Today has been a long day; our longest, I think, in terms of kilometres travelled and without a doubt the longest day of driving.
Because we have to time our departures around Eloïse’s sleep patterns, we revisited the Family Park in the morning and let Eloïse play around on the various climbing frames and slides. The place was virtually deserted in the daytime heat. As we had seen on the day we arrived, it doesn’t really come alive until the late afternoon.
And so we bade Abu Dhabi a fond farewell around noon and headed for the Al Maqta Bridge to take us in the direction of Dubai. On the outskirts of town, we stopped to take photos of the humungous mosque that is being built there.
It’s already very impressive. The original plan was to make it the largest in the world, but the Saudis got upset at the idea of the great mosque in Mecca being displaced from the top spot, and so Sheikh Zayed relented and scaled it back. You wouldn’t know to look at it, though; it’s huge.
As I’ve suggested before, they certainly know how to build roads here. A four-lane highway in each direction links Abu Dhabi with Dubai. The absence of cruise control was, once again, a royal pain in the arse, as one never has to lift one’s foot from the accelerator as one races across the desert from one modern glass and steel oasis to the other.
When we flew into Dubai, we had no car, so we spent our two day stint there being ferried arround by abra and taxi. This made it possible to see that Dubai was big, but not exactly how big.
This time, our drive to Musandam would take us right alongside Dubai, which loomed up on the horizon when the clock was still reading a good 50 km to go before reaching that most famous of the emirates. The road widened to six lanes in either direction and started to feel more like a race track than a utilitarian road.
The sprawl of Dubai has to be seen to be believed, and it’s not due to the city being low-rise, either. On the contrary, this city has skyscrapers to dwarf those found in New York, Hong Kong and other cities. It seems like no two things are within walking distance of each other in Dubai. A visit spanning a few days could probably run to a few hundred kilometres if not planned correctly, without your ever having left the city.
We followed route 11, driving close by the world-famous Burj Al Arab hotel, its sail-like form quite unlike anything else protruding into the Dubai skyline.
Another building, planned to be the world’s largest when it is finished, currently reaches some eighty stories into the sky, just half the number it will boast when completed. Looking at Dubai is like looking at a vision of the future from a science-fiction story written just a few decades ago.
As we headed out of Dubai near the airport, the traffic arteries started to clog up as we reached the next emirate of Sharjah. (We’ll spend a night here before returning to Dubai.) The signposting also worsened, and it became increasingly less clear which exit we should take from each passing roundabout. More than once today, we would take the wrong road and have to figure out and correct our mistake. Thankfully, we incurred only slight delays each time.
Sharjah gave way to the emirate of Ajman — blink and you’ll miss it — and then to Umm Al Quwain, where we finally stopped, much too late, for lunch. A rice dish for me and hummus for Sarah would plug the gap until dinner.
Whilst there wasn’t time to visit any actual towns, it was clear that Umm Al Quwain is a much more understated emirate than either Abu Dhabi or Dubai. It, too, has a good number of construction projects, but nothing of the scale of what is going on in its two famous cousins.
With fewer visitors coming to this part of the UAE and fewer commuters, the road had long since narrowed to two lanes in each direction.
Ras Al Khaimah was the final emirate we would pass through today. Here, the signposting of the roads became truly useless and Sarah began to navigate by the position of the road relative to the sea and the mountains. The road surface, too, was becoming less and less worthy of its purpose, as it carried us past towns of ever decreasing size.
Finally, we reached the border with the Omani province of Mussandam at just before 17:00.
There was a fair bit of bureaucracy, but no problems, unexpected or otherwise, to deal with. Our only surprise was needing to fill in and purchase three UAE exit forms, which set us back AED 60. We hadn’t needed to do that at the Hatta exit point back in February. Different place, different rules.
With that out of the way, we could drive the 50 m or so to the Omani checkpoint, where three more forms needed to be completed and three visas purchased. We were given the option of paying in dirhams, so we did, to the tune of AED 180. We also had to demonstrate that we had appropriate car insurance for Oman, and we did, as the insurance we had purchased when passing the Hatta border in February was still valid.
The border formalities had taken half an hour, so we had only a little more than thirty minutes to reach our destination before sunset. Happily, we were only another 35 km removed from it at this point, so we made haste and followed the winding road as it hugged the side of the cliffs, first inland and then sharply curving back towards the sea.
The clearly visible strata of the cliffs and the small villages tucked into coves at their base reminded me quite vividly of the Faroe Islands, although the cliffs here were much less green, of course.
Around 18:15, we reached our hotel after some 340 km and checked in for the evening. We’ll spend three nights here before heading back along the road that brought us.
We’ve booked a half-day dhow cruise for tomorrow, as the only way to see a lot of Musandam is by boat. Roads are a relatively new invention here and one village, Kumzar, can still only be visited by boat, a journey that takes two hours by speedboat.
In a single day, we’ve travelled from the bright lights of the UAE’s capital to this Omani outpost, Arabia’s least-known and least populated corner. Musandam is cut off from the rest of Oman by Emirati territory to the south and the Strait of Hormuz to the north. How did this come to be?
Well, basically, the semi-nomadic Shihuh people who live here didn’t really care which country they were in, but then came along the British in the sixties and early seventies, and they wanted to grant oil concessions to their companies. This meant that all of the tribes in the region had to pledge allegiance to one of the big-wigs, and the Shihuh chose the Sultan of Oman, rather than the Sheikh of Ras Al Khaimah.
And so it came to be that the Musandam peninsula is a slither of Omani territory, whilst being physically and geographically separate from the rest of the country.
There are no exploitable commodities here — no oil, no copper — and that has ensured that the peninsula has remained relatively isolated. Fishing, goat herding and limited agriculture are the staples of the local economy.
Beyond the Strait of Hormuz to the north lies Iran, and we’re informed that Iranian smugglers also help bolster the local economy. Perhaps we’ll see a few in the next couple of days.