In late November I had ten days off for the only vacation I will have this school year. The occasion involved one of the Eid (eed) celebrations. This particular holiday celebrates the Old Testament story of Abraham not killing his son. As for a brief explanation, all three of the world’s desert religions; Islam, Christianity and Judaism, use the Old Testament. In the Old Testament (the best testament) there’s a wonderful tale involving a chap named Abraham. For whatever reason, almighty Lord God, decided to test the faith of this particular gentlemen, so he/she/it parted the clouds and texted Abraham.
Yo. Abe. If u believe in me u gotta kill ur son. Sorry bro.
Abraham, not having the almighty lord god’s number, could not text him back what he wanted to say:
WTF!? :(
Left with the crushing weight of so unfair an order from the boss, Abraham prayed while he sharpened his axe. He tried to think of any way he could forestall the pronouncement. He was living in a historical anomaly of being Jewish and having no lawyers around and thus could not find any loopholes through which he could escape his divine predicament. Left with no way out he called over to his son and told him to chill out on the chopping block. Honest Abe, tears streaming down his face looked down upon his son’s body and raised his axe over his head to decapitate him. Just as he was about to swing down the great and merciful almighty lord God sent him another text.
Psych!!! :) Whoa man! Hardcore! I didn’t think u’d do it. Just go kill a goat or something. I am the LORD :)
And check this out. This is what I sent Jonah!! :p
Thus, Abraham’s submission to the all-knowing, all-seeing, pitilessly vengeful God was rewarded by the great, tap-dancing God’s mercy. To celebrate this wonderful occasion the people of Oman typically buy and kill and goat and then cook it. One thing I’ve learned in my time abroad though is that it is not ours to question the reason for a holiday, merely to go forth and consume alcohol. So J. and I planned to do just that the first night of the vacation in Oman’s capital (and really only) city, Muscat.
However, the shattering of vacation dreams began early. His Majesty Sultan Qaboose bin Said announced that all bars would be closed for the two days leading up to the celebration of God issuing the world’s first psych out. Thus, the entire reason for booking a four star hotel (and I use that term pretty loosely) in Muscat was rendered moot. The hotel in question was attached to one of the more hopping night spots in the city.
Since we were planning on driving around the country for pretty much ten straight days we decided a map might be a pretty handy thing to locate. So on Wednesday night, the first night of vacation (the weekends in Oman are Thursday and Friday), we went to Muscat’s big western shame factory, otherwise known as a mall. There we found a Border’s Book store and some maps of Oman. Since all maps of Oman are printed under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism we would later encounter some issues. We also purchased what is known in Japan as a “Ro’ Pro.” It is called this is Japan because those people are adorable, in the West this book is known as Lonely Planet. For J. one of the first true pleasures of the trip was the time warp he felt pulled into when he learned it was ok to smoke in the mall. A nod back to the dark ages of the 1970’s when we didn’t know inhaling chemical fires into the soft membranes of our lungs could have possibly been bad for us…or our babies.
Settling down in our hotel that night we popped open the map dotted with pictures of camels in the orange deserts and Onyx preserves, and scuba divers dotting the oceans. We decided we’d bomb down to Salalah. Salalah was approximately 1,100 kilometers from our present position in Muscat (about 660 miles for the Yanks).
Depending on who you talk to, it is the Germany, Switzerland, Shangri-La, or Xanadu of Oman. The road moves through the heart of Oman’s empty quarter, where I expected a picturesque drive through pillowy sand dunes, dotted by camels and nomads carrying magic lamps, smoking hashish, and dragging harems of belly dancers dressed like Princess Leia in Jabba the Hut’s palace.
As his been historically true of virtually all my pleasant expectations of the world, reality did not come even remotely close. I purchased a haphazardly composed book for five bucks in the airport after the vacation ended called, “Dawn in Oman” or something equally as trite, and the book did a splendid job of describing what I saw on this drive:
“Though Oman is thought of by many to be a desert country of majestic sand dunes the empty quarter is actually more accurately described as rocky waste.”
That’s right, put those two together, “rocky” and “waste.” Now repeat those two words together while staring at a wall for 12 straight hours. You’ve come close to driving from Muscat to Salalah.
We were told that once we’d entered the empty quarter that we should gas up, every single time we saw a gas station, regardless of how much gas was in the car, because there were patches of more than a hundred miles without any gas stations. The thought of being stuck in the desert with a middle-aged American guy fifty miles from the nearest gas station terrified me enough to take the advice. However, they’ve either added a lot of gas stations or the piece of crap compact we were driving got really good mileage.
And as abruptly as the rocky waste began, some miles outside of Muscat, we hit the Dhofar mountain range. After driving 100 miles an hour for about 10 hours slowing down to accommodate two hours of hairpin turns over a mountain range in pitch blackness was less than a picnic. The heavy construction on the majority of the roads, the endless strings of construction barriers, changing lanes, teenagers passing around blind corners at high speed, or the occasional wild animal did not help things either. Finally though we did make it over the mountains past some signs that literally said “Eat At Joe’s” for some invisible diner and back down to the highways and oversized roundabouts that constituted familiarity.
