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Living Life in the Digital Age - Living Life with Technology past, present and future. Find me at https://www.lifeat100Mhz.com - Produced by Dave Bunyard - earthdrifter@gmail.com Cover Photo: Charles Sharp Crawford in a Cole car at the Indianapolis speedway in 1910.
This is Dave Bunyard, and in this episode of Life at 100 MHz, we are on a deep dive into a seven day trip into the Northern Hejaz region of Saudi Arabia. The Hejaz railway once went from Damascus, Syria down to Medina, Saudi Arabia. It was intended to go all the way down to Mecca in order to enable Islamic pilgrims to shorten the traveling time from twenty days to five days to perform the Hajj. Unfortunately, the Turks had decided to use it to transport military troops to infiltrate Saudi Arabia. Lawrence of Arabia was part of the British military during World War one and fought the Turks and attacked several trains along this railway.
Dave Bunyard:You can find my Saudi Arabian travels with many photos in a downloadable PDF from etsy.com. Just look up earth drifting Saudi Arabia. I hope you enjoy this.
Delilah:Imagine fighting the steering wheel of this this tiny, totally underpowered Suzuki Vitara.
Sam:Oh, man.
Delilah:Right? You're in a scorching, just utterly desolate wasteland. Your tires are spinning. The engine is overheating. And then you finally, you manage to crest this massive 60 foot sand dune.
Sam:And what's waiting on the other side?
Delilah:Suddenly, you're staring down at a rusted, ghost like steam locomotive just lying on its side, resting in the exact spot where Lawrence of Arabia derailed it with explosives like eighty years ago.
Sam:Wow.
Delilah:Yeah. There's no climate controlled museum, no velvet ropes to hold you back, no tour guides or or ticket booths. Right. You are just looking at the rotting carcass of a dead empire, and it's slowly being swallowed by the endless sand.
Sam:I mean, that image really captures the raw, unfiltered reality of the Northern Hejaz region in Saudi Arabia.
Delilah:Totally.
Sam:Because, you know, we're so used to interacting with history in this highly curated, sanitized way.
Delilah:Plaque readings and audio tours.
Sam:Exactly. We expect the audio tours. So finding a literal war zone that's perfectly preserved just by its extreme isolation, it forces complete recalculation of how we understand the passage of time.
Delilah:It really does. So welcome to today's deep dive. We are transporting you back to January 1999.
Sam:A very different world back then.
Delilah:Fairy. It's the middle of the Eid al Fitr holiday, and you were basically riding shotgun on a grueling, deeply serendipitous, seven day off road, four wheel drive expedition.
Sam:Sounds intense.
Delilah:Oh, it is. The mission today is to trace the forgotten path of the old Turkish Hejaz Railway. But the underlying narrative here is much bigger than just old trains. We're gonna look at the tension between preservation and progress and how the deep desert acts as this ultimate unforgiving equalizer.
Sam:Mhmm.
Delilah:Okay. Let's unpack this. Our source material gives us a fascinating trio of explorers. There's the author, who is bravely navigating this punishing terrain in that little Suzuki. Then there's Jackie, an Irish nurse who's providing medical backup, and her boyfriend Craig who is a deeply experienced global adventurer equipped with, like, complex satellite gear.
Sam:And the contrast between where they begin and where they end up is just jarring. I mean, they depart from Jeddah on a massive, modern three lane highway.
Delilah:Yeah, totally paved and normal.
Sam:Exactly. The author actually notes that the initial landscape feels deceptively familiar. He says it resembles those long flat drives across Texas or Nevada, you know, huge skies, rolling hills, very few trees.
Delilah:Right. It kind of, it lulls you into this false sense of security.
Sam:Yes. That modern infrastructure totally tricks you, But the moment their tires leave that main asphalt artery, the modern era simply evaporates.
Delilah:Just gone.
Sam:Gone. They enter a blank spot on the map where you can drive for hundreds of miles without seeing a single patch of pavement.
Delilah:And as soon as they drop off that highway, the environment shifts into this massive, uncurated historical layer cake.
Sam:Oh, I love that analogy.
Delilah:Right. Just outside the city of Medina, they encounter their first major piece of infrastructure, a Turkish railway fort. And this isn't just a quaint little ticket station.
Sam:No, definitely not.
Delilah:This is a heavy stone fortification designed to hold 25 armed men, complete with a massive water tower. And the Turks built these forts precisely 20 kilometers apart along the entire length of the railway line.
Sam:And the underlying mechanics of that 20 kilometer spacing are, they're crucial to understand. Steam locomotives of that era required massive amounts of fresh water to generate power. And in a deeply hostile desert environment, you can't simply hope to find a river. The Turks had to engineer a reliable logistical tether, basically creating an artificial water supply chain. Exactly.
