First Steps in the Outpost of Tyranny

3rd to 4th November 2009 – Days 36 and 37 – Wadi Halfa to Abri, Sudan


The ferry ride to Wadi Halfa took roughly 20 hours, and sadly we had passed the temple of Abu Simbel in the dark so we did not get to see it from the lake. Upon arrival we were faced with the sight of a dry and dusty desert town with not much going for it. The original Wadi Halfa drowned as a result of the building of the Aswan dam in Egypt so the population had to relocate, and the newly built Wadi Halfa really seems like it has lost its soul in the process. Together with some of the other foreigners from the ferry we spent the day sitting in the couple of cafeteria/restaurants in town enjoying some beverages and having a chat with the friendly owner of one of the places and following the amusing anger sprouts of the owner of the other one. We pulled back to our lokanda early for the night, in preparation of sorting our way out and down south from here the next day.

One small step for a man... One giant leap into Sudan

The next morning T and I slept late again to compensate for our hardships of sleeping on the ferry the night before. Around noon we eventually went looking for the registration office where we completed the lengthy and hierarchical process within two hours. In this time we were pushed around to walk between four different clerks at least ten times, filled another form and had to provide copies of our passport info page and Sudanese visa page with one photo each. The result of the registration was a stamp on our passports for the price of SP100 each – price seems to have gone up quite a bit from the SP57 in the guidebook from four years ago. We then swooshed quickly by the bus station to ask for bus times to Abri, the next town down the Nile, as we agreed that we wanted to suck in as much of the Northern desert atmosphere as possible. There was one going in an hour’s time so we headed off to pack our bags there and then. Back at the lokanda we bumped into Richard who had decided to take the direct bus down to Khartoum, so we said our goodbyes and seeyalaters with him, hoping to catch up with him further along the way.

Downtown Wadi Halfa and its many entertainment options

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With a new registration sticker in passports we hopped on an infamous truck-bus, equipped with musical horns and a driver happy to use them, we tooted and bumped our way along the mostly tarmac, occasionally gravel road towards Abri, stopping at a “service station” of sorts along the way. The Sudanese service station is a patch of sand by the road (much like anywhere else in northern Sudan) with a shelter of palm tree branches propped up by wooden poles. Underneath this, woven mats are placed on the floor and people lounge on them, swatting flies. The most important man in the whole place is the one who owns the key to the chest fridge where piles of bottles are stacked. In this particular service station the fridge was sadly empty so we whiled away the time in the shade before being moved onto another truck-bus towards Abri. The truck-bus is another curious typically Sudanese contraption – the body of a bus is welded onto a truck, seats are bolted to the floor, and any semblance of suspension is removed. These were used before the tarmac road was finished this year, which has cut travel time between Wadi Halfa and Khartoum from 4 days to 12 hours. Air conditioned buses are now running the roads but truck-buses are still used on shorter routes.

Sudan's new fleet of luxury buses

Two women are sat over the aisle from us and, in marked contrast from Egypt, they are quite happy to strike up conversation with us. The language barrier prevents us from actually talking about anything but they are happy to point things out to us, such as the South African cyclists we met on the ferry. I’m already feeling a much more relaxed vibe in Sudan than in Egypt, and the feeling is reinforced on arrival in Abri, a small town with one storey buildings and sandy streets. We rolled up at the only lokanda in town and got a mud-floor room for the night. Here, we met up with Dixon, Lucas, Sean and Rui who we met on the ferry and went for falafel sandwiches before the two of us went to the house of Mugzoub, our new acquaintance. It’s a funny evening – Mugzoub seems happy in our company but we spend half of the time in silence and Mugzoub only becomes more animated on the phone to his girlfriend in Cairo. After a few cups of tea, he invites us to a Nubian wedding but we’re so tired that we have to turn down the invitation. We are in a similar tired state and wouldn’t mind going to have a look but getting roped into a full blown wedding until the early hours of the morning would be a bit tougher, and we are heading to Dongola tomorrow so we want to get some sleep.

Sailing south

2^nd November 2009 – Day 35 – Lake Nasser Ferry, Egypt/Sudan

Our evil plan of crudely exploiting Richard as our walking alarm clock by dropping him casual hints, such as our hostel name, location and room number and a time we thought suitable for a meet-up for catching the train to the port, worked perfectly as we were woken up by him punctually banging on our door at 7.30am on the morning of the ferry trip. After yet another morning scramble of grabbing all our stuff and stuffing it into our backpacks upside down and inside out and then screening the room for any objects we could identify as our own we hurried downstairs to pay and were further postponed by having to wait for the guy at the reception run around the nearest block to get us our change. We got to the train station in time for the 8am train, however, and to the amazement of us all, the train actually left on time! This would make it the first train in Egypt so far to do so, and ironically it should of course be the last train we’d be taking in the country.

The rattle to the port took about half an hour, and after getting to the gate of the port we made acquaintances with two chatty British guys, Lucas and Dixon, while having to wait for our turn to enter as 2^nd class passengers. What followed was an amusing set of formalities for boarding the boat and exiting the country. At the first step the stamp didn’t work and made the whole queue stand for 15 minutes before the man operating the stamp had a revelation and started using a pen to mark “II” on our tickets for 2^nd class, supposedly. At the next step another ticket stamper compensated for this with his over-eagerness and actually mistook my passport for his ink pillow so I now have a stamp of some sort on the back cover. At the next step we first paid to get a paper stamp licked and pressed onto our exit forms (what a job that man has!) and then brutally cut in front of the locals in the passport queue. The final step involved getting our forms for the Sudanese immigration which was to be performed later onboard the ferry.

Thankfully it wasn't in the boat.