Our trusty Ministry of Tourism map kind of almost guided us close to where we sort of needed to go. We had booked a hotel room by phone from a Lonely Planet pick. We had a bit of trouble locating it though. We drove back and forth down the street it was supposed to be located on three or four times, passing the massive five star hotels we had no intention of paying for. We called the hotel; they gave us directions which made no sense, which kept leading us to a dead end, that dead end being the ocean.
Finally, and I don’t exactly remember how, I just said, “Fuck it” and drove up onto the beach, and low and behold there was a little sign for our hotel. Our hotel that was completely invisible from every vantage point except standing on the beach, and which could only be approached by driving over several curbs and onto said beach. How they could give us direction without the word “beach” still boggles my mind to this day. When we finally checked in I had been driving for about 13 straight hours. To say I drifted quickly to sleep would be like calling the Iraq war a slight miscalculation. If an alien race had come down to earth and leveled every city in the country and evaporated the oceans and banged a bunch of pots and pans next to my head I wouldn’t have known it. I came out of my coma sometime in the morning and J. looked like absolute crap. He said he hadn’t slept a wink. He was adamant that we check out of the hotel though and find a different one. I didn’t question him; we just paid up and had breakfast next to three or four tables of portly Germans.
Germans love Salalah. I don’t know why this is, but there you have it. A half dozen, pot-bellied Germans strolled around the beach in Speedos and I’m not sure whether I should be thankful that any bulges that might have normally been visible were completely covered by the overhanging mass of their stomachs. Suffice to say we didn’t dally at breakfast. I was starting to itch a little though.
When we got back to the room I took off my shirt to investigate. My entire torso, back, sides, and arms were completely and monstrously covered with red welts. I’d had my first encounter with bed bugs, and there must have been a whole fucking hive of them in my bed that I slept through while they ate me alive. “You see,” J. said.
He had apparently decided to stay up smoking cigarettes and blowing the smoke under his sheets to encourage all the little bastards to come into my bed. “Well, why the hell didn’t you tell me before we paid for the room?” I asked. “You think we’re gonna get our money back from Indians!? No fucking way!”
We didn’t even bother, the bastards got us and that was that. We drove across town.
We found another hotel called the “Hamilton Hotel” in the Lonely Planet and booked a room over the phone. We drove to where we thought it should be, and then turned around a drove back to the same place where we thought it should be. There was an enormous hotel and we figured we could probably get directions to our hotel from there so we stopped in. The place was called “The HAMDAN HOTEL.” I asked the desk clerk where the Hamilton was and he informed me that we were standing in it.
“This is the Hamilton Hotel?”
“Yes”
“Then why does it say ‘Hamdan’ on the building.”
“It says Hamilton on the building.”
J. and I looked at each other, and without saying a word fished our passports out of our pockets and just asked to be shown to our room. At the very least the room was well-apportioned and seemingly not filled with vile insects thirsting for my delicious flesh.
Everything in Salalah also seemed to be closed for the beginning of the holiday, but we managed to scare up some surf and turf at the Hilton, whose beachfront shared the water with enormous, loud, oil spewing port facility of some kind. But while swimming was out of the question we were treated to the surreal site of two Bedouin leading a train of about 50 camels right across the beach. I’d seen a few here and there before but I’d never seen so many at one time.
We asked around the hotel, and some western lady shopkeepers gave us some very encouraging advice about exploring Salalah: “My husband dragged me to this god awful place, and I’m just trying to figure out whether I should kill him before or after we get back to England. If I were you I’d try to see some of the sights outside of the city, and then go.”
To be fair, Salalah’s charm is apparently derived wholly from the climate during the summer, when they get a substantial amount of rain and hundreds of thousands of migrating birds pepper the landscape. We were here in October, and as we drove around the mountains in the next few days, the place would evoke the scenery on Mars better than Xanadu. That night we found out one of the hotels was organizing a tribute to the recently deceased King of Pop. When they promised a functioning bar we were sold.
We arrived pretty early as they were opening up, and two very attractive African-Brits who looked like James Bond Femme Fatales greeted us at the door. As with all good omens on this trip, it would turn out that they were the organizers of the event, and besides not wanting to have anything to do with us, were pretty much the only game in the bar. What followed was a bizarre tableau of Michael Jackson covers and dance routines all mashed together. At one point a bunch of Filipinos dressed as zombies came out and did about 14 seconds of Thriller, and then a Filipino cover band played some tunes, and then a DJ finished up by splicing MJ into some deep house and trance beats. We were happy there was booze, albeit overpriced, and just for kicks we told the Taxi to take us to “The Hamilton” just to see what would happen.
The next day we decided to be tourists in a more official capacity and try to go out and actually see touristy things. We started with a hole. A very big hole. About 30 minutes outside of town was an old volcanic crater, which to be honest was pretty impressive, and I’d even show it to you, but all the pictures of Oman are safely tucked away on a hard drive in New York. Though the Martian landscape was stark and barren, there was a beautiful highland quality about it which probably would have been a lot more charming had I been sharing the car with a young woman rather than a potbellied middle-aged co-worker. Shoganai.