Sam:Those forts weren't just military outposts, they were the absolute lifeblood of the engines. If a train left one fort, telegraph operators would signal the next one down the line. System. Yep. And if the train didn't arrive within ten to fifteen minutes of the expected time, the garrison instantly assumed a Bedouin ambush and mobilized because the local Bedouin tribes viewed the railway as an existential threat to their camel caravan economy so they fiercely attacked it.
Delilah:And Lawrence of Arabia understood that logistical tether perfectly.
Sam:I see.
Delilah:He didn't just attack the trains, he attacked the math. By targeting those specific water stops and blowing up the isolated engines between them, he weaponized the geography against the empire.
Sam:It was brilliant, really.
Delilah:But the historical layers in this region go much deeper than just the twentieth century. Like, driving further north, they encounter the Kaibar Dam.
Sam:Oh, yeah. This is wild.
Delilah:Local legend claims claims it was built by the Queen of Sheba. Now we can't verify that obviously, but estimates put this massive half broken stone structure at around 2,000 years old.
Sam:2,000 years, just sitting there.
Delilah:Just sitting there. Right near the old ghost town Khaybar which is this abandoned settlement of mud and stone buildings slowly collapsing under the sun.
Sam:And the crown jewel of that ghost town is the Acropolis.
Delilah:Yeah, tell us about that.
Sam:Well, at first glance, the author notes it looks like nothing more than a natural sloping hill with a ruined building on top. But closer inspection reveals a brilliant feat of ancient military architecture.
Delilah:It's crazy when they realize what actually is.
Sam:Right. It's an old Jewish fortress and the builders deliberately slathered the exterior stone walls with thick layers of mud. They were consciously camouflaging the structure to mimic the surrounding natural topography.
Delilah:Think about the tactical genius of that In a flat, arid landscape, any vertical military wall is a glaring target silhouetted against the bright horizon.
Sam:It sticks out like a sore thumb.
Delilah:Exactly. By sloping the mud to look like a naturally occurring hill, they manipulated the visual geography. So an invading force marching across the plains wouldn't even realize they were looking at a hardened military installation until arrows were already raining down on them from the summit.
Sam:It's it's incredible defensive engineering.
Delilah:It really is. But I have to admit some confusion when reading the sources. Like, why is an incredibly complex 2,000 year old camouflaged fortress and a massive ancient dam just sitting there totally abandoned to the elements? Where are the archaeologists?
Sam:Well, the geopolitical context of the late 1990s explains that absence perfectly. In 1999, Saudi Arabia was essentially closed off to casual international tourism.
Delilah:Right. You couldn't just book a vacation there.
Sam:No, not at all. Furthermore, the cultural and governmental approach to historical preservation was vastly different from what you might find in say Western Europe. Pre Islamic history was often not prioritized or converted into massive commercial enterprises.
Delilah:So no gift shops?
Sam:Exactly. Because there was no state sponsored tourism infrastructure actively packaging these sites for consumption, the entire northern region functioned as this unintentional paradise for accidental explorers. The lack of attention is precisely what kept these structures intact.
Delilah:That brings up a fascinating dynamic. While the desert acts as a perfect preserver of dead stone ruins, it also forces ancient living traditions to collide heavily with the modern world.
Sam:Yes, definitely.
Delilah:We see this play out when the expedition rolls into the town of Taimah. They stop to see the Bir Haddaj, well, a massive water source that is 2,500 years old. Taimah is actually mentioned as Tema in the biblical book of Isaiah.
Sam:Which is just it's mind blowing history.
Delilah:But what makes this stop so striking is the timing, because they're traveling right in the middle of Eid al Fit.
Sam:And that timing is everything. Eid al Fitr is the major Islamic holiday celebrating the end of Ramadan, which is a rigorous month of fasting from dawn until sunset.
Delilah:So everyone is ready to celebrate.
Sam:Exactly. The atmosphere in a town like Taima during Eid is electric. It's a period of intense celebration, feasting, and community. The author compares it to Westerners buying brand new suits for Easter Sunday. The young Saudi men are all walking around in pristine, sparkling white throbes.
Delilah:And despite the heavy language barrier, these young men in their pristine holiday clothes immediately approach the dusty exhausted travelers and offer them a free enthusiastic tour of the ancient well.
Sam:Such a great moment.
Delilah:It's an incredible display of warmth. But shortly after, they experience the intense friction of those living traditions because they're approached by a local chieftain wearing heavy black robes.
Sam:Right.