Already at this point in time we could hear the signs of dissatisfaction of some fellow passengers behind us in the queue. A certain angry middle-aged whitey had an imminent attitude problem towards queuing at this time in the morning and having to fill in this many forms, especially when they asked for your mother’s name on one of them as well. This raises a question of why this man would choose to visit what has been titled as the most bureaucratic country of Africa, let alone the continent of Africa in the first place. The process all in all had been very smooth and reasonably quick so I couldn’t understand this man’s reaction even from that side of things. If you want to travel, you have to stand in line at border posts from time to time and transport tends to leave at early hours all around the world – at this time in your normal life you would have been in the office for an hour already, and probably sitting in a meeting which would easily outdo this little bit of queuing as measured by both boredom and effort levels. Being the head of the queue at this point and having already gone through all the steps, I sat down on a sunny spot of the ground to enjoy my breakfast (take away from the hostel) not far from the groaners, who still had at least 10 people between them and the clerk, and smiled away at the beautiful morning.

We stepped onboard the ferry around 10am and were in for the long wait before it would eventually pull away from the pier. The ferry is a three-storey beast with somewhat the standard structure of a cruiser: 2^nd class on the bottom with restrooms and a restaurant serving our onboard meal for which we had a coupon each, 1^st class above it on the middle level with its own, smaller restaurant, and the sundeck! We walked through the 2^nd class section enough to label it as a grim and hollow hall full of wooden benches and stinking of engine fuel and headed straight up on the deck to hunt for our perfect corner to camp for the trip. We tried to negotiate our way to the roof of the captain’s deck, but were unsuccessful and settled for the rear end of the deck in the end. We placed our bets for the actual departure time of the ferry: me the optimist went for 13.05, Lucas said 14.20, T guessed 15.02 and Richard played safe and realistic with his 17.00. We bought the firsts of many teas from the restaurant downstairs and sat down for a chat and Jungle Speed, yet again we had some new people to teach this great pastime to and we sure had time to pass.

Is there a bar on deck?

Surprisingly the proportion of foreigners onboard the ferry was quite high, with a big group of 50 people travelling on an overlander truck from Cairo to Cape Town, a smaller group of nine Czechs driving the same route in their own vehicles, two South African guys doing a slightly longer run from Scotland to Cape Town on their bicycles and a few other faces – a Japanese guy whose name went past me, Xiang from China and Rui from Portugal – passing through here as part of their long and comprehensive itineraries. The older generation was represented by a couple of grey guys who we saw in the restaurant in Aswan the night before and two elderly German ladies who are hard to imagine being on this ferry. And of course we had the company of the angry whitey from the queue before.

As hours passed while we waited to set sail, we learnt the meaning of this ferry to the trade between Egypt and Sudan. Merchants, mostly Sudanese, kept appearing and cramming every corridor and free corner of the deck with their goods to the extent that the open and relaxed deck suddenly seemed to serve its purpose rather as an outdoor hold, probably because the ferry lacked an actual one. Our space on deck was also drastically reduced as it was absolutely essential for the Sudanese merchant community to pile their mountains of stuff somewhere. Just when we thought there couldn’t possibly be much more goods to be crammed onboard, I saw a jalaabiya-covered butt pushing its way up one of the staircases leading onto the deck, obviously pulling with it the rest of the man in the jalaabiya and seemingly something very heavy. And hop! A huge American-style fridge had just been swooped on deck with the support of a lot of swearing from the other guy who had been pushing it at the lower end of the staircase.

Our sleeping space shrinks by the minute...

This surely was not the only fridge that was included in the unwritten manifest. When the chimney finally started pushing some black clouds in the air as a sign of departure at 19.20, we declared Richard as the closest guesser and decided to go downstairs to celebrate in the form of dinner. This is when we saw that the access to the restaurant was blocked – by another monster fridge! This one raised even more anger among its carriers who were stuck with the fridge in between the restaurant door, a metal cage to the side of the corridor and a pole at the mouth of the other end. The situation soon broke out into a proper row as people were trying to get through the corridor for obvious reasons, as this corridor was the only one that could be used to get inside or out on the deck. Richard somehow managed to sneak in before one of the merchants started pushing another mouthing something at him and slammed the metal door to the restaurant shut. I tried to explore our possibilities of getting inside as well but I was signaled to pull away in a less than friendly way. No dinner then? Eventually we got in as the guys recouped their strategy and somehow managed to pull the fridge out of its box and squeeze it through the metal pole end of the corridor. Unfortunately, we were too late for the chicken and macaroni we had seen being served earlier in the afternoon and had to settle for ful (Sudanese fava bean stew) and a boiled egg with bread and salad. They had started serving the breakfast meal already at this point. Mental note: the chicken comes before the egg.

Dinner was followed by the Sudanese immigration procedures which weirdly enough included taking everyone’s temperature. All of us cool northern visitors at least seemed to be dangerously low at 34,5 °C - a detail to which no one seemed to mind at all. Another one of those that are not even worth questioning, just go with the flow. Shortly after this we tucked into our sleeping bags under the bright white stars and the black smoke flying straight onto us from the chimney in front of us. As I lay awake with my iPod and covered in my eye mask and pashmina protecting me from breathing in a deathly amount of this black poison, I thought back to the old Finnish women’s magazine I had seen at the Finnish embassy in Cairo with the hilariously Finnish reportage on some unemployed woman who becomes a janitor in Korso, I suddenly felt that I was in fact made for these kinds of moments.

A classic for those of you who understand Finnish, both the language and the culture.