After driving around the mountains and valleys, stopping to avoid camels in the road, and goats in the road, and sheep in the road, and cows in the road, we headed back to Hamdan and decided to take a nap and make our escape up the coast that night. Everything was going smoothly, the sun collapsed into the ocean on our right, and the mountains jutted out over the highway winding in twists and turns along the contours of the Arabian Gulf. We weren’t moving terribly fast, but we were moving over flat, level ground at decent speed. We drove this way for more than three hours before the road, without any warning, stopped being paved. We hit the dirt and gravel and rocks at about 60 and I slowed us to a stop a few hundred yards later. We were slightly befuddled. We took out the map and studied it. According to the map this road ran free and clear, unabated for another 500 to 800 miles up the coast. However, this map, and every map like it was printed before Gonu. Gonu was basically a hurricane that had devastated the country a few years earlier, and done significant damage to a lot of the roads. We drove on for a bit anyway. Another half mile over gravel and there was no longer even a dirt track, there was a pile of rock and dirt a hundred feet high and then the ocean. We literally came up against a wall and stopped.
About fifty feet above us was a little pillbox and a soldier. I have no idea why he was there, beyond guarding the absurdity of our vacation. A minute later I had an AK-47 trained at my head. As it turns out though he was only pointing it at us so he could reach around into his pocket and pull out a lighter to light his cigarette. I can’t think of a much more boring post than standing watch over a pile of rocks at a dead end. He came over and we showed him our map, which he immediately turned upside down and then pointed at a spot in the north of the country about 1,000 miles away. I did not think this was going well. I pointed at where we were, and where we were going, and then pointed at the landslide in front of us. He looked at the map one more time, tossed his cigarette, and then pointed back the way we came. Nobody has uttered a syllable during the exchange. We went back to the god damn Hamilton and got another room for the night, deciding to start again in the morning.
We examined the map, and it seemed the only way to get back on track was to go over the Dhofar Mountains again, this drive was slightly shorter, at least in total distance than the trip from the capital to Salalah, but events would make it a slightly more eventful drive than the map would have us believe. We set out at an obnoxiously early hour, and set our sights for the mountains, we crept along the winding roads and hairpin turns at a grandmotherly 50 or 60 miles an hour, and while doing so were passed continuously by teenagers streaking along the blind turns and steep inclines at 70 or 80 miles an hour, apparently unafraid of what happens when semi-truck hits a Honda civic in mid-flight. Once we had freed ourselves from the crags and the nose of the car pointed straight downhill, we bombed back toward the coast road. Along the way we spotted some of the most picturesque pieces of Oman that I would encounter the whole year.
Seemingly in the middle of nowhere we’d drive across a Wadi, a dry river bed, measuring hundreds of feet across, dotted with scrub grass and majestic desert trees. We’d gone in the space of fifty miles, from the Martian landscapes of the dead mountains, to something resembling the Serengeti of my mind’s eye. There are times when there is overwhelming beauty in the desolation of this land. These wadis were one of those times. They were completely abandoned, not so much as a power line or utility shed interrupted the vast empty space. We pulled over and took out our little camp chairs and had some snacks and smokes on the sand a few feet from the highway. We wandered around a little, but we still had a tremendous amount of ground to cover before we made it to Sur, so we pressed on.
Not long after the road flattened out, our friend the Arabian Gulf became our Eastern border, our constant companion out the passenger window as we barreled north along the coast. We moved across beaches so vast and long and empty that it was beginning to feel like we had found a piece of the Earth as tranquil and unmolested as if humans had never found it. In Oman the beach has no inherent value. It is largely ignored until such time as a Western developer sets their sights on it and immediately drives the value up by offering someone money to purchase the exclusive right to it. I don’t know how long it will last, but I give the Omanis immense credit for the times that they have not granted this right, and the hotels retreat a few hundred yards from the surf, offering only walkways instead of walls.
This unbroken surf is straddled by towns every few dozen miles. Sometimes the towns can’t even really be called towns, just collisions of poverty with concrete. They would all start the same way, with shacks, drifting in from somewhere in the interior. I sincerely hope that many of them were simply temporary shelters for the sheep and camel herders, but the presence of air-conditioners and satellite dishes sadly pointed in the direction of permanent residence. The shacks would slowly increase in number, until eventually many of them would be combined together, and then a mile or so later we’d see some rows of shops, squat one story concrete boxes, and then the Mosque, the school, the gas station that were harbingers of civilization. I don’t know how many times we passed this same configuration of quasi-abandoned segments of Omani society, but after a few hours the shacks and hamlets and beach felt more like the wallpaper along a vast coastal corridor than the pockmarked progress of an emerging nation.
The one thing that every one of these towns had in common was a good place to stop for a cup of tea. And so we did, to break the monotony, or sometimes we’d just stop next to the beach for a cigarette and a few minutes out of the car. This went on for an untold number of daylight hours, the windows down, the desert wind blowing from one side, and the salty sea air coming in from the other. As the sun began descending in the late afternoon we pulled into a small city full of truck stops and a few hotels. We stopped at a local restaurant and ate plates of shawarma and hummus and French fries while we studied the map. We noticed, to our consternation that there was a section of the highway, about fifty miles long, that was marked with blue dashes. We did not know what this meant.
