Morning Desert Safari Abu Dhabi

The blue hour, then the gold

The twenty-five minutes before the sun clears the horizon are what photographers call the blue hour. At Al Khatim the whole plain goes an even cold blue with no shadows at all, and the dune crests read as soft grey lines against it. It photographs completely differently to anything you will see later in the day, and most guests miss it because they are still in the car.

Then the sun comes up and the light turns hard and gold within about ten minutes. Because it is coming in almost horizontally, every ripple on the sand casts a shadow several times its own length, and the surface that looked flat at noon suddenly reads as texture. That effect is gone by about half nine, when the sun is high enough that the ripples stop casting anything.

Where to stand, if you care about the photograph

Face away from the sun rather than into it. Shooting into a low sun over pale sand blows the highlights out and the dunes come back as a white smear. With the sun behind you the sand holds its colour and the shadows do the work. If you want a silhouette, wait until the sun is a hand’s width above the horizon and put a person on the crest above you, shooting upward.

Ask your driver to stop before the dune drive rather than after. Once the cars have crossed a ridge the ripples are gone for the day, and drivers are used to being asked — nobody minds pulling up for ten minutes on the way in.

Temperature, honestly

People underestimate how cold the desert gets before dawn in winter. Between December and February the plain can sit in the low teens at six in the morning, and with any breeze at all it feels colder than that. Guests who came from a European winter find it fine; guests who packed for a Gulf holiday sometimes do not. Bring a jacket you can take off by nine.

The reverse is true in summer. A seven o’clock start in August gives you low to mid twenties, which is the most comfortable the Abu Dhabi desert gets between June and September. By half ten the same spot is past thirty-five, which is exactly why the trip ends when it does.

What is moving at that hour

The desert is at its most active in the hour either side of dawn, because most of what lives there has spent the night out and is heading for shade. Fresh tracks are everywhere on the morning drive and they are easy to read once someone points them out: the neat parallel dashes of a sand skink, the small paired prints of gerbils, the wandering line of a darkling beetle, and occasionally the clean four-toe print of an Arabian red fox heading back toward the plain.

Desert hares are common along the graded track on the way in. Ghaf trees dotted across the plain hold small birds at first light — hoopoe larks and wheatears mostly — and the ghaf itself is worth a look: it is the UAE national tree, it stays green through summers with no rain at all, and its roots reach down more than thirty metres to find water.

Why the sand looks the way it does here

Al Khatim sand is pale gold rather than the deep rust red of the Lahbab dunes outside Dubai. The difference is iron oxide content: Lahbab sand is rich in it and oxidises to red, while Al Khatim carries much less. In morning light the pale sand is the better of the two, because it holds shadow detail that red sand loses.

The dunes here are long and linear rather than short and steep, shaped by wind that blows consistently from one direction across a wide flat plain. That gives you an unbroken horizon at sunrise, with nothing between you and the light — and a smoother dune drive, since the car is running along ridges rather than climbing and dropping.