The family split up for the morning, with Sarah and Eloïse going for a swim outside, whilst Papa stayed inside and tried to contact a hotel to make a booking for our stay in Musandam next week. It took a long time to finally make contact, by which time the girls were back from their swim.
The single most tedious aspect of unscheduled travel is having to make bookings and reservations en route. This means having to be flexible in your schedule (sometimes taking different nights at a hotel than the ones you wanted; sometimes taking fewer nights; sometimes not getting the only decent hotel in town), replanning your itinerary (going to B first, then A, rather than vice versa), dealing with communications difficulties, paying extortionate hotel phone tariffs, recovering from botched reservations (they were expecting you two days ago; or they made the reservation for one night, not two, and now the hotel is full on the second night), finding travel agents to book flights, finding flights that aren’t full, hiring a car at the other end, booking excursions, etc., etc.
There’s really no other way, however. Even with the most exhaustive research beforehand (not that we were exhaustive for this trip), one can’t always conclude how many nights will be needed at each location or, indeed, which locations should be picked for each overnight stay. Even if you did have things tightly pinned down, you can still find yourself wanting just one more night somewhere, or finding yourself in special circumstances that dictate one night more or fewer somewhere.
Besides, the sense of adventure and exploration is that much greater when you plan as you go. With relatively little hassle, one’s itinerary can be changed at the drop of a hat, which means that only your flight arrival and departure dates need be set in stone.
So, you take your chances and try to arrange everything whilst on the road. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, but usually it does, even if some kind of compromise is necessitated. At this point, there’s only one night left in our trip for which we don’t have a hotel booking.
At noon, we bade Muscat a final farewell and took the Sohar road that first brought us to the Omani capital back in February. I had forgotten what a dull drive it was, but at least we managed a steady 120 kmh all the way to Sohar.
Sultan Qaboos must really love his flowers. The dual carriageway in and out of Muscat is embellished for a good 50 km on both sides by a stunning blaze of colour. I can’t imagine how much work it must be to keep that length of flowerbeds looking as beautiful as they do.
We stopped to fill up with petrol and food in Sohar. An anonymous, menuless chicken-and-rice shop provided the calories and we were on our way again. Thankfully, the drive towards Al Ain now became more interesting. The road began to bend and wind its way past hills.
The border crossing into the UAE was painless. We filtered into an aisle containing three checkpoints, and stopped first to show our passports and car registration paperwork. They were handed back with a slip of paper bearing a scribble (probably to verify payment of vehicle fees, but our car is registered and insured in Dubai).
We then drove forwards 50 m to the second booth, where another official withdrew our scrap of paper and printed out an A4 sheet, apparently with three visas in Arabic. He then handed it to us and waved us on.
50 km ahead, we handed the visa paperwork to the third official, who stamped our passports and welcomed us to the UAE. Perhaps nowhere in the world is government bureaucracy and labour duplication quite so evident as at border crossings. I suppose it keeps the unemployment figures down.
Soon afterwards, we were on the outskirts of Al Ain and arriving at our hotel. By that point, the headache that had been with me since the early afternoon had now developed into a real grinder. I wasn’t up to going into town, so we took Eloïse to the playground at the back of the hotel.
It was full of expat families, who come here on Thursdays — it’s the weekend, after all — to relax, use the playground, socialise, etc. The immediate assumption of those around us was that we, too, were expats.
I was forced back to the hotel room to catch forty winks in an attempt to suppress my headache. I awoke at 19:30, my strategy having at least partially worked, and now just in time to drive us into town for dinner at a Lebanese/Iranian place called Al Dewan.
Al Ain is very big, much larger than I had anticipated. The reason for this is that it is a low-rise city, and such cities frequently suffer from urban sprawl. Reykjavík is another such city that comes to mind.
We need to get a good night’s sleep tonight in preparation for packing in all of the sights tomorrow.
At this stage of the trip, we’ve covered more than 2500 km.