Spacefiller day

31^th October 2009-1^st November – Days 33-34 – Cairo and Aswan, Egypt

Getting back from Dahab at 6.30 in the morning, we had 14 hours before the night train to Aswan. Once again, our only mission for the day was successfully pulled off. Not only did we get the tickets for the ferry to Wadi Halfa, but we also jumped the queue to get them. Positioning ourselves at the back of the queue to the ticket window, we were spotted by a man a few places in front of us who called us over, opened the door to the office and waved us in, where we were served before the masses who had been waiting at the window for quite a bit longer than us. The feeling of slight awkwardness was far overshadowed by the happiness of finally getting everything we needed to head to Sudan, and we celebrated with a long day of (wait for it…) tea, backgammon and the odd beer, eventually heading back to the Dahab Hostel for the last time to pick up our bags, say goodbye to Daniel and Megan, and sneak into the shower. The train to Aswan held the entire population of Cairo in it and moving from wagon to wagon searching for seats involved heavy planning to avoid stepping on the people crammed into every little space, but somehow we managed to find 2 empty seats (probably the only ones on the whole train) and fell asleep quickly. Sudan, here we come!!!

The question of what to do all day in Aswan was well answered for us by the Egyptian railway company – the 7 hour delay meant that we arrived in mid-afternoon instead of mid-morning and, after finding a place to stay, we went for the last beer for a while, and food. Richard had got stuck in Luxor but we agreed to meet up for the ferry tomorrow.

One month on the road – the analysis

It’s been a bit over a month since we left Helsinki now and we’ve had a mixture of activity and laziness but we’ve seen and done quite a lot, all things considered. So far, we have been zipping around Egypt, getting used to the new lifestyle, waiting for replies from 1% Fund projects and our Sudanese visa application for the trip to really begin. Our route has been mainly determined by a process of joining the dots between various projects sponsored by the 1% Fund. Before we went the question had come up of how we’d fare together – back in Helsinki we’d have gone our own ways to work, seen friends and so forth. On this trip, we’ve been attached to each other pretty much the whole time. I’ve always thought that a long trip like this is the ultimate test for a relationship – without total communication and understanding there would undoubtedly be disaster and any faults, exposed 24/7 instead of bit by bit and under more intense circumstances, could cause much bigger rifts than they would do at home.

The first month, all in all, has been our easy start. After 3 weeks in Sudan we will enter Ethiopia and the hunt for the first project sponsored by the 1% Fund will begin.

The 1% Fund, our raison d’être in many places across Eastern and Central Africa over the next year, is an NGO run by retired UN workers to which those who sign up give 1% of their salary, used to finance development projects across the world. I visited the organisers in Geneva in August to finalise the details of what M and I would do for them, and we have a list of several dozen projects financed over the last five years to visit, look at, talk about with local people and prepare a report to send back to Geneva. The reports in turn would be put into the projects’ dossiers and would be used when considering other projects from the same local NGOs. A totally non-profit organization in which no-one receives a salary, it’s a very worthy NGO which, as we will hopefully see, makes a difference in small communities across the world and for which we are very happy to give our time and efforts. Our first projects may be in Ethiopia if we can make contact with them, although we are definitely going to visit some in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo amongst others.

Awards so far :

T’s “Natural Selection” Award for mass reproduction goes to Egyptian cats. They’re everywhere and, quite honestly, if they can survive the Cairo traffic, they deserve all the awards they can get.

T’s “Questionable Interior Design” Award goes to the United Arab Emirates for uniformly placing its toilet roll holders in such a bizarre position near the floor of the wall behind the toilet that it’s impossible to reach, unless you’re Nadia Comaneci or some breed of snake.

T’s “Ridiculous Amounts of Food Served” Award goes jointly to every Indian Restaurant in Oman for serving the entire annual rice consumption of Equatorial Guinea with every meal.

T’s “Nice Story” Award goes to the guy who runs the minimarket across the road from the Shams restaurant in Dahab for trying to sell me a packet of cigarettes for twice the going price on the basis that all other L&M packs in Egypt were fakes and therefore cheaper. This was done with a completely straight face.

And finally, T’s Lookalike Award is deservedly given to Mohammed from the Boomerang Hostel in Luxor who, I believe, is actually Yannick Noah.

M’s Persistence award goes jointly to all Omani taxi drivers for whom “no” is not an acceptable answer. A refusal is generally met by a bemused look, and they will drive 10 metres to catch up with you and ask again. “Where are you going ?” – “We’re walking” – “Walking?!” – “Yes”

M’s “Dude Where’s My Board” award goes to an American guy from Dahab Hostel who backed up his floppy blond hair and bandanna by being totally incapable of finishing any sentence without including the words “weed” or “waves”. The runner up prize in this category goes to the Australian guy who declared that he didn’t like Aswan because “the drug culture isn’t a patch on Thailand’s”. A worthy reason to travel halfway around the world if ever there was one.

A whole lotta nothin'

29^th-30^th October 2009 – Days 31-32 – Dahab, Egypt

We went to Dahab with one main objective – do as little as possible. This was not only achieved, but achieved with flying colours! After an increasingly typical desperate dash for Cairo’s Turgoman bus station and a night bus in which I was woken up five times to show my passport and the driver got into a show of strength with an articulated truck (which, thankfully, nobody won) we pulled up in Dahab and headed straight for BishBishi, the place Richard had recommended to us. “Check in is at 12” they told us, “so your room is not yet ready. You can go to our restaurant on the beach to chill out for a bit if you want”. The expression “chill out” was one that seemingly everyone in the Dahab hospitality business knew and we soon learnt why. We hardly left “the place on the beach” for the entire two days and instead entertained ourselves with endless cups of tea, endless games of backgammon, and a few beers to boot. The first night saw a valiant attempt to do something else as we went to eat next door (and after my 6 hour nap in the restaurant, it seemed appropriate). M went one better and dragged herself several minutes back to BishBishi for a shower, although dragged herself right back after for more tea and backgammon. The following morning saw us greeted like old friends by the staff and we were then given a hearty goodbye and best wishes. A great and friendly place to “chill out”.

"Get the jumper cables, coffee isn't helping!'

Are we getting slightly too old and comfortable...?