Delilah:He generously invites the crew over to his home for tea and offers them the use of his telephone. And Craig, the seasoned expedition leader, flat out refuses.
Sam:He just says no.
Delilah:He politely declines and they immediately drive away. To a casual listener, turning down a warm cup of tea after days in the desert sounds incredibly rude.
Sam:Well viewed through the lens of desert survival, Craig's refusal is actually a highly calculated necessary maneuver. How so? In traditional Bedouin culture, hospitality is not merely a polite gesture, it is an evolutionary survival mandate. In an environment where denying shelter to a traveler literally means sentencing them to death by exposure, extreme hospitality developed into an unbreakable socioeconomic law.
Delilah:So it's not just come have a quick drink.
Sam:Exactly. If the crew had accepted that single cup of tea, the cultural rules of the region would have compelled the chieftain to escalate the offering into a massive obligatory slaughtered lamb feast.
Delilah:Which sounds delicious honestly.
Sam:It does.
Delilah:But it would have completely derailed their momentum. Participating in that feast would have cost them an entire day of travel. Craig recognized that they were operating on a razor thin logistical margin regarding fuel, daylight, and water.
Sam:He had to be practical.
Delilah:He had to prioritize the brutal physics of the expedition over the beautiful, but demanding local customs. So they skip the lamb feast, push further into the wilderness, and decide to explore another unused Turkish fort.
Sam:Oh, the bat fort.
Delilah:Yes. They walk down a dark stone passageway, hear high butch squealing, and realize the floor and walls are thick with bat guano. Hundreds of bats have reclaimed the empire's military outpost.
Sam:And that encounter with the bats is a perfect preamble to the environment violently asserting its dominance. Because the ultimate test of their expedition happens shortly after when they attempt to set up camp in Awadi, a dry riverbed.
Delilah:Craig
Sam:drives his heavy gear laden Toyota into the wadi and immediately sinks into deep sand. The author attempts to use the lighter Suzuki Vitara to tow the Toyota out and the Suzuki violently sinks too. Oh, no. Yeah. Both vehicles are suddenly resting with their metal frames flat against the sand, completely immobilized.
Delilah:Getting stuck in deep, powdery sand is governed by incredibly frustrating physics. It acts like a giant suffocating mattress.
Sam:That's a great way to put it.
Delilah:Because the human instinct is to apply more horsepower, you know, to floor the gas pedal and fight your way out. But in deep sand, the surface simply absorbs that kinetic energy and spits it out as a deeper hole.
Sam:You're just digging yourself deeper.
Delilah:The more you spin the tires, the faster you dig your own grave. And when you are hundreds of miles off the grid and both of your vehicles are trapped, panic is usually the default setting. So what do you do when you're off the map and your only two vehicles are immobilized?
Sam:Well, the psychological discipline required to suppress that panic is what separates a seasoned adventurer from a casualty, and Craig does not hit the gas pedal. He completely shifts tactics and attacks the physics of the surface. He pulls out a mechanical jack, but instead of placing it on the soft sand where it would instantly sink under the weight of the truck, he hunts down a large flat rock to use as a foundational base. Smart. Right.
Sam:He jacks up one single tire. Then, he and the crew physically push dense layers of sand into the empty hole beneath the suspended tire. Finally, they slide another large flat rock directly under the rubber tread.
Delilah:He essentially built a makeshift hardwood floor over the mattress. By placing the rock under the tire, he gave the vehicle a solid platform of traction to push off from when lowered, and they had to repeat this exhausting, meticulous process for three different wheels.
Sam:It took an hour and a half of grueling physical labor in the punishing heat, but it is a masterclass in off road survival. Patience, not horsepower, is the only tool that actually works in the deep desert.
Delilah:It's wild. Surviving that wadi should have reinforced their caution, you'd think. But surviving extreme danger often breeds overconfidence.
Sam:Oh, absolutely.
Delilah:Instead of retreating to the safety of the paved highway toward the city of Tabuk, Craig decides to pivot. He pulls out a hand drawn map pointing toward a remote village called Adisa. They commit to going entirely off the grid, ensuring they won't see asphalt for another 200 kilometers.
Sam:And this detour leads them into a total geographical anomaly. They're originally trying to find ancient Nabataean tombs. You know, these are the same brilliant architects who carved the breathtaking rose red city of Petra into the cliffs of Jordan.
Delilah:Incredible stuff.
Sam:But because their handwritten map relied on a literal dead tree as a crucial landmark and obviously a tree that had long since blown away or been chopped down, they miss the tombs entirely. Instead they drive straight into a massive 15 kilometer long sandstone gorge.
