11-Apr-2008 -- During our long weekend of 9 April 2008, we decided to visit a cluster of four unvisited confluences, 31N 42E, 30N 41E, 29N 41E, and 29N 42E, which are located in northern Saudi Arabia. The weather is still pleasant enough at this time of the year to venture out into the wild.

After successfully visiting the confluence point at 29N 41E, we decided to continue our journey towards our next confluence point as we still had a couple of hours of daylight left, hence we veered east and rided the sand dunes much more easily, we covered half distance before we settled for a good camp site in a sandy bowl. We had lamb stew for dinner, and made to bed early than usual. The temperature during the night was around 15°C with practically no wind, it was indeed a very pleasant night.

We woke up early before dawn and broke the camp up. We continued our journey east over the sand dunes and dodging bushes here and there. At about 20 km from the confluence point, we came down a slip face and landed up in what appeared to be an old lake bed, we stopped and had a look around to discover that indeed this was a Neolithic site. Worked flint was everywhere. We picked up some very good samples of scarpers, knives, spear heads, and some knapping tools such as the knockers. We spent a bit of time here, eventually peeling away towards our final destination. We arrived after zigzagging across sand dunes to the confluence point. This confluence point is also located in the middle of the sand dunes covered with small bushes.

We left the confluence point in high spirits as we had achieved what we had set out to do. We turned northeast and started leaving the sand dunes behind and approached the plains again. We eventually hooked up on to the blacktop road heading north towards the great pipeline highway.

The journey back to Ẓahrān was long and hard, but uneventful, we had travelled some 700 km between the four Confluences, without taking into consideration the 1800 km round trip to get to this northern area from Ẓahrān in the first place.