Saudi Arabia

Gravel was about 40 minutes for us. Your two sources have it long, though it does depend which approach the driver takes and how recently the track has been graded. Shade at the top is nil. There is one rock overhang near the main viewpoint that gives you a metre of shade around midday and people take turns standing in it. For a single day in June I would take the three hour version over the full one. Out and back on the Darb al Manjour side and you are in air conditioning again before the afternoon does its worst. My knees prefer the shorter descent and in 44 degrees so does the rest of me. On food, buy water and something at a petrol station on the way out of the city. There is nothing after that.

The driver question. Everybody wonders and nobody admits to wondering. My first long transfer was in Santa Cruz, a man drove me four hours to a glacier and I stood at the ice worrying about him instead of looking at it, which is a waste of a glacier. They sleep. Mostly they sleep. Sometimes they sit with the other drivers, and there are always other drivers, that is the part you cannot picture from home. Mine had a flask and a phone and looked a good deal more content than I did out on the rocks. It is his working day and he has arranged it around you. No pasa nada. In June go as early as they will take you. Out of the hotel before six. The rock goes orange for maybe half an hour after sunrise and then it flattens right out and stays flat until evening.

Late report. I am back in Hamburg some weeks already and only now I sit down to write it. I took the short version, on the Wednesday. Out of the hotel at 5:40. The gravel was 35 minutes, so Jonas was right and my two sources were not. At the top it was 33 already at half past seven in the morning and there was no wind whatsoever, which I had not thought to consider. The overhang exists. There were two of us standing in it. The driver slept. I asked him about it afterwards and he said he prefers the escarpment runs precisely because he can sleep, and he had a cool box in the boot with more water in it than I drank all week. Back at the hotel 11:30 and I did not go outside again that day.