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The wild motor festival that transforms the desert into something ‘like Mad Max’ 
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You hear it before you see it. Hundreds of all-terrain vehicles tearing across the desert, the roar of their engines echoing over the sand dunes. The noise goes all night long, making it impossible to grab any shuteye.

Not that anyone does.

“There is no sleep in Liwa,” says Ginger Krook, a 23-year-old motorsport enthusiast from the Netherlands. “It’s crazy.”

Each year, the Liwa International Festival draws crowds of car fanatics deep into the Empty Quarter, the vast desert stretching from the United Arab Emirates into Saudi Arabia.

Three hours’ drive from Abu Dhabi, the landscape is almost empty for most of the year, save for a new ribbon of blacktop and towering dunes.

In December, it becomes a dreamscape for motorheads.

“They come together and they drive,” says Krook, who plans to return for her fourth festival this December. “Everything you can think of related to off-road driving, you can find there.”

‘Full throttle or nothing’
The Liwa International Festival has been running for just over two decades.
The Liwa International Festival has been running for just over two decades. Karim Sahib/AFP via Getty Images
Local Emiratis first recognized the motorsport potential of the Liwa Oasis more than two decades ago. They began gathering with their off-road vehicles at Moreeb Dune, the tallest in the region at more than 300 meters (about 1,000 feet). The challenge was simple: reach the top.

An official festival was created in 2004 and has grown steadily. In 2024, it drew more than 600,000 visitors, according to the event’s organizers. Alongside motorsports, a cultural program has taken shape, complete with fireworks each night.

But the central attraction — racing up the Moreeb Dune — remains the same.

“Everyone watches each other as they go up,” says Krook. “They are waiting for things to happen.”

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Spectators cheer drivers on, but the dune is daunting. In Arabic, Moreeb means “terrifying.”

“If your tires are not big enough, your suspension is not good enough, you’re not able to come up,” she says. “You cannot be scared because it’s full throttle or nothing.”

Smaller, less terrifying dunes serve as obstacles in “dune-bashing” races, where cars and trucks dart and drift across the desert, leaving exhaust and plumes of sand in their wake.

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Liwa
It was “this kind of Mad Max-feeling city,” says Christian LeBlanc, 32, a Canadian influencer who attended last year. “There were these huge lights illuminating the dunes, and as we got closer you could see there were these (cars) driving up and down and up and down. We kept getting closer and closer, and (then) I could hear the chaos.”

Mixing with the locals