Day 1
Funny – I pick up Demitri from the car hire joint where he dropped off his car, around 3.30pm, and where do we go for the next hour or so? A shopping mall. Bought map, water, butane burner, the pillow I forgot, the fabulous little X mini speaker that plugs into DX’s iPhone, and various other essentials.
Start driving seriously. It’s Ramadan, during which muslims fast from daybreak to sundown, and it is highly offensive to be seen eating or drinking in public. All F&B joints (other than some within hotels catering to tourists) are closed during the day. The first small meal, traditionally dates, and other sweetmeats, is called Ifthar. We pulled into Al Ain around dusk and had an Ifthar of Red Bull and ice cream. At the Al Ain border crossing, we congratulate ourselves on the ease with which we passed through inspection. And then came to another window. And then another. And then had to get out of the car, enter a building, fill forms, pay money. And then another window and boom gate. We did get through eventually.
We stopped in Izbi to withdraw Omani Riyals from an ATM and drink some roadside lemon juices. More kms, into the Oman desert proper. By midnight we’d had enough and found a side road to get away from the highway and set up camp. The four Heinekins that I’d surrounded in Lilli’s ice packs, a towel and insulated supermarket cool bag, were beautifully cold and washed down the instant noodles very nicely.
Day 2
DX, veteran of road trips, is zipping flys and scrunching ground sheet before sunrise barely 5.5 hrs later. Sigh. Fire up the butane, cuppa, camp site photos, mark the location in the GPS, pack up. Within minutes, the only sign of our visitation is a splash of coffee grounds.
The Oman desert is very ugly. It is gravel. The occasional patch of sand dunes warrant a road sign to warn that there may be drifts of sand on the road. There is some colour graduation from white, to ochre to reddish, but mostly it is grim British seaside grey. Except it is 49 degrees. More camel signs than camels.
Things change as you near the coast. Craggy rocks leap up, and the terrain turns dark brown. Moonscape and roadworks. Then suddenly the world turns moist and green. Just like that in 500 metres. Topsoil covers the gravel and the most ridiculous new-growth green covers that. Jersey cows, camels and little multicoloured goats. Trees and mosquitoes. The temperature drops 15 degrees to low 30s, and we drop the windows and pretend we are driving the Sunshine Coast. Steep ups and downs, and the (weirdly brown) coastal plain below. It is exciting to be amongst this after hours of desert in a way that would not be so felt had we dropped in by plane.
Consulting the Lonely Planet as we descend, we decide, mostly due to its location, that the Crowne Plaza is the go.
Salalah is best to visit during the monsoon season – khareef – and we were arriving at the end of it. Only nobody else was. Maybe because of Ramadan? I reckon we had about 10 co-guests at the Crowne. Although it is nicely sited on its own palm tree beach, it features the same daggy 80s design as its Dubai counterpart with a few extra Arabic flourishes for kitsch. It smells of mildew, but the green, the beach, the relative coolth and the contrast with the previous night’s accommodation make it fine. We ate, we swam – in the pool (there are rips and messy waves during the khareef, and as most Arabs and Indians can’t swim, the municipality goes with the odds and bans everyone) – we read and slept. I’m carrying a compendium of explorer tales and for some reason choose Burke and Wills.
Evening and adventure! Although Salalah seems to suffer from the same I don’t care malaise as other places I have been in the ME, it is a pleasure to explore. It has history – or at least crumbly buildings. The town is separated from the beach by walled groves of coconut and date palms which are flanked by little seller huts piled up with the produce from the trees behind and papaya as well – each individually framed by the ubiquitous bare flouros, local decoration of choice.
A forgettable Chinese meal. A wander through the souq with its usual ranks of electronics, tailors, clothing and hardware. In the middle of everything there is an open area that resembles a cross between a graveyard and a building site, surrounding a mosque. As well as conventional looking headstones, burial sites seem to be marked by weathered looking concrete blocks stood vertically. Odd to see a graveyard by a mosque.
Not a woman to be seen.
Day 3
Happy birthday Demitri. Typical hotel breakfast and we’re on the road before 8.00. We head west along the coast to Mirbat. Barely a couple of kms, and we are driving slowly through a group of nonchalant camels. The first of several, not to mention road crossing gangs of goats and disinterested cows. Either side of the coastal highway there are makeshift tents of gaudy cheap plastic and lots of livestock. Not sure if the tents are for people or animals, but it is all very temporary and we wondered if this was the local version of the long paddock. Mirbat is a weird place – it had wealth at some point, but its richness is now limited to the visual. See photos.
