Desert Adventure in Abu Dhabi: From Dune Bashing to Camel Rides

Where the Road Ends and the Sand Begins

After five days hemmed in by fluorescent lights, lanyards, and the numbing thrum of hotel air conditioning—what people now call a “conference”—we finally broke free into the vast, indifferent wilderness of the Arabian desert. It was not freedom in the romantic sense; we were driven there in air-conditioned SUVs along a highway engineered to resist the encroaching sand. But still, there was a sense of escape—of being loosed from the polished sterility of Abu Dhabi's glassy skyline into something far older, far less accommodating.

We headed eastward, though direction in the desert becomes more conceptual than precise, toward a dune field that felt like the end of the world. The wind re-sculpts the landscape with such whimsy that even Bedouins can lose their bearings. Our driver, a man with an inscrutable calm, seemed to know the dunes as one might know an old, temperamental friend. What followed was what the tourism industry blandly calls dune bashing—a phrase that undersells the manic, lunging violence of it. The SUV bucked and twisted over the sand ridges like a deranged animal. I found myself clutching the seatbelt with the silent reverence of a man confessing his sins.

At the top of a particularly daunting crest, the driver paused—as if knowing the value of silence—and we gazed westward. The sun, a molten disk, hung low over the ridgeline, spilling its final light across a landscape so empty, it felt sacred. The desert inspires a peculiar awe: the kind that doesn't ask for your admiration, only your submission.

We tried sandboarding, a sport that blends grace with humiliation. The board was uncooperative, the sand deceptively soft but pitiless to anyone who loses their footing. When my turn came, I lasted perhaps two seconds before pitching forward. Pride bruised, but face intact. In the desert, small victories matter.

At our encampment—part theme park, part cultural pastiche—we were led to a long, low table draped in patterned cloth, the kind of Orientalist set-piece designed to charm the weary Westerner. There were henna artists, hookahs, and the obligatory camel rides. I climbed atop the beast with all the confidence of a man boarding a rickety ladder. Camels are not gentle creatures. They groan. They lurch. They rise in segments. And atop one, you feel not so much elevated as exposed—like a flag trembling on a too-high pole. It struck me then that entire civilizations once depended on these animals to cross this cruel landscape. I had trouble imagining such tenacity in a world now driven by touchscreens and GPS.

The evening ended beneath a sky so expansive, it made the very idea of containment seem absurd. We dined under the stars, the air alive with the pulse of darbuka drums and the flickering silhouettes of whirling dancers. The buffet was generous, though the food was secondary to the spectacle—the feeling of being momentarily unmoored from the self-importance of daily life.

This desert excursion, staged though it was, carried within it the ghost of something ancient. A glimpse—however brief—into a harder, purer existence. And in that glimpse, a gratitude. Not the kind scribbled in thank-you cards, but the quieter, deeper kind: the realization that the world is far vaster than your itinerary, and far older than your ambition.