Delilah:And the environment inside that gorge fundamentally breaks the rules of desert travel.
Sam:It really does.
Delilah:The dry track completely disappears and the flowing creek itself becomes the only navigable road. They are forced to drive their vehicles directly up the center of the water surrounded on both sides by 10 foot high dense reeds.
Sam:It's like a different planet suddenly.
Delilah:Right. They end up making camp deep inside this wet, reedy gorge and this is where Craig brings out his heavy navigational artillery. Now keep in mind, we're talking about 1999, long before the convenience of Google Maps on a smartphone.
Sam:Oh yeah, totally different era.
Delilah:Craig fires up an early clunky GPS satellite receiver and cross references his coordinates by firelight using USGS maps. Now you might wonder why an Australian adventurer is using maps produced by the United States Geological Survey in the middle of Saudi Arabia.
Sam:Right. It seems random.
Delilah:It's because at that time, commercial topographical data for the deep desert simply did not exist. If you wanted to know the elevation of a canyon or the hidden path of a dry riverbed, your only options were highly detailed Soviet military maps or American geological surveys.
Sam:And using those military grade maps, Craig attempts to plot a cross country shortcut straight up the gorge walls to intercept the railway line early. But the geography simply refuses to cooperate.
Delilah:Nature always wins.
Sam:Yeah, the track dissolves into impassable sand, forcing them into a brutal retreat. They had to backtrack and attempt a different punishing climb up a rocky, jagged escarpment.
Delilah:The rocks on this new path are so violently pronounced in the center of the track that the author has to drive with two wheels of the Suzuki propped high up on the ridge, driving at a severe angle just to prevent the jagged stones from ripping the oil pan completely out of the undercarriage.
Sam:So stressful.
Delilah:The terrain absolutely shreds their tires. And when they finally breach the summit of this agonizing mountain, entirely isolated from civilization, Craig reacts to the extreme stress and isolation by, spontaneously stripping down and mooning the vast empty landscape.
Sam:Well, let's bypass the specifics of Craig's anatomy and focus on the profound whiplash of the timeline they are experiencing. In the span of a single afternoon, they navigate using advanced American satellite telemetry, battle an ancient flowing riverbed, conquer a punishing geological escarpment, and then immediately encounter a group of local Saudis riding camels. They hand a modern ice cold Pepsi to a Bedouin girl and pose for photographs. The collision of sentries is just dizzying.
Delilah:So what does this all mean? The whiplash is insane. One minute you're navigating satellites and the next you're handing a modern soda to someone in a landscape that hasn't changed in millennia.
Sam:What's fascinating here is how that collision becomes literal during their lunch stop shortly after. They pull the trucks off the main track, maybe 300 yards into the brush. As they are eating, the author notices small fragments of quartz scattered across the dirt. Now, quartz is geologically alien to that specific sandstone area, it didn't belong there.
Delilah:So how did it get there?
Sam:Craig starts investigating the perimeter and realizes they have parked their cars directly inside the faint circular footprint of a ruined ancient hut, and the ground around them is littered with hand carved broken quartz arrowheads. When they examine the nearby rock faces, they discover ancient petroglyphs cave drawings meticulously depicting horses and camels.
Delilah:This is the ultimate proof that in the deep desert geography dictates human movement. Without trying, without any historical maps, these modern travelers relying on combustion engines and orbiting satellites had sought shelter in the exact same spot as prehistoric nomads.
Sam:It's incredible.
Delilah:The landscape forced them into the exact same rest stop thousands of years apart.
Sam:And following those ancient geographical pathways finally brings the expedition to its primary objective, the Phantom Railway.
Delilah:Yes, the climax of the trip.
Sam:When they finally reach the outskirts of Tabuk, it takes them over an hour just to locate the entrance to the railbed. It is not advertised. It is basically a discarded piece of infrastructure.
Delilah:And driving the actual railbed is a brutal mechanical challenge. The Source rates it as a solid five out 10 on the technical off roading scale. Almost none of the iron rails or wooden sleepers remain intact.
Sam:So it's not a smooth ride?
Delilah:Not at all. The raised gravel bed is washed out by flash floods in dozens of places, forcing the drivers to constantly angle their vehicles off the steep sides of the embankment and back up again. They dodge heavy rock slides. And the sand dunes, these aren't small drifts.
Sam:No. Definitely not.
Delilah:We are talking about monolithic walls of sand towering up to 20 meters high that have simply marched across the desert floor and swallowed entire miles of the racetrack. Here's where it gets really interesting. Driving this road isn't a road trip. It feels like exploring a massive massive shipwreck.
Sam:Oh, that's a brilliant way to describe it.