Unsure if we can travel the roads NW to our highway of the day before, so we decide to double back to Salalah for the return journey. En route we zip up the coastal hills to visit Wadi Darbat. A Wadi is a stream or watering hole that becomes wet when it rains, but is dry most of the time. As soon as we start climbing, the world turns lush again. The road to the Wadi is clearly a popular place to take your animals because it is literally covered in shit. We couldn’t find the waterfalls that we had read about, but the road took us to a little valley filled with a decent stream with overgrowing trees and thickly grassed hills. Bizarre to compare with the moonscape barely 20km to the north. A little tourist carpark with tea/snacks hut – closed for Ramadan – and a tiny jetty. At the turn-off to the Wadi road, we had noticed a cafe with outdoor seating and a fabulous view back down over coastal plain and the sea....also closed for Ramadan. Not to be beaten, we found a little roadside camp area – as evidenced by a couple of old fire sites – and decided to make our own cuppa. Mid-morning coffee and Timtams. In the end the tiny midges drove us back into the car, and stayed with us for the next 100km or so. The next day I was covered in bites similar to mosquitos’, and a week later I still have evidence of the fuckers on my legs.
Filled the tank and began our return. Just above Salalah, marking the threshold between green and grey, is the roadside town of , nuh, forgotten. We pulled in and bought some nibblies. The next few hours we chewed up distance listening to ABC podcasts of Dr Carl and By Design. The comfortable strangeness of all that was punctuated by our good deed for the trip. An older American couple travelling in the opposite direction had shredded a rear tyre on their Pajero. No water, no hats and the bottle jack wouldn’t fit under the swing arm. They were returning home to nuh, forgotten where apparently there is a military base. We saved them, refused the proffered bottle of Jack Daniels and carried on feeling very pleased with ourselves.
At dusk we ran smack into a sandstorm which cut visibility to not much, but only lasted a few km.
Beginning to debate whether to camp or drive through. We decided to break for dinner in Nizwa, then carry on and look for a camp site – if we didn’t find one by the border, then there would not be much point or opportunity to stop. Nizwa has a nicely preserved fort in its centre that has been converted to a souq. We had a brief look in the twilight then followed the crowd (of men – again no women) into the centre. There were groups of mostly Indian guys strolling and chatting and a couple of annoying local lads screaming around the centre island on their quad bikes. We had picked the wrong commercial area for food, and Dem’s birthday shout was a falalel “sandwich” and coke (700 Omani baisa – about $2.30 for both of us) at one of the typical ME footpath eateries: indoor restaurant, little external cabin where a sweating guy cooks shwarma for diners and passersby, outdoor white plastic settings occupied by dudes watching football or Bollywood movies (the latter on this particular evening) on a TV trundled out atop a cheap Laminex stand.
Some freaky and very heavy downpour had swept through just before us. And although disappointed to have missed it, we had the excitement of coming across deep torrents crossing dips in the road while travelling at around 120km/h in the dark. Fortunately there was generally someone ahead to show brake and hazard lights.
After a couple of side road investigations, and almost giving up hope, we found a very acceptable, sandy camp spot about an hour before the border. Approaching 10pm. We set up, poured a plastic of red each, lay on our sweat absorbing towels within our respective tents (much warmer than southern Oman) and equipped with head torches, read a few pages before sleep.
Day 4
Up at sunrise for plunger coffee with sweetened condensed milk and a muesli bar. We’d picked quite a nice spot, and took a few photographs. Glad of the rest, it was a pleasant cruise to the Al Ain border, crossing which was far simpler than in the opposite direction as we already had visas. By 10am we were back in Dubai, having covered 2800km in 65 hours. It may seem like a silly exercise when plane travel is relatively cheap, but it wasn’t. It was an adventure, and it was fun. The everyday world got completely forgotten, creating a proper break. I hadn’t camped in years. I like it. It is not that comfortable, I’ve had better sleeps, I have midge bites. But all the clichés are true: It’s nice to be exposed, to have total freedom over your actions separated from any other influence, to have a temporary sense of self sufficiency, and yes, everyday creature comforts are all the more appreciated following a period without them.
A little later Demitri smsed me to advise that Mad Max 1, and its desert driving scenes was on TV. I turned it on and ate lunch. The world got small again.
