Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Sadous - Underground

I read about this dahl in Mekshat site .. cousin AbuTalal has mentioned it to me earlier so we decided to visit. It’s close to Edge of the World but can’t get to it from there so we had two routes to choose from, either from Huraymla or Sadous .. we chose the latter. It turned out to be a good choice.


I checked the route on google earth and I could see a dirt track that leaves Sadous and goes west all the way to the Dahl. We left Riyadh in the afternoon heat and upon arriving at Sadous we took the wrong turn that lead us north west to the dam. We came down south to look for the track that I saw on Google. Fortunately I had some points along the track jotted down so we connected with the first point and off we went. The road was smoother than I expected. It was about 20km from the village to the dahl.

The opening was just like I saw in the pictures on the northern side of the dahl. I grabbed my cache and took some spare batteries for our flashlights before entering. Cousin Hamad was already inside.
A short ladder resting on a pile of rocks was placed at the entrance which opens to a large chamber –more than 12 meters in diameter- where large piles of fallen rocks gather at one end. We walked around the boulders and found ourselves in front of a long tunnel with well defined semicircular section. The air was very humid and at this point we were sweating like a leaky faucet.


We continued our walk slowly but steadily into the tunnel. The floor was very soft and moist and at some places the soil was black. Other than for the bats, this was a friendly dahl. After 90m or so, we came to a stop at the end of the tunnel where the only way to continue was to go crawling. I spotted a hiding place before the end of the tunnel and stashed my cache there. I later realized that it might not have been the best place considering the soft floor and the possibility it could wash away with any flooding. We left just in time before sunset and made a stop on our way back to eat the watermelon that AbuTalal brought.

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