After dinner we stopped at a hotel, which thankfully was staffed by some English speaking Indians. We were incredibly happy to speak with someone who knew how to read a map, or at least find their location on one. We pointed at the odd segment of highway, and asked if we could make it up to Sur by the end of the night, and they assured us that we would have no problem. It would be smooth sailing all the way. We thanked them for the reassurance, gassed up the car, and got ready to bomb the last few hundred miles at high speed into Sur.
The drive was pleasant enough, and for a while we thought we’d actually have an uneventful drive, the sun lolled in the sky, irradiating everything in the furnace of Oman’s coast. About an hour outside of the hotel the road stopped…again. We had driven to the gate of a serene looking lighthouse beaming its quicksilver fused signal into the ocean. It was a moribund moment to say the least. Another road led off to the left, a direction might as well have been North, the way we wanted to go, so we took it, and after driving along parking lots that had no discernible purpose we floated into a campground. Dozens of Land rovers and SUV’s and Porsche Cayenne’s straddled the narrow dirt lane, and cooking fires and wine swilling Europeans dotted the darkness beyond the reflections of the cars. These massive vehicles, built largely for the purpose that we had put our tenacious coup through the last few days sparked a little envy in me. There are many times I’ve simply felt like an outcast even among the small western expatriate community here, because many of them engineers and architects, pulled in at least quadruple my salary, and the entertainment establishment that had grown around them reflected that reality, preventing me from really exploring some of the most spectacular attractions Oman had to offer, reachable only by Land Rovers or other 40,000 dollar monstrosities. Such is the lot of we English teachers.
We got out and asked them if they knew that this road that was quickly becoming a path led to Sur. I’m not sure whether confusion or pity mounted the parapets of their brows to stare out from their eyes, but “maybe” and “I think so” was the muttered response we heard most often. That was as good as we were going to get, so we drove on.
Directly outside of the small campground the road quickly turned to dirt, but after a few miles it thankfully became pavement again. We gave it a 75% chance that we’d won somehow. We were, as usual, overoptimistic. The pavement ended again, and the car stuttered over the grooves in the dirt. The dirt road was wide enough for eight cars side by side, and huge piles of earth are piled on each side, like snow banks in New York after the plows have come through. We think that this must be the dashed lines on the map, that it will suck to drive through dozens of miles of this constant bouncing and rattling, but we’d get through it, back to the smell and taste of the sea. About thirty miles too soon it too ended and there was simply hard, sandy ground, and the tire tracks of trucks leading us further into the darkness.
At the roads edge the tracks were deep and pronounced, singular and purposeful, steady as the distant sound of a call to prayer, redoubling its efforts to penetrate the silence of our disbelief. We wanted to, needed to believe they led us out, but after a few minutes the tracks forked, and forked again. They went in every direction, Bedouin driving haphazardly across the bled had made them, and they followed the same random and shiftless pattern as the tracks of camels searching the empty quarter for the last remnants of sustenance. We followed whatever tracks seemed densest, clinging to a feebler and feebler hope, until the lights of the highway long gone looked much like dim stars that had fallen into the horizon. We stopped when we the only thing illuminated by our headlights was an abandoned wooden boat, not thirty feet from the sea.
We were lost. Not hopelessly, but approaching it, the only thing we could do was turn around. We got back to the bumpy, gigantic, dirt pathway and drove very slowly, trying to find any sign of a road we missed. Off to our right side was a town, and a few cars turned toward it and disappeared. It was our only option short of going back to the hotel manager that told us we’d be fine and angrily taking a room for the night at his hotel.
We drove into town, but all the roads were dirt roads, there was only one house by design, repeated thousands of times in the dirt. The lanes were identical, the Toyota Datsuns were identical, and all the dim blue glows of TVs through the windows seemed tuned to the same channel. The whole place was a pointless mirage, nothing helpful, no signs, no exits, or even people on the street to feebly ask for what would probably be impossible directions. The only road in town led off to a massive structure so we went that way. As we approached the unmistakable sound of a riotous party drifted over us.
A twenty foot high wall separated us from the building and the Arab-infused dance music beyond. I can’t be sure, but it appeared as if we’d found a rave. So we did what any sane traveler would do, we banged on the door and yelled hello waiting for someone to let us in. To no avail, they either didn’t hear us, or completely ignored us. We pulled out our camp chairs and “had a sit” as the Brits say. A few pickup trucks blazed by us in the wall of darkness to our left, hauling screaming teenagers and twenty somethings that I would be absolutely certain anywhere in America were piss drunk, but in Oman could have simply been ravaged with a half dozen Red Bulls. It was a lead, but a tenuous one at best. We didn’t say anything, just sighed as we put out our cigarettes and got back in the car to follow them. It was immediately apparent that the “road” on the other side of town just led from darkness to more darkness. We gave up. We decided to go back to the rat bastard who told us we’d be fine and sleep at his shitty hotel.
We hit the wide dirt road and saw another Datsun filled with young Omanis coming toward us. I followed a hunch and moved the car to the exact center of the road, turned on my hazard lights and stepped into the dirt. The truck stopped next to us, and the driver beamed an enormous smile at what I imagine was a slightly peculiar sight of two white guys on an abandoned stretch of road in the middle of nowhere. I asked in my most elegant Arabic if this road went to Sur, it came out “RoadthisSurgo?”