Delilah:But instead of wearing scuba gear at the bottom of the ocean, you are steering a four by four down a 350 kilometer stretch of scorching desert where an empire's ambition has been left out to rust in the open air.
Sam:The artifacts they pass along the shipwreck are just staggering. They encounter another major fortification known as a Kalat. This is a formidable four turret stone castle featuring a massive internal water cistern and the decaying wooden remnants of an early windmill used to pump water from deep underground. And as they push further south toward the regions of Medan Salah and A'ulah, which by the way is the biblical city of Dedan mentioned by the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel, the geology dramatically shifts.
Delilah:The
Sam:flat plains rise into colossal, towering sandstone formations that rival the scale of Monument Valley in the American West. They even drive their tiny trucks under a gargantuan natural stone archway known locally as the Mammoth.
Delilah:And nested within that alien towering landscape, they finally find them. The physical trains, decaying iron behemoths just sitting on the tracks baking under the relentless sun, They locate the specific heavy locomotive that Lawrence of Arabia derailed, still lying exactly where it violently crashed.
Sam:Just frozen in time.
Delilah:Totally. They park near Jebel Antar, the towering mountain vantage point where Lawrence and his guerrilla fighters would sit for days, mathematically timing the speed of the approaching steam engines before launching their devastating ambushes.
Sam:And analyzing that wreckage presents a profound geopolitical irony.
Delilah:How so?
Sam:Well, the Turkish Hejaz Railway was a monumental feat of engineering. It drained massive amounts of capital and human labor to construct. It was explicitly designed to project the absolute undeniable power of a sprawling empire deep into hostile territory. Yet that billion dollar infrastructure was fundamentally crippled by a small, highly mobile group of fighters who understood how to exploit the logistical tethers of steam power. And whatever the gorillas didn't destroy, the environment quietly erased.
Delilah:Reclaimed by the desert.
Sam:Exactly. That mighty symbol of dominance was effortlessly brought to its knees by the wind in the sand.
Delilah:It is a sobering conclusion to a wild seven day expedition. To wrap up the journey, the crew survives the freezing zero degree desert nights by huddling around campfires and relying on heavy duty sleeping bags.
Sam:Because the desert gets incredibly cold at night.
Delilah:Very cold. They eventually hit the paved roads near Medina and endure the monotonous three hour drive back to Jeddah. The temperature shifts rapidly returning them to comfortable t shirt weather. And despite the utter wildness of the terrain, they note with some relief that they didn't encounter a single living snake or scorpion during the entire week, only the faint tracks of lizards in the sand.
Sam:The transition from navigating prehistoric wadis and blown up trains back to three lane highways and traffic lights is a jarring psychological return to normalcy. The illusion of predictability is immediately restored.
Delilah:But that illusion is precisely why this deep dive matters so much to you, the listener. The ultimate insight we pull from this 1999 expedition isn't just some generic platitude about getting off the beaten path to find adventure.
Sam:Right. There's a deeper lesson here.
Delilah:The real takeaway is a stark lesson in the extreme vulnerability of our infrastructure. The trucks genuinely believe they had conquered the Hejaz simply because they managed to lay a line of iron over it. But this journey proves that when you step outside the protective bubble of our cities, geography always bats last.
Sam:Geography always wins.
Delilah:The deep sand easily reclaims the heavy iron, and the modern driver, armed with GPS, ends up being funneled into the exact same quartz littered rest stop as the prehistoric nomad.
Sam:It really shatters the arrogance of modern engineering, and that provides a compelling final thought to leave you with.
Delilah:Let's hear it.
Sam:We just traced the skeleton of a mighty railway engineered by a vast empire and attacked by historical legends only to see it effortlessly swallowed by 20 meter dunes in mere decades. When you look out your window today at our massive highways, our sprawling electrical grids, and our towering concrete cities.
Delilah:Wait, I mean when you look at all of that, which of those seemingly permanent monuments to our progress will just be curious, rusted waypoints for off road explorers from now. It's just another buried layer in the cake. We'll see you next time on the deep dive.
Dave Bunyard:You can get the 150 page downloadable photo book on etsy.com. Just search for earth drifting Saudi Arabia. You can also see some of the video from this trip on youtube.com/@davebunyard233one. The railway bed didn't get buried in the sand. The rails were just taken up and recycled.
Dave Bunyard:It was pretty easy driving on the rail bed even though sometimes we would hit corrugated sections. As of late twenty twenty five, there is an effort taking place to restore the Hejaz railway between Turkey, Syria, and Jordan. This has been another episode from Life at 100 MHz. This is Dave Bunyard. Thanks for listening.