inxps: Rawdhat Khuraim

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Rawdhat Khuraim

03 Dec 2010

Need to warm up after our long break. We need to start back our exploration. How time runs so fast. After coming back from hajj, recovering from the sickness one after another, kids with their mid-term exam, this is the first outing in the winter season.

We didn’t had much option of places nearby to go out to relax ourselves and just to break our legs. This time we want to try a new place called Rawdhat Kuraim. The place is a forest reserve by Saudi government because of it’s greeneries. When we look from google earth, we can see it is the only spot with green color while the rest are mostly brown.

At about 8 am, we move out from our house. The direction is to go via Dammam highway, taking exit to Rhumah. The journey was less than an hour drive, about 100 km from Riyadh. Once we reach there, we found the place was guarded by policemen. We knew it is the right place as we can see many big trees from afar.

Maybe because it is a reserved forest, they have some sort of control over the place. Good thing the police guarding the place could speak english. He told us that we are not allowed to enter the area with our car. We need to park our car outside and walk in. With the kids and our picnic stuff, it surely be tiring for us to walk that far. Hence, we decided to picnic not far from the car park where still there are many good location for us to settle down.

The temperature were quite low. When the wind blow, we can feel the coldness biting our skin. As usual, once settle with the picnic spot and had our breakfast, time to explore around the area. I stay with Amzar on our mat, hugging him to get more heat plus lazy to carry him around. Hubby and the kids starts to search around the place to find anything interesting to feed their eyes.

The actual green area were fenced. From the fence we could see how green it was inside. Our picnic spot wasn’t the actual spot. Maybe the entrance required us to walk further in. From the net, it was said that there were camping spot and people selling and renting camping gears, foods and stuffs. However, we can’t see any trace of it around the area, Not sure whether there are different entrance to Rawdhat Khuraim for camping, picnicking spot than the one we are now but the police guard didn’t say anything when hubby ask him of it.

At around 11 we decided to head back home. When we were at the car park we saw three cars trying to enter the area with their car which we knew are not allowed. They look like Chinese expat trying their best to get permission of driving in. They were making a few calls might be calling people they knew that could help. Waiting of around 10 minutes, seems like they still fail to enter the area with their car. If they manage, we’ll try our luck as well. Since it looks like they failed to enter, off we go home.

Still, we get the chance of relaxing and enjoying our time together. The kids enjoy running around freeing themselves from the walls of our house :-). Every moment together and experiences are precious.