Richard has headed to Aswan already and we’ve arranged to meet him on Sunday. Between then and now we have to get our ferry tickets from Cairo on arrival tomorrow morning, pick up our bags from Daniel and Megan and finally say goodbye to Dahab Hostel, and then get ourselves onto a night train to Aswan without any glitches in the plan. It should be fine, inch’allah, and we embark on the long road to Sudan.

Adventures with Mr. Asshole

23rd-28th October - Days 25-30 - Cairo, Egypt

6 days melted into one as we returned to that city we now call home – Cairo. Our pockets breathed a sigh of relief as we took the bus from the airport to Midan Tahrir without having to ask our banks for permission first, and we hopped back to the Dahab Hostel and settled in for a few days of business, leisure and lazy wandering.

The business portion consisted of 2 parts: Getting the Sudanese visa, and then getting a ferry ticket across Lake Nasser into Sudan. This first part was complicated by several predictable factors – Sudanese bureaucracy, the French consulate, and our ever decreasing ability to wake up to alarms. We had gone into the Sudanese embassy and were instructed by a man who we would (with great affection) come to call Mr. Asshole that we had to bring 2 photos, a letter of recommendation from our embassy and 100$. M delightfully demonstrated the advantages of being Finnish as she swanned off to Zamalek, got her letter and had a coffee even before I had squirmed my way out of the metro in search of the consulate, which internet maps had told me was out east in a district I’d never been to. As I walked further down the small, dirty and empty streets, asking people who couldn’t give me answers, I became more and more doubtful that I would find the French consulate here. We needed to get the letters into the Sudanese embassy by 12, and it was now 11. The clock was ticking. I decided to abandon my map and ask everyone, getting pointed in vague and contradictory directions each time. Eventually one gentleman informed me that I was in the wrong part of town and bundled me into a taxi with strict instructions to the driver, and off we set across town. An hour and many kilometres of traffic jams later I emerged sweating, tired and cursing at the foot of the Finnish embassy building where M was sat, looking unfussed and refreshed. Trying the phone number several times again, I cursed the Republic even more vigorously. M’s suggestion we go up to the Finnish embassy again bore fruit, and we had an address and a phone number. It turns out that there are 2 El-Fadl streets in Cairo and that Mappy had given me not the large street in the centre of town, but the filthy alleyway out in the suburbs. The joys of travel.

There was a twist in the story yet as the consulate found itself completely unable to pick up the phone when I called it, and then refused to issue me a letter of recommendation on government orders. Mr. Asshole was not going to be happy about this.

And so it proved the next day as we handed in our applications, with Mr. Asshole assuring me that I would not get a visa without a letter of recommendation. I tried to smile and persuade him that he could give me one but he kept on repeating the same two slogans : “No letter, no visa”, and “I told you the rule”. Great. Thankfully M knows how France works and wasn’t overly fussed as we thought we could try again at the consulate in Aswan. Having made us stand around and wait for 3 hours, Mr. Asshole told us we could come back tomorrow to pay, and we began to see a hint of a smile. The day after, we got our passports back, laden with visas. Our names are misspelt on both of them but Mr. Asshole sorted us out well.

Our desperate last minute attempts to buy ferry tickets sank because it was too late but we’ll go back on Saturday as we were ordered to in order to try our luck again.

Leisure has taken many forms as well : lying around, drinking tea and beer, playing backgammon and wandering around the area with the various interesting characters we’ve met – Daniel and Megan, two Americans studying in Moscow; Derrick, a Dutch guy who introduced us to the wonderful game “Cow trade”, and Richard, an English guy who’s heading down to Cape Town and should, inch’allah, be on the boat with us on Monday. The less interesting characters, like the Swedish group who drink lots and say very little, we have tried to avoid. Many hours of backgammon, many gallons of tea and many hours of lazing later, we’ve hopped on a bus to Dahab on the Sinai coast for a couple of days before heading back to Cairo on Saturday and starting the long slog south. Daniel and Megan offered to keep our backpacks in their room so we’re free of them for a couple of days. Woohoo.

This entry is dedicated to M on her 26th birthday and on finding out her sky high thesis grade – I apologise to her that the first bar I took her to had already closed down and that we couldn’t find the second one but at least we had Thai food with Egyptian wine!

Communiqué to M’s friends

Dear Friends of M,

Before leaving on this trip, I heard vague rumours of your concern that I would be dragging M from one fleapit hostel to another, spending the occasional night sleeping under a bridge and only eating berries plucked from trees and whatever we could find crawling around under rocks in an endless quest to spend as little money as possible. I would like to assure you that this is not the case. In the last week we have done the following:

A meal and bottle of wine at “Trader Vic’s”, a restaurant in the InterContinental Hotel in Muscat.

A tour of the desert, just for the two of us, in an air-conditioned 4x4

A dolphin watching trip.

2 nights in an apartment hotel in Dubai (this picture features only one of five rooms)

Total cost of above activities: Enough to gain us super-quadruple-platinum membership of Amex

Total cockroaches spotted: Zero.

I’m already starting to think of applying for jobs and preparing myself for the end of the cash reserves although hopefully your fears will have been allayed, at least for now :)

Plane Stupid

21st-22nd October 2009 – Days 23-24 – Muscat, Oman

Needless to say really, but we did not only miss out on the mosque but got to Gabor’s office closer to 1pm more to show our humiliated faces and to say thanks once more for the tour than to rent any cars. I also felt a headache strong enough to put me off driving mounting already early on in the morning, so this time the disappointment of still not getting to drive does not swoosh over me in the slightest.

Instead, we took a microbus to the nearby fishing town of Seeb as our afternoon activity. Less than an hour’s drive west from Muscat city, this quiet town is a regular stop for the locals for some fair-priced tailoring and other shopping. During our stay in Seeb we scoured the main street and the corniche in search of squid kebabs – the first we did slightly poorly at, but the squid kebabs we managed to enjoy fresh out of fire and concluded them being worth our rials even if they don’t top the ones I’ve munched in Cambodia and Vietnam on my earlier journeys. I also ended up spending a couple of rials on Omani halwa (softer and gooeyer than its Middle Eastern counterpart and made mostly out of dried fruit instead of nuts and almonds) and local coffee to take as souvenirs to be indulged in on those social nights to come along the way.

