Discover the luxury Anantara hotels in Asia and the Middle East in Liwa Desert, United Arab Emirates

This arid, enigmatic area is about 150km southwest of Abu Dhabi via a poker-straight strip of tarmac that looks like it’s dropped out of the skies into virtually uninhabited desert. Take a local guide and play at Wilfred Thesiger, rewriting your own Arabian Sands exploration of Middle Eastern mysteries and mirages. You’ll stumble upon the odd verdant oasis, wandering camel or weekending Emirati, but you’ll need to go a long way to meet much else out here – the nearest neighbour is the fabled Empty Quarter (itself the size of France and the world’s largest expanse of sand). Scale the sands on a camel trek, or explore in a dune-bashing 4x4 in a thrilling duel of man and machine versus Mother Nature. The greatest riches here are humble pleasures – feeling smaller than a grain of sand among those magnificent mountainous dunes, sipping mint tea in a traditional majlis, or huddling together under a Bedouin tent for dinner in the desert, telling tall tales as the moon slides skywards.