In about a minute another truck full of kids parked next to us coming from the other direction. About a dozen Omanis were laughing and shouting to each other over me and the car. The road that was empty only a minute ago accumulated two more beat up sedans worth of Omanis, and the numbers stood at about 15 to 2. We were lost and hopelessly outnumbered on a black stretch of back road miles away from anything remotely resembling Police or helpful authority, and I have never been less afraid. Though I didn’t understand more than a word in 10 or 20 of what they were saying, I knew the vast majority of their words were geared toward trying to help our dumb asses out.
After a few minutes of bewildering noise a leader emerged from the group, the one who best spoke English said, “We all go Sur, you come.”
In ten short minutes our hopeless car had become a triumphant convoy. We all got back in our vehicles and the Datsun took off, spraying pebbles behind it. Another car followed, then our little coup, a pick-up truck and another car behind that. We went through town, the kids were laughing and laying on their horns, and we were escorted into the darkness like a rag-picking Sheik with his motley, Bedouin honor guard. The desert road was unpaved and had those ungodly, tell-tale grooves of a flattened, planned road that had borne far too many cars before the pavement was supposed to be laid. We bounced up and down in our shockless Nissan, trying to keep up with the cars ahead of us flying down the road. After a half hour of the constant rumbling it felt as if I’d been riding a camel across the desert. In other words, my ass hurt.
A massive structure rose to our left, and the kids turned on the juice and were now passing each other, cornering turns at high speed, attempting donuts, and sometimes failing. We laid back a bit to watch the hijinks, and before long the structure to our left, a solid black wall slowly turned into a highway. A paved highway. The Datsun was the first to make a break for it, and gunned the engine up an almost vertical incline before painfully dropping its front end from a few feet in the air onto the pavement. It immediately sped up to about 90 and then squealed into a Donut, leaving a harsh, burnt rubber smell permeating through the air. The other cars were a little more cautious, each finding their own entrance across the last vestiges of dirt between us and the highway, and before long we had all finally found the sanctuary of a paved road. We stopped the car and watched as the boys began driving past each other at insane speeds turning on a dime, slapping hands mid-pass, singing songs, and filling the air with the smells of scorched rubber.
It is something that we often take for granted in America, but especially for boys, we have one of the most varied and intensive sports cultures in the world. We have baseball, football, basketball, soccer, hockey, golf, lacrosse, track and field, tennis, swimming, dozens of martial arts, and nearly everything else in some form or other. The boys in Oman have soccer, and even then there aren’t many grass fields scattered across the country. Many are happy for the few waning hours of dusk where they play on the beach. Most of their middle-schools, even high schools don’t offer any kind of organized sports, Omani fathers aren’t coaching their boys in intramural leagues. So their playground has become the road. As one would imagine, this has led to traffic fatality statistics that America would consider near apocalyptic. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by drifting. I wasn’t thinking this then though, I was ecstatic that we’d found the highway.
The boys stopped and came over to us and I thanked them all profusely for guiding us to the road. They beamed their great big Bedouin smiles at me. Omanis have the kind of smile that grows so large that you can be sure they have banished all evil from their minds when it appears. As quickly as they’d appeared and rescued us the boys flew back off the highway into the dirt, and vanished into the night.
The highway was as empty as any road I’d ever seen. There were no lights in either direction, and it looks as if it had just been finished recently. Crickets did not chirp from the non-existent foliage, flies and mosquitoes did not converge from the non-existent pools of water, and airplanes did not criss-cross the skies along filaments of light from distant airports. The silence was deafening. The high beams cut a swath of light into the wall of night ahead, and I remember feeling a strange sensation for a long time on that road. We drove on without landmarks of any kind on either side of the road, without signs or cars in either direction. After the bumps and rattles of the previous hours, the car was no longer grinding against gravity and friction, but floating through the night toward some inexorable destination. The moonless sky flattened the bright pin points of stars into muted chalk marks. If I had to imagine what purgatory was like, I would venture to guess it was much like that drive along that deserted highway, the world melting into a stygian darkness around us, and the car soundlessly floating from nowhere to nowhere else.
But our brief interlude into the void did not last overly long. The headlights began to find vestiges of civilization along the roadways, and as the first, small city came into view we spotted a wide corniche with its dragon spine of lights along the water. Even before we’d thought to ask, a sign appeared, “SUR – 600 km”. It was like an eight-ball injected straight into the brain, my foot pushed the accelerator down to the floorboard, where it stayed for the next 350 miles. Finally, it was smooth sailing the rest of the way up the useless map.
As it turned out, getting to Sur was actually the easier part, finding a hotel would be another story. Our trusty Ro’ Pro’ didn’t have many non-expensive options, and the ones they did have were either ignoring their phones, or had changed numbers. We flew into town blind. At night, Sur had the odd charm of an abandoned Renaissance Fair, with even its anachronisms crumbling into disuse around us. The streets began narrowing and curving at impossible angles, drifting between one or two lanes, often disappearing into impassable allies and dead ends without so much as a single sign to foreshadow our about face.