The lure of the squid man

Pre-empting our morning flight out of Muscat the next day we decided to come back from Seeb in good time and spent our evening recovering over some excellent Moroccan tagines and thé à la menthe in one of the centres of Muscat we hadn’t yet explored. Back at the hotel well before midnight, we should surely wake up to the six alarms we set to start at around 7am and safely embark the plane scheduled to leave at 10am.

Next picture – a déjà vu from my Parisian times when we had a certain TGV to catch with my flatmate and I shook her up too late for standing a chance at catching it – “T! T!!!!! T!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We’ve missed the plane!! It’s 11am!!!!”. What followed from this was a trip to the Gulf Air office with one of T’s well-renowned stories that he has a habit of making up at tough spots. As I was focusing on looking miserable and ashamed, T blabbered away to the clerk about how our rental car had broken up on the way back to Muscat this morning and we couldn’t make it to the airport on time despite having got up at 4am in order to drive the distance from Nizwa (a town in central Oman, in the Hajar Mountains) specifically reserving enough time to catch our plane. A couple of remarks about how beautiful Oman is but how crappy it is to have a car break down here as the distances are great and roads winding was all it took to get the clerk to issue new tickets for us for the same evening, with a layover in Bahrain airport overnight. After the clerk said we would not be charged for the re-issuance this time, T nicely topped the story off with a joke about sending the bill to Europcar even if that would have been the case. Hurrah! Bravo! Academy award! And good luck on your career as an act… I mean politician, T! And too bad for your brand value, Europcar. We walked out of the office with our new tickets and couldn’t resist to high five already before turning the corner.

We suddenly had an extra afternoon in our hands in Muscat. Without further ado, I spotted an ad for dolphin watching trips and within 30 minutes we were at the marina sitting on a boat with some well-to-do Emirati tourists. We got a nice and speedy (read: bumpy) ride along the coastal corners around Muscat and were offered various snacks by the smiling women of the party which seemed to appear regularly out of some miracle secret pockets inside their abeyyas. We didn’t see any dolphins, however, as they apparently come close to the shoreline in the mornings to eat and then bugger off further out of reach of these kinds of trips. Oh well, we’ll just have to come back for the bottle-noses or try catch them elsewhere another time.

An apparently famous sea arch.

With apologies to those who are bored of sunset pictures by now...

With some nice sunset pics stored on our cameras’ memory cards we rolled up at the Muscat airport later that evening, well in time for our flight.

Hard Come, Easy Go.....

19th – 20th October 2009 – Days 21-22 – Muscat, Wadi Shab and Wahiba Sands, Oman

With our total bill for the Dubai visit rising to roughly 250 € for what was effectively two nights stayed over and less than two days spent exploring this tower town (without only two of these €s spent on conventional shopping in the form of a skirt for me!), we courageously turned our back on all the glitter in order to head back to the more cozy coast on the Omani side.

Bus ride back from Dubai started at 7am, and the bus can be described cozy in a similar fashion than any town in Oman could be; comfortable with no frills and delivers the experience with just enough hassle that you feel the human factor. On this particular ride the human factor presented itself when there was less than 20 kms left to ride until reaching the terminus and the bus driver told everyone to get off and change onto another vehicle waiting outside in front of the bus. Either the first bus must have broke down at a seriously ridiculous moment on the main highway that feeds into Muscat downtown, or there’s some kind of restriction on buses older than certain vintage from being allowed inside the ring road. No explanations given or asked for, as we had to be woken up by the bus driver for the change and were far too sleepy to question anything, the journey continued safely for the last 20 kms. The only other moment that I can recall from the journey was the deliciously fit border guard on the Dubai side while exiting the Emirates. Could I have a stamp, pretty please, sir?

Back in Muscat, we staggered through our day with professional backpacker tactics. This means, of course, hitting the beach area of Shatti al-Qurm for some chilling under the sea breeze while enjoying various treats, ordering them one at a time and from different places so that you have the feeling of moving around when in fact you’re just staying inside a pathetic 100 m strip of beach. We don’t do this kind of thing too often, though, so we allow ourselves to feel good about spilling over to the enemy side. After intoxicating ourselves with some lush juice, fish & chips (yep, guess who’s the true Brit here…) and coffee with ice cream – all neatly within the set 100m strip limit – we booked ourselves in for the big bang to decorate the spending log a bit more: full day tour of some wadi and desert bashing covering a total distance of 600 kms to be driven across the country with a private driver-guide in a 4x4 with lunch and drinks included. Fun starts 8,30am tomorrow morning and comes wearing a price tag of 280€. The guide said that the only thing we need to bring is ourselves wearing hiking shoes and swim gear, but I’m guessing I might want to remember to wear something over that too.

Livin' the hard life in Shatti al-Qurm

Hard come, easy go – you know it.

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The next morning we wake up at 8.25am and rush downstairs for our rendez-vous with Gabor, our possession for the day. This Hungarian guy turns out to be a lot of entertainment with his stories of experiences in Oman, where he has been living for five years now and running the tour operator business with his partner for the past two years. He is one of these straightforward individuals that I can imagine to split opinions, and we take the positive attitude towards this and feel at ease with him instantly.

Striking a pose to match the Omani coast.

