We spent our 5 days traveling throughout the country, sleeping wherever we could find a secluded place to park the car once it got dark. Given the fact that the VAST majority of the population of Oman (which is only about 2.5 million) live in Muscat, finding secluded places to park your car in the interior of the country isn't hard. In fact, we quickly found that it's much harder to find a place with people once you leave the city!
We spent our first night out in the true Arabian Desert--in the empty quarter. The dunes we big and went on forever. Josh was determined to be the driver, which make me the navigator. Now, for anyone who has driven with me I can only guess at what your faces look like at the mention of me navigating. Given my absolutely devastating sense of direction, we got lost numerous times. Really bad idea. I shouldn't be allowed to navigate in a well marked and easy to understand city, let alone the middle of the ARABIAN DESERT where every dune looks the same. The other silly (and by silly I mean really stupid) part of this set up was that between Josh and I, only one of us had experience driving in sand. That would be me. Driving in sand is definitely a skill that takes time to learn, and most people don't consider themselves to truly have learned until they go through the right of passage of getting the car stuck. Generally people try to go through this desert ritual somewhere close to civilization, as I did last fall right by school. Not Josh. Leave it someone who lives in Yemen by choice to decide to take his first shot at driving in sand in the middle of the empty quarter, just a couple dozen kilometers way from the unmarked Saudi border. With all his bravado about looking up how to drive in sand and being a naturally good driver...it took him a total of 7 minutes to get us hopelessly stuck.
We had just embarked on a 5 day long camping trip with now hope of a shower. We were 8 hours into the trip and I stood outside the car in the blazing desert sun looking at the car wheels knowing that I was about to get more sandy and sweaty than I had ever been before. Awesome. We both flopped onto the ground on opposite sides of the car and began to dig. An hour and a half later we finally managed to dig the car out of the sand. Covered in sand mixd with sweat, I took the wheel. We spent the night sleeping on a sand dune under the most stars I've ever seen. Simply gorgeous.
The next few days were a blur of ancient ruins, green wadis, frankincense trees, and fields with camels and cows grazing side by side. I didn't expect to be so taken aback by the sight of cows and camels together in green fields...but it was just so strange. The morning traffic on the roads as we neared the Yemeni border was a mix of cows, goats, and camels, and it never ceased to make me giggle each time we drove past the strange field-mates. The climate and vegetation made you feel almost as if you were in Europe--but we were quickly brought back to the Arabian reality when we saw a camel lung for the same tuft of grass as the black and white spotted cow.
We almost got into some trouble when we came dangerously close to running out of gas. We were taking the coastal route (which according to our map was supposed to be finished)...turns out they hadn't finished the road yet. So we had to turn around after driving for 3 hours in one direction and make our way back to the main, very ugly, highway back to Muscat (a 12 hour drive). We didn't have enough gas, so we checked our map for the nearest gas station. It had a gas symbol pretty close to where we were, so we figured we were in the clear. The gas light came on when we were still 40 km from where we needed to be. I began to conserve gas as much as possible, desperately trying to find trucks to coast behind. The road took us down a winding hill into a really tiny coastal fishing town. We could see the entire village as we came down the hill...there was no shell station, that's for damn sure. We drove all around the village--which took a total of two minutes--without any luck. We checked the map again; it definitely had a gas symbol in this tiny little town. We could figure out for the life of us what the hell the map was talking about. Finally we saw a couple of men standing in the village wadi and we decided to ask them. They didn't speak English (why would they?) so we played charades for a while (I have now played charades in numerous countries on 4 different continents...it is my method of choice for communicating with non English speakers) and finally they waved us to their hut. The two men then pulled out a barrel and a hose, and got ready to syphon. I can't imagine how many brain cells these guys kill daily syphoning gas into cars and I felt bad about being a part of the problem...but we needed gas. Desperately.
With our tank a quarter full, we pulled out of the village, waved goodbye to our new friends and headed back to Muscat. The whole trip was a blast and I'm looking forward to going to the south again. Salalah (the only other main city in Oman, which is the capital of the south) was so green and the weather was far less harsh, even in October. It's a different world down there...which makes sense given the proximity to Yemen. :-) The trip reminded me that one of my favorite parts about this country is that you can literally camp wherever you want. Going off-road to find your own little beach is the norm here for expats and I feel very lucky to be experiencing it before it gets taken over by tourism.
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