Where the Desert Meets the Sea

The flight lands at an airport that appears to have been built in the last eighteen months, and the road from it runs for an hour through nothing at all. Then the water appears, and the desert begins to make sense.

This is a coast of hard edges: red rock, white sand, water so clear it reads as an absence rather than a colour. For decades it belonged to divers and to nobody else. What has changed, carefully, is the arrival of a small number of properties built low and in the colour of the ground they sit on.

“The desert is not a backdrop here. It is the client.”

Our villa had no front door in the conventional sense, only a wall with an opening, and a plunge pool that caught the last two hours of sun. There is a particular silence at four in the afternoon in a desert that no recording captures, and after two days we stopped trying to describe it.

The diving remains the reason to come, and the reefs are as intact as anywhere in the world. But the best of it, for us, was the morning: coffee on the terrace at six, the rock turning from grey to ochre, and the sea flat to the horizon. By eight it is hot. By nine you are in the water.

Go before the coast becomes what every coast becomes. That window is still open, and it will not be open indefinitely.