Driving south on the eastern coast of Oman we stop at a sinkhole and some spots by the ocean accessible quickly on his colourfully painted off-roader, apparently unique in Oman and admired by the local guys. You can’t but smile at the camel smirking on the side of the car. After these preliminary shows of what him and his vehicle are made of we reach the first main attraction of the day, Wadi Shab. Gabor explains how the mouth of this wadi used to be accessible by foot until the area flooded under a year ago and leads us over what is now a creek coming out of the mouth of the wadi. A local young entrepreneur is running a monopoly service in crossing visitors over with his little boat which Gabor is not very impressed about as he has to dish unreasonable cash to the kiddo and also pay in advance already for what will be the return crossing later. We start walking up the wadi, which changes from being a gravel path to a more rocky climb on the way with some occasional jumping over the falaj, the local irrigation canal, that runs on the bottom of the wadi.

Taking a wander along the falaj

After about an hour’s walk we reach the end of the wadi, or the point of no further penetration by foot at least. We have come to the mouth of freshwater pools or lagoons which lead into a cave with some funky spots for climbing out of the water to do jumps back into the lagoon inside the cave. We climb and bomb back into the water a couple of times and just generally float around admiring the rock formations above and around us for a good hour before starting to head back. The cave is like a sweet secret haven, tailor-made for cooling ourselves off after the hike. We express our open envy to Gabor for his job and he starts scouting out for our possibilities to join his company for some work – he’s desperately short of staff and is complaining about how difficult it is to recruit suitable individuals for this kind of job who really make an effort towards the guests’ experience and don’t just play around at the company’s expense because they get to drive fancy cars around in scenic settings meeting new people and cashing out on decent salary on top of all that. Apparently the local guys have a bad habit of causing extra work at the garage as a result of some reckless off-road bashing. He starts to paint careers of a guide and a camp chef (that are always taken to the desert trips) for us. We kindly refuse for now but promise to come back to him if our other dream jobs fall through.

Gabor's demonstration of "another day at the office"

After the return crossing back to the parking lot Gabor loops his car around to provide a shady spot for our lunch break. We are offered various treats in small boxes and we feel happy about the first meal of the day, but Gabor mouths his opinion about the undercooked rice in the blunt wording of “I’m very sorry about the rice, it is just shit – I don’t understand how these people can toss up even in the simplest thing like this”.

As we drive further south to reach the Wahiba Sands I have “a micro nap” of a good half an hour in which time Gabor and T exchange life stories – Gabor having to tell his again later in the evening due to my badly timed doze-off. Dune bashing at the sands remains slightly disappointing due to the fact that by the time we get to the furthest town down before the sands begin and deflate our tires, there’s only an hour left until sunset. Gabor knows the limits of his car and skills, not being a Bedouin-level expert at desert driving just yet, and provides us with the best he possibly has time for before the darkness sets upon the dunes making them too hard to read well enough to avoid getting stuck. Gabor tells the story of his last failed attempt and the resulting dig-out mission and we insist on him not trying to cross his limits.

"The only Hungarian-speaking tour guide in Oman" bashes some dunes

M bashes some dunes in her own way

A few lucky dunes escaped a bashing...for now.

At sunset we pop into the nearby house of Gabor’s bedouin friend for a brief moment of Omani coffee, or kahwah, and dates. Despite T’s immense effort at coffee drinking (two cups downed for a non-coffee-drinker is fair enough), I master to paint us black as I receive a cup with my left hand, something which earns me a blunt displeased remark from Gabor. Luckily this mistake goes fairly unnoticed as the children of the house are putting up a right show off in front of the visitors with the little girl tricking her older brothers to mistreat her and her crawling back to mommy and the guests for some attention-seeking weeps before running off again to aggravate the boys some more. A case in point in revealing the true power structure of the families in Arab countries.

We head back into the darkness for the three hour drive back up to Muscat and hear some more great stories of the Omani way of life in the view of an expat worker. We tell Gabor about our troubles with getting a rental car and he makes some phone calls to check the situation concerning driving without IDP in Oman and gets confirmation from his friends about IDP not being necessary for renting and driving. He then promises to try sort out a car for us the next morning and we schedule a date at his office for this. He suggests we should not miss out on the Grand Mosque either so we agree to show up after a visit to the mosque first. In the end, Gabor leaves us at the InterContinental in Muscat and we head inside to splash yet some more cash under the pretext of celebrating my upcoming birthday. We dine in true expat style with a bottle of import rosé followed by some stinking cocktails which we could well have skipped... But once having opened the money-spending flood gates they just seem to be stuck open and result in other gates popping open with the flow. One of the white and orange coloured taxis carry us back to our hotel and yet again we strongly doubt our ability to make it to Gabor’s office (let alone the Mosque) in time.

I ♥ MONEY

17th-18th October 2009 – Days 19-20 – Dubai, United Arab Emirates

The outcome of yesterday’s choice was closer to option 1. I woke up with that familiar crappy feeling and we headed off for the bus to Dubai, which we couldn’t take because it was full. The baking Omani heat, my hangover and M’s inability to come to any kind of a decision left us sitting for a while until a bus to Buraimi, on the Emirati border pulled up. I made up my mind and we got on, and I fell asleep. Next thing I knew we were there, and walked across the border. In another one of those things which are impossible to understand but must be accepted, there are two border crossings in Buraimi, which go to the Emirati town of Al-Ain on the other side of the border. One is for Gulf countries only and takes you directly to the centre of Al-Ain. The other, which we ended up using, leaves out standing on the side of a highway, many kilometres out of town.

Once again, we stood around wandering where the nearest ATM was to pay for a taxi, until a 4x4 pulled up and a cheery voice spoke to the back of our heads. “Hi there! You guys need a lift?”. As I prayed to Allah that my alcohol sweat wouldn’t send our benefactors into immediate violent convulsions, we stepped in and thanked them for their help. To make me feel even better, one of their first words were “Sorry if we smell bad – we’ve been out collecting rocks all morning!”. I breathed a sigh of relief. My odour wasn’t going to kill anyone today. Jeff and Treva were a spritely couple from Missouri who showered us with help, invitations to their house for grilled fish, and drove us around town several times searching for snacks, money, and the bus stop to Dubai. We had to turn down their generous invite because we didn’t have anywhere to sleep in Dubai and felt that we should probably get going. My first act on the bus was, once again to fall asleep.

