stayed awake that night trying to wrap my 5 year old mind around "The Nothing." I imagined a big shadowy force erasing the everything in the Universe, maybe even erasing me in my bed.

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Our tour group rolled off into the desert one afternoon in white Toyota Land Cruisers.  When we hit sand our drivers exited the vehicles, let most of the air out of the cars' tires, and then began riding the ridges of dunes at astonishing speeds and with rollover-defying angles. The car ahead of the one in which I was riding miscalculated a dune and bottomed-out, burying his back tires in the red, mealy sand.

We stood atop a dune and watched the drivers argue over the best method to retrieve the car.  A tow rope was produced, and the the Land Cruiser quickly extracted.

As we drove back into glittering Dubai I contemplated the harshness the desert. Edward Abbey, in his book Desert Solitaire,  contends that everything about the desert is hostile to life. Basically, the desert is trying to kill you. If you are caught unprepared, alone and without a tow rope, you will die.

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I keep hearing the locals using the term "The Empty Quarter," when referring to the desert beyond the cities of Dubai or Abu Dhabi. 

Our Belgian tour guide, who has lived in Dubai for 10 years, explains how Sheik Zayed's family, the founding father of the UAE, came from a small oasis in The Empty Quarter called Al Ain. For millennia, his ancestors lived a harsh existence fighting over a rare source of sweet water.

When the oil money began flowing in after 1971, Sheik Zayed started building cities and military installations in the Empty Quarter, just because he could.  These days, to keep these installations alive,  desalinated ocean water must be trucked in from plants along the coast.

In a similarly defiant project against the open desert, Sheik Zayed planted millions of trees fed by untold miles of drip irrigation lines.  We look to our left and right. The freeway between Dubai and Abu Dhabi is lined with fenced-in swaths of forest. (Roaming camels found the new greenery rather delicious).

Was Zayed simply a dictatorial maniac to take on the ever-expanding desert, attempting to prove that he was more powerful than the God of nature? Perhaps.  But he may also have seen it as an enormous humanitarian project, to remove the fear and threat of the hostile Empty Quarter that had afflicted his family for as long as anyone could remember.

But there's an irony here. The money to build cities, to plant trees, and to desalinate the water that supports them all comes from the oil reserves found primarily in the Empty Quarter.

The Empty Quarter is not so empty after all. It is really quarter full of wealth.

The encroaching "nothingness" of the Empty Quarter the Sheik and his family feared, supplies the cash to make all the Sheik's wishes come true.

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The Never Ending Story could be interpreted as a metaphor for the never-ending struggle we mortals go through whenever we lose someone close to us.

Bastian, the main kid in the movie, has just lost his mother. The woman who created and structured his life, his home, and his paradigm, is gone. Death claimed the woman he loved most up to that point in life, and in her death he realizes is own mortality.

The Nothingness then, is death or the knowledge of death and our futility against it.

However, Death loses its grip on Bastian when he is able to give life a name and a purpose. Oedipal transference aside, Bastian finds a new hope for love and life in the young girl. He gives her a name, and then in turn she encourages him to make wishes which she will promptly fulfill.

Before he could be happy or find fulfillment, Bastian had to face the reality and inescapably of death.  

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I sense a hesitancy from our tour operators regarding the Empty Quarter. They don't want us to spend much time there. We stay for two hours max on the dune safari, and then rushed back to Dubai on a freeway.

I read the hesitancy as an implicit discomfort with the desert. Fittingly, we have a dinner appointment at the Burj Al Arab Hotel. The outside is modern and stark. Incongruently, the inside is decadantly adorned with gold, carpets and drapes. 

Minimalist decor to match the exterior of the building would be too much like the minimalist landscape of the Empty Quarter.

The decadant interior of the Burj Al Arab is a way of avoiding death, and the deadly landscape just outside the door.

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In the film Lawrence of Arabia, Prince Faisal, ruler of Arabia, rolls his eyes and the young naive Englishman, and mutters something about him being one in a long line of Englishmen to fall in love with the spell of the Arabian Desert; a spell Prince Faisal expects to quickly wear off when Lawrence discovers the violence and death found there.

Lawrence is almost killed by water disputes, heat exhaustion, thirst, and even a sodomizing Turkish official. At one point he is disturbed with how comfortable he has become with death.

Lawrence's evangelizing passion for the desert eventually compels him to becomes de facto leader of an Arabian coalition army.  The Ottoman armies do not expect any real threat to come from the The Empty Quarter wasteland.  They are caught unawares, and defeated.

Before my trip to the UAE, I had never seen the film. I bought it as soon as I got home, and spent the next four jet-lagged nights watching it.

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Why does Lawrence love the desert? Why do I love the desert?  Unlike Lawrence, I am certainly not comfortable with death. I cried for days this last February, when I found out my grandmother was about to die.

Yet I still believe that death, in a very broad sense, is what attracts me to the desert. There is a thrill to being alive in a hostile environment, provided that all life sustaining needs are adequately met.

The thrill of living on the razor's edge of life made Lawrence accomplish things not even he imagined before his sojourn in the Empty Quarter. The Desert brought out the greatness within him.

Like Lawrence, the desert makes me feel as if I have greatnes within me. And if there is greatness to be found in the desert, why not be great in a well-apointed  king bed and private plunge pool?