NUJUMA, A RITZ-CARLTON RESERVE SAUDI ARABIA

On alittle-visited Red Sea archipelago, the Middle East’s first Ritz-Carlton Reserve reflects both untapped nature and hyperreal modernity, finds Noo Saro-Wiwa.

A young Saudi woman in a short sleeved T-shirt, rocking a short back-and-sides haircut, is helping à me dig a hole near the cresting waves on a beach. We're on an island on the Red Sea, and I've just embedded a mangrove shoot. "The mangroves do so many things. They filter the sand and the air and they are a nursery for fish," she says.

Sbr Shrwani oversees a programme that is planting 2,00,000 mangroves on the tiny Ummahat Islands, home to Nujuma, the first-ever Ritz-Carlton Reserve in the Middle East. In five years, they will turn this landscape green but for now, it is largely pristine white sands, lapped by waves of such cerulean intensity, I occasionally raise my sunglasses to see if the lenses are filtering my vision. They are not. There's an artificial intelligence miseen-scène quality to Nujuma, and Shrwani's lipstick-tomboy chic only adds to the sense of alternate reality. I have to remind myself that I'm in Saudi Arabia.

The Ummahat Islands, off the country's west coast, are among the most unexploited on earth. When Nujuma opened in May this year, it joined The St. Regis as the only other resort on these uninhabited islands, part of the Red Sea Global project, which Saudi is developing to modernise and diversify its economy. Nujuma ("stars" in Arabic)-and its forward-facing staffers like Shrwanifeels like a digestible entrée to the kingdom. The Red Sea region, as a whole, feels primed to give the Maldives a run for its money.