We decided that we wouldn’t have time to go to Musandam and so we’d just stay in Dubai to look at this huge city. M wants to see the desert and wadis in Oman and we don’t really have time to see both Musandam and the Wahiba Sands.

Dubai is a huge city in all dimensions, full of shiny things, people and money. It’s the biggest shrine to capitalism that I’ve ever seen – shopping malls are scattered all over the city, huge and imposing and offering different themes. M’s choice of Mall for us to visit, for instance, was themed on the Arab explorer Ibn Battuta and had various sections decorated according to the different areas he visited – Tunisia, Egypt, Andalusia, and so forth. An entire section was dedicated to restaurants, there was a 21 screen cinema, and the mall was open (and full of people) until midnight. People don’t only shop at malls, it’s a centre of Emirati social life too.

Ibn Battuta Mall - The large Chinese boats section

East meets West

Despite the shopping overload and the superficial nature of life there (big new cars and designer clothes everywhere you look) I found myself actually quite liking Dubai’s vibe. As I decided this the world looked on in shock and amazement although no-one was more surprised than me. I can’t really put my finger on it. It’s visibly impressive, of course, and it’s also a very functional city with a great public transport system, including waterboats and old abras going across the creek where the gentle sound of water splashing around the boat drowns out the traffic all around.

An oasis of calm...

It’s very Western in one way, although people wander around in all sorts of traditional clothing and there are lively souqs and old quarters too, for instance the Batakiya district with its low-rise sand coloured houses by the creek. In many parts of town you can quite easily forget you’re in a city world renowned for shopping and skyscrapers. I even found myself towards the end imagining that I could quite happily live there. That may be slightly over the top and I’m sure I’d get bored of hanging around in shopping malls and staring at glass giants although it was definitely better than I thought.

M waits for a bus through the skyscraper jungle.

Islam adopts to anything!

It is Dubai - honest! The Batakiya district unveils its charms

We ended up spending two days there (even if the second was by accident having missed the bus back to Muscat in what is becoming quite a trend) before heading back to Oman.

The ultimate Emirati souvenir - the world's largest gold ring. I politely turned down M's request to buy it for her

M and T's Big Night Out!!!

16th October 2009 – Day 18 – Sohar, Oman

After finally managing to get up early enough to get a bus from Muscat, we find ourselves bound for the northern Omani town of Sohar. From the city bus stop, Sohar seems unremarkable enough and we settle on a plastic table with plastic chairs in the conservatively named Riyadh Restaurant for a drink as we decide what the hell to do from here. Various research missions to travel agents provide us with two bits of information: there are no more buses out of Sohar today; and the cheapest hotel in town costs 100€ a night for a double. Crap. Faced with this kind of situation, a wise traveller would not decide to head to Dubai, MoneyVille USA – but given that wisdom is not one of our foremost properties (even though, given M’s misadventures over the last 17 days, luck seems to be) we decide to do just that. We’ve read on the internet that the border crossing between here at Dubai is only open to Gulf citizens and so we decide to head to the Royal Omani Police to check out the current situation. And that’s where the fun starts. M waits outside while I go in to enquire as to the current status of the border crossing.

- Hi. I’ve come to ask for information – the Buraimi border post.. is it open ?
- Buraimi ? You want a taxi ?
- No no.. I would like to know if it’s open.

I feel already that this exchange is not really going anywhere. A few more fruitless exchanges follow until the guy asks me to follow him outside, and all seems to be going nowhere until he bumps into another guy, and leaves me in policeman #2’s seemingly capable hands.
Policeman #2, it turns out, is not only helpful but very friendly too. Not only that but, as an ex-tour guide, he speaks great English and loves to talk too. He asks me to hold on for a second while he calls a German friend of his. Buraimi, it turns out, is indeed open for EU citizens, so obstacle #1 has been surmounted. Obstacle #2 – Find-A-Cheap-Hotel – is equally easily sorted as our new friend Jaifar drives us there. Enjoying Jaifar’s company and wanting to thank him for his help, we ask him to take us somewhere to get him a drink and so we end up in the overly-opulent Sohar Beach Hotel. There’s a bar here and, so he’s told buy the barmen, there’s a Polish group playing there tonight too! A few beers later we meander off to the nightclub and the Polish group eventually turns up. I’d told Jaifar that Polish folk music was good but we never expected what we got – a Hans-Moleman-from-the-Simpsons lookalike fronted by three girls dressed in what even raging liberals would call supershort miniskirts – the whole ensemble, looking extremely bored, belting out classics from such artists as Enrique Iglesias, the Bangles, and Elton John.

The "Polish Band" feat. bored girls

As I go to the bar to get another beer, I meet Douglas, a Scottish mining expert who’s been living in the Gulf for seven years and has been recently transferred to Sohar. As with most people living far away from home, he’s an interesting character with plenty of stories to tell and the four of us make a good team in this rather surreal setting – discussing Omani culture and Middle Eastern travel (as well as Arabic swear words and miniskirts) with scantily-clad Polish teenagers singing Spice Girls hits in the background. Were we expecting this when we alighted in Sohar this afternoon? M and I agree that we didn’t. Douglas departs with the promise of trying to sort us out a bed with friends of his in the Emirates for tomorrow night and we bid him a fond farewell for now.

Jaifar, it turns out (or so he assures us), is in a fit state to drive us back to the hotel but not before getting us a shawarma each in what he tells us is the best snack joint In town, which we find hard to disagree with! This (typical??) Omani evening ends with us sitting tipsy in a shop doorway chowing down with the friendliest policeman in Oman. Well… why not indeed??? Jaifar drives off home and we leave him with great thanks and another fond farewell. He’s a keen traveller as well as a nice guy and I would hope that somewhere in this wide world we would meet again.