We did find a hotel, and J. got out to check on a room. It was booked. We moved in sputtering turns across the city to another hotel, also booked. And then a third and a forth were also filled. We had probably circumnavigated the city, small as it was, a half dozen times getting rejected by hotels that were either genuinely filled up, or staffed by assholes. We drove out of town in the opposite direction from whence we came, and a string of much more modern looking hotels loomed large along the highway. This was new Sur, the additions cobbled together on the premise that its eccentricities were shocking enough to draw tourist revenue. We stopped at the first hotel we saw and paid a lot more than we’d wanted to for a room. We didn’t even take our bags out of the car.
It was somewhere around midnight. I had been driving for nearly 17 straight hours. The bar was open. The sleepy Indian man, who managed the graveyard shift at the desk, informed us that the hotel had two bars. They had an Arab bar and an Indian bar. This was the oft-repeated formula across the country, but I hadn’t been out much yet, or at all really, so I didn’t know any better. With the choice of Indian music or Arab music we went with what we thought would be the lesser of two evils.
At the Indian bar the clientele was still mainly Omani. There were cheap tables and cheap chairs thrown haphazardly around the room from what was probably a full house a few hours before. J and I sat down near the back at a little square table, and I realized for the first time how close I was to utter and total mental and physical collapse. Once we sat down I realized that the room was painfully bright. Strobe lights blasted us from the stage where an odd collection of sub-continental humanity gathered.
The singer was an Indian man of indeterminate age. His hair was coiffed into some impossible shape and was so black that stage lights seemed to just bend around it after having given up trying to penetrate it. He wore a kind of pastel jumpsuit that opened in a v-neck down his chest. The cheap beers, some German brand we’d never heard off, had such a soothing effect that this strange apparition’s off-tune crooning took on a hypnotic resonance. He bounced across the stage, without his hair shifting a centimeter, as three enormous Indian women fanned themselves behind him.
The next song cantered between English and Hindi and Arabic, and the three sari-clad hulks rose and ambled to the front of the stage. The Omanis were at the edge of their seats. The women bent their knees a bit and slowly spun in a circle. The Omanis howled. Their legs were tapping on the ground. Their mouths hung open. I had encountered something new, and I had the feeling the second I fully understood it I would be disgusted by it. Thankfully, the large ladies tuckered themselves out pretty quickly and had to retreat to their chairs to begin fanning themselves again.
We looked around the room trying to spot another foreigner who might be able to explain this bizarre tableau to us, but we were the only white-faces in the bar. As we cracked into our second beer a small Indian woman took the stage and began singing. Our crooner took the opportunity to walk over to the bar and start a screaming argument with the bartender. I thought this to be a pretty rude maneuver to pull on a fellow performer, but as usual everyone around me knew a lot more about the situation than I did. The woman drowned him out within the first three notes. The piercing, high pitched, banshee wail that erupted from that small woman’s throat blanketed the room as quickly as a canister of mustard gas.
The beers disappeared as fast as our gullets could swallow them and we made a bee-line for the exit. I was more than ready to collapse but my compatriot was anxious to see what the Arab bar was all about. I was immediately impressed by the fact that there was a DJ, and though the music was hardly my cup of tea, it was much more tolerable than the banshee next door. Where the other bar had a smattering of Indian patrons, the Arab bar was entirely peopled by Omanis in their white full-length dishdashas and some other Arabs in some approximation of Western club clothes.
The stage was empty, except for another three enormous women. This time Arab girls in long, and unfortunately form fitting dresses. They rose with that same vacant look in their eyes as the Indian women and walked to the front of the stage to spin around with a little more of an Arabic flair. Their right hands reached out in front curving inward, and their back hands touched their lower back. You Americans would recognize this little shuffle from our little girl’s childhoods. They were enormous fucking teapots, short and most certainly stout.
The bar patrons had much the same reaction, except this time they all began furiously scrawling writing on little scraps of paper, and they bounded toward the stage, knocking each other over in their quest to get the little papers into the hands of the women, who would read them and laugh, shoving some of them into their dresses and dropping some on the ground. When the girls retreated back to their chairs the air filled with more papers thrown onto the stage in their wake.
Was this a transaction of some kind? Were these things for sale? Were they writing them love notes? Prices? I had no fucking idea what was going on, and the drive combined with a few beers had me nearly swimming and, “Hey you British?”
“What the fuck?”
“You, you British?” This unbelievable character in front of me asked with his bony finger a few inches from my eyes.
The Omani in front of me, who had dashed over to my table, looked to be about a thousand years old. His breath stunk of liquor and something else that I assumed was peanuts because his shaggy grey beard was composed almost entirely of peanut shells. J had disappeared to load up on more beers and this ghastly character had slipped into his chair.
“No, I’m American.” I tried to put as much leave me the fuck alone old man into my voice as possible.
“Oh, America!”
It had no effect. I tried to gather myself for the herculean effort of continuing this conversation.
“America,” he raised one bony finger, “Oman” as he gestured to the bar with his other, “Same same,” he said as he put the two fingers together and smiled with a mouth almost entirely devoid of white. I imagine part of the smell from his face was derived from the black stumps where his teeth should have been.
