A borderline case

It’s New Years Eve. Instead of watching the last-day-of-the-year-cabaret on Dutch television we sit under the roof of farmer Salem’s shed. Three friends of his join us to drink coffee and have a chat. In between some of them pray to Allah, whilst the others continue talking and laughing. In the Netherlands one would be quiet and wait for the ‘amen’.

When everyone goes home Salem enjoins us to sleep in the warm shed, and Ali promises to return with a hot meal. The wind is tempestuous now and the temperature drops to twenty degrees. Lovely in our home-country, but we are shivering with our tropically spoilt bodies.
Ali, a young and recalcitrant veterinary student, returns a little later, after we made our bed in one of the sheds, between hay and dirty car parts. The rice with eggs, grilled meat and Omani bread tast delicious after another day of suffering. At nine o’clock we gratefully take a dive into our bed, in a farmers shed in the northern part of Oman, while the wind howls around the small house. We wish each other a happy New Year a little too early, because our tired bodies won’t make it until twelve o’clock.

The next morning Ali takes us in his Mercedes to Misfath Al Abra’een, a village high in the mountains behind Al Hamra. As well as in Al Hamra, in Misfath Al Abre’een everyones family name is Al Abri, in plural Al Abra’een.

The village has been built half in and half against a mountain slope of the Al Jabal Al Akhdar Mountains. The early settlers heated rocks with fires until they burst, so they could use pieces of it to build their houses. A mixture of clay, dung and straw function as cement. Because of the lack of space houses were built close to each other with narrow, spooky passages between them. Cars can not enter the village and the donkey still is the most important mode of transportation.
We walk on the kilometres long falaj, the stone-made water canal, until we reach the source. Everywhere on the mountain slope flat terraces are built where people cultivate date trees, citrus fruit and vegetables. Time stands still here.

Late in the morning we step on our bikes and continue our way from east to west along the more than seven hundred kilometres long Al Hajer Al Gharbi Mountains. Off and on we catch a glimpse of Jabal Shams, the mountain of the sun, with more than 3000 metres one of the highest mountains of the Arabian Peninsula and the highest of Oman.
The whimsical wind still comes from the wrong direction so we decide to take it easy, the best way to keep up this fight.
Often map and reality differ: sometimes we don’t know on which road we are, because villages and roads don’t correspond with the indications on our map. We do not really care about it; we cannot lose our way because everything is allright as long as we have water and food.

Past the town of Amla we climb through a long, meandering wadi; at the other side of the highest point we descend to the same height as we started. Here the wadi is no more than a plain kilometres wide between hundreds of small mountain tops. We find the ‘World Heritage Site’ of Bat: a collection of villages and tombs dating from the 3rd century BC. The tombs are made of piled stones in the shape of a beehive. That’s to say, the ones that still stand upright.

In the days after Bat the mountains lie on our right side and we cycle between yellow and red sand dunes. Every now and then we get off the bikes and walk into the desert, where sporadic bushes are the only nourishment for goats and camels. In the sand are thousands of tracks, varying from tiny insect-legs to the print of camel hoofs, proof that life is possible even in these harsh circumstances.

Past Hafit we cycle around a piece of territory of the Emirates that sticks out as a swelling into Oman. We want to cycle as long as possible in Oman until the utmost north at the border of Hatta, from which we will return to Fujairah in the Emirates. To our astonishment there is a border post after 23 kilometres, that doesn’t exist on our map. We ask the officials for an explanation. They don’t understand why we don’t understand anything of what’s happening here. They tell us that it’s a new border post since one month and that we will get an exit stamp of Oman in our passports here, whether we like it or not. Then we will have to cycle another forty kilometres on Omani territory and cross the border with the Emirates at Al Ain. Something we do not want because we have to go north. To realise that we would have to reverse in Al Ain and go to Buraymi and buy a new visa for Oman there (for fourteen euro each). Preposterous!
We have no choice and get our passports stamped. For forty kilometres we keep on cycling in Oman, officially without being in any country. Just before Al Ain the border post of the Emirates emerges, where the officials discover that their collegues in Hatta never updated the information in the computer systeem: according to the system we never left the Emirates! Luckily our passports prove the opposite.
Disorientated we cycle through the large town, find a bicycle shop where some Nepalese mechanics replace the balls in Peter’s rear wheel ball-bearing and cycle on to the north. Through the Emirates, that is.

The next day we think we are getting insane: a police officer assures us that it’s possible to go from Al Madam to Hatta, which road leads over Omani territory. We decide to take the gamble and sleep the night, with an Emirati visa in our passports, in Oman.

Without problems, even without passing a borderpost, we cycle onto Emirati territory the next day.
Strange fellows, those borders.