Jaifar and T, very happy after their shawarma

M and Jaifar feat. crooked Omani hat

It’s 3.15am as I write and we have two options for tomorrow:

1) A.k.a “What we want to happen”: We get onto the 9am bus to Dubai and get to the airport where Douglas told us we could get an International Driving License. We then rent a car, drive to either Fujairah or Ras al-Khaimah for the night with one of Douglas’s friends, before heading off to Oman’s Musandam peninsula (which Douglas has told us is extremely beautiful and full of natural wonders).

2) A.k.a “what is more likely to happen”: We get up too late to call Douglas before he gets into work, think “shit”, and head back to square one in Muscat. Watch this space, and good night.

First Steps in the Land of the Benevolent Sultan

14th – 16th October 2009 – Days 16 to 18 – Muscat, Oman

Arriving to Muscat from the exuberantly noisy and dirty Cairo serves as a good reminder of there being some sophistication left in this world still. Muscat airport in the evening looks somewhat like a candy store with spotlights in soft shades of green and purple surrounding the dashingly clean white building, and the airport sure has a good gardener to look after its bushes too. I was aware of that Sultan Qaboos has a very specific taste and that he likes to look after the general outlook of things, and just by seeing the airport you can tell that he has a thing for colours in particular. After all, this is the same man who ordered the Hyatt Hotel in Muscat to tone down its coating because of the pinkish building was apparently too bright – for the Majesty or for the area or what, I’m yet to find out. Now the hotel’s coating is described as ‘peachy’ instead. (Later addition: Unfortunately we never made it to the Hyatt to check out what the new coating looks like so I can’t provide evidence of the Majesty eye for style in this case.)

Omani Urban Design, colour coordination par excellence

Our first impressions of the country were unified in terms of how neat everything is. In the taxi from the airport to our hotel on the Muscat corniche we looked around in amazement at all the buildings and cars being shiny and new (there’s a fine for driving a dirty car) and at people walking on the street looking very proper in their outfits. We came to a slight panic, even, about how quiet it is around you in this capital city. There is virtually no noise, just the humming and swooshing of cars driving past and the odd hooter from taxis asking if we want to hop in for a drive somewhere. People don’t seem to speak much, to us or to each other. For a short moment I started thinking that there’s something wrong with us or that we’re not that welcome to this spotless paradise with our backpacks. As always, I decided not to let this bother me for too long and already from the first night settled on enjoying the silence, peace and beauty of this strange capital which has not got the slightest feel of a capital to it. The first two days in Oman we spent wandering around exploring the corners of Muscat, not really getting too fussed about the pace of which we were doing things. First “morning” for us started late at 5pm, and we did nothing at all apart from walking to along the corniche in Mutrah, the port area of Muscat where we were staying, and paying a quick visit to the souq. Mutrah has hotels, a couple of restaurants, a museum, a souq and the fish market which you can breathe in as you’re waiting for a microbus right next to it at the aptly named Fish roundabout.

Haggling for bargains (or not) in Muttrah souq

The second day we improved our standards enough to rise at 11.50am only to rush out from the hotel as we had to check out at noon. As we hadn’t sorted our lives out by this point enough to know where we’d even be continuing to from Muscat, we swiftly checked in at another hotel next door for 30 % lower price. We had at least investigated our surroundings as much the night before to know this was officially the cheapest hotel in town. After the downgrade in price but not in quality, we set out to explore the town a bit further and possibly to rent a car.

The Muttrah corniche by night

Muscat is laid out on the rocky coast of the Gulf of Oman, and pretty much everything is centered in or around three main areas of town called Mutrah, Ruwi and Qurm. All of these are separated by 2-3 km’s distance from each other and require a microbus or taxi ride if you don’t have a car at your use and happen to be lazy like us. In other words, no one walks in this town anyway so it’s easier to just do what the locals do and jump onto the microbus. On our first day in Muscat we had nervously looked around for where and how you could get on these things but it was only on the second day that we were awake enough to crack the formula (they just stand at roundabouts and you get in – simple as pie).

On one of these buses it’s a 10-minute ride to Ruwi which is the transport hub of town to inquire about buses and car rental and to do further research at an internet café. After a visit to the bus station, a better look at “the Bible” (Lonely Planet) and a 3-hour session on the net it turned out buses don’t go to too many places in Oman, at least not very often, and that by renting a car you can see much more as most of the attractions are in its nature and cannot be reached via public transport, and most often a 4x4 is needed as well. Best place to get a car quickly in Muscat is the airport so we got a taxi there (37 kms), negotiated one from one of the rental companies and at the point of handing my license in for the paperwork, I realized I’d left my wallet at the internet café. Back to Ruwi on the microbus we went, me holding my breath and thinking about all the places I’d have to start calling in case the wallet would not be found. Gladly the guys at the café had found my wallet and made sure I checked that every Rial of cash was still in there as well, again an example of Omani society at its finest. I had to insist five times to leave a tip to the guy running the café and once he finally accepted my small token of gratitude, he passed it on to the other guy hanging around keeping him company. Go figure. I called the lady at the car rental agency in the airport to say we could come pick up the car now, but stupidly made sure my license would actually be valid as it’s not an international driving permit, and was told that would not do. Disappointed at the fact that I wouldn’t get to drive on the wide, new roads in decent traffic, we concluded that it would be for the better to drop the car rental for now and just take a bus the next day to get moving somewhere at least.


The evening we spent visiting the Sultan’s palace in old Muscat. You can get a surprisingly close look at it without any guards patrolling around making you feel uncomfortable as the Sultan is a man close to his people in all respects. We admired some more of the nightly skyline of Muscat on the walk back to the hotel, passing by some beautifully lit rocks in pastel colours, all in perfect harmony.

Omani rock decoration - colour coordination par excellence