J. was walking back toward the table and I met his glance with a look of such seething hatred that he stopped in his tracks. That moment of hesitation was long enough for a group of Omanis to grab him and sit him down at their table in a classic drunken divide and conquer. I would be stuck with peanut beard for the long haul.
“I Bedu,” he said.
“You don’t say, here I was expecting you to be a porn producer.”
He frowned at not understanding, and pulled out a little one hitter. Now things were getting interesting. Was this old wizard going to smoke some hash right in the bar? But to my dismay he pulled out a pack of tobacco and took a hit. I would see these little displays all over the country later, and when I finally tried one it was probably the harshest hit of any smokable substance I’d ever encountered. I imagine it’s a small part of the reason a lot of these guys wrinkle up so badly.
“Oman good?” he asked.
I wanted a bed more in the three seconds after this question than almost any time I could remember.
“Yes, Oman very good” I said, learning that I could actually sigh an entire sentence.
Then just when all hope seemed lost I was rescued by those lovely, lovely hippos coming back to the stage. The old man nearly dropped his pipe trying to get out his pen and scrawl something in Arabic on a little paper that appeared out of his dishdasha pocket. J’s table also was in a sort of poetic frenzy. The night was getting late, and whatever they were doing this might have been their last shot. The whole bar moved as one, leering whole toward the stage.
We utilized the melee to make our escape. I could’ve slept in an iron maiden that night, but luckily the beds were comfortable, and no infestations incurred to interrupt the wonderful fit of stygian darkness that enveloped me for the next twelve hours. We left our hotel room for the relative sanctuary of the buffet line and stared blankly into the Gulf of Oman as if we’d survived some hellish escape from the mutants prowling a Mad Maxish desert. It only occurred to me then that this was my first road trip in Oman, in the Middle East even. It was going relatively well.
The city of Sur was famous for its ancient boatcraft that is the craft of building boats. They built and still build Dhows, to be more specific, the wooden vessels that plied the seas between the Arabian Gulf, the Cape of Good Hope, Melaka and China. Oman was for a long time an enviable power, or at least a wellspring of knowledgeable sailors (Sinbad supposedly hails from these parts) in this part of the world. The craft that was once the lifeblood of this bizarre little hamlet has now become a simple spectacle for the dribble of tourists that come here. No doubt, if the Sultan’s plans to make Oman into a watered down Thailand come to fruition, it will become a Disneyized version of what seems now a sad, but still genuine, spectacle of ancient knowledge continuously renewed, if not faded, from one generation to the next.
We were hardly in the mood for awe that day though. We briefly flitted about the city in the car, took a few photos of the Dhows on the water, and then decided to skip town for greener pastures, literally and figuratively. There was one stop left on this whistle-stop tour of Oman, Jebel Akdar, the Green Mountain.
Even now, safely back in the vibrant hues of a fall in New York, and the somehow desolate green foreground of Southern California, always receding into the sienna hillsides, when I think of Oman, the primary color I see is brown. There are brown mountains, brown sand, brown dirt, brown hair, and brown eyes. Even the stucco and concrete facades cannot withstand the Arabian Peninsulas’ preference for the color.
Between cities, between malls…between breaths, all is brown. It seemed only natural then that after the dozens of tedious hours of brown driving, and brown sightseeing, that our final trapdoor from tedium would be the Green Mountain. Saying the word green took on an almost talismanic significance as we veered off the coast road outside of Sur, and barreled through the rocky waste of the interior.
Nestled among the crags of Ibra and Ibri, near the gorge of Jebel Shams, the Middle East’s Grand Canyon, shone a beacon of vegetation, tended by the same tribes millennia after millennia. Like the craftsman making their Dhows five centuries after they’d become obsolete, these men of the mountains too would kindle the fire of their ancestry, long centuries after the advances of modern agriculture had made their meager stockpiles of local produce more expensive to buy and ship and maintain then the same crop coming from China, Ethiopia, or Southern California today.
That was the Romantic idea at least. We drove into the rather unremarkable city of Ibri. Like most cities in Oman it was bisected by the highway, melting the mountains into waves of heat shimmying above the pavement. The hotels were expensive, and offered a wide variety of overpriced tour options. All of the pamphlets featured rather featured rather narrow shots of the mountain. Pamphlet after pamphlet showed a single section of mountain, tiered for some kind of farming. We were told by the concierge that for 125 dollars a jeep could carry us up to the top…or somewhere near the top. It was likely a combination of vacation fatigue on one end, and maybe a last futile ray of hope that something would finally beat our already meager expectations before we got back home.
An Omani came in a Jeep a few hours later. Not long after that we were rumbling past a police checkpoint, covered in warning signs in Arabic and English, littered with the bones of dead sedans. The climbs through the Hajar Mountains are intense, and depending on the whims of the police, a two-wheel drive car will sometimes get turned back.
In the Sultanate of Oman traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for anyone under 40. The statistics on driving start to get a little dire after that. My driver, Hami, rolled slowly up the surprisingly well paved mountain highway. Teenagers rushed by, passing us, going uphill around blind corners…the driving dead. After the initial inclines we stopped at an overlook to take in the breadth of an unobstructed view of this uninhabitable stretch of mountains. The range extended until the rock met the sky and everything became a soft blue.
Back in the car we soon discovered that Hami was not, in fact, a tour guide.
“I’m an animal doctor.” He said.
“A veterinarian?” We asked.
He took a second and when we repeated the word he remembered the word from somewhere in his past.
“Veterinarians don’t make a lot of money here?” We asked.
It seemed almost inconceivable that a vet would be moonlighting as a tour guide since they make so much damn money in the United States, but there you have it. Come to think of it the Indian doctors, the ones who treat people, don’t make all that much money in Oman either, and considering how much this guy was gouging us for a short drive it seemed almost inconceivable that any local who spoke English would take any job other than tour guide.
“What animals do you treat?” We asked.
“Animals for farmers,” he paused, “sheeps, goats…”
“Camels!?” We interrupted. They were still pretty exotic animals for us at the time.
“Sometimes.” He answered, but didn’t seem to put any emphasis on treating what we would later discover are incredibly temperamental creatures that most vets probably did not look forward to treating.
The one subject he was very excited to talk about was his Filipino mistress, who worked at the McDonald’s in Sohar. He complained about how expensive her tastes were, how much money he had to spend, how long he had to drive to visit her, etc…
After that first stop we made a beeline for the top, riding the well paved curves in rather treacherous switchbacks. Strangely, the more imposing the peaks became the more often we’d see small villages nestled in the cracks. The SUVs, towing tourists, began to give way to crowds of DATSUNS, the ubiquitous Toyota pick-ups. We’d entered Bedu territory. We pressed on, or up, for another half hour until we got to a parking lot in the heart of four peaks and a number of villages pressed against them. I got out of the car with my camera…still hopeful.
The fresh, cold, damp air blasted us the moment we opened the door. A very light rain was falling, and it almost seemed for a moment that occasional crystals of snow were appearing and vanishing in the wind. After a few months on the coast I would have thought snow to be impossible throughout the entire country, but it is a measure of how high we had actually driven that the temperature could fall so far. The villages around us were lackluster to say the least. The centuries had left their mark on the sagging walls and foundations, and the intervening decades of the late twentieth century had added their own accoutrements. Rusting satellite dishes dotted the roofscape of the villages like the scars of a technological smallpox on the brown skin of the mountains. Everywhere that one dish rusted and bent and fell another rose to take its place.
All of this would have been ok, it was still new. It was still fresh and interesting, the mountains tribes taking a break from the rarity of farm work in the Arabian Gulf to watch WWE wrestling on their satellite systems, (Arabs love wrestling for some reason) but for the one small and predictable problem. This wasn’t a green mountain. Lush, verdant, fertile, abundant—none of these words could adequately describe the scene. What I saw there, atop Jebel Al-Akdar, the radiant jade jewel of the Sultanate, was a single side of a single hilltop, with a few vaguely sprouting fields. I saw the exact same underwhelming vista that had stared back at me from the underwhelming pamphlets at all of the Nizwa hotels. Another hundred and fifty bucks went well spent. We weren’t outside much longer than a cigarette break before we dejectedly ordered our guide to take us back to the hotel. We took small solace in the fact that some Filipino fry-cook was at least going to take our money from the bastard and spend it on some Clinique and a knock-off Prada bag.
When we got back we bee-lined for the bar and struck up a conversation with the Uzbekistani-lady-barkeep. She and the server were both from the Caucuses. He was from Kazakhstan. Apparently the dead eyed dancers in one of the bars at this particular hotel were all Uzbeks. In the Middle East, it was explained to me, Uzbek entertainers were essentially just discounted Russian girls. The Russians all headed to Dubai or Abu Dhabi where the sugar daddies were slightly more refined than their Omani counterparts. So, of course, an hour later we were sitting at a table, watching an empty stage, waiting for some Uzbeki lady parts to swivel across our vision.
The “show” was probably equal parts sad, awful, and comical. Two blondes switched from the front to the back of the stage while a bald septuagenarian in a painfully bright track suit sat at a Casio keyboard playing karaoke classics in the gravelly voice of a two pack a day smoker with the sound quality of a pre-Napster midi file. The dancing girls had mastered the kind of 1,000 yard stare that Eva Mendez would use on a blind date with Kim-Jong-Il. It was time to go.
This was it. I had trekked across a great deal of Oman, looking for some kind of Middle Eastern adventure. I was apparently not quite up to the standards of Lawrence of Arabia, though his particular exploits appear to be wildly exaggerated anyway. The important thing was that I’d left my house with a chunk of time and a car, and come back with a car. What I’d gained in between is anyone’s guess really, I would like to say I’ve got loads of awesome pictures, which I did, but have seemed to vanish from my hard drive in the interim. I could say I gained some experience, some piece of mind about this undertrekked corner of Allah’s brown world, but as you can see it was really more a patchwork of confusion and frustration than anything else. The least I can say is that in sharing this gripping tale with all of you that I’ve finally cemented my legacy as a writer and adventurer. I’ll simply wait here for all the accolades and prizes to roll in.
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