Khor Fakkan, Part 2

The beauty and freedom of our diving experience came with a price, unfortunately: We had a long day of driving ahead of us on Sunday. We decided to drive down the coast to Khor Kalba, then through the mountains to Hatta, where we’d heard there were some interesting things to see.

The mountains out here are a bit like the surface of the moon. Sparse trees (apparently some of them are frankincense) dot a landscape that is completely desolate. Jagged rocks like dragon teeth jut out of the sand…

...and through this, a winding road takes you through surprisingly new and clean towns that are springing up along the way.

You really feel like you’re the only person out here – especially if, like us, you turn off the main road. Driving along, we met up with a herd of donkeys and, just a few hundred metres later, a herd of very pretty goats.

It’s quite amazing that, for such a small country, the landscape seems to change every few kilometers….. even the sand changes colour! Our drive, which took us from Khor Fakkan to Hatta, through to Madam, to Hayer, towards Sweihan, past Abu Dhabi and back to Madinat Zayed meant that we saw everything from farmland to mountains, to sand dunes (red, orange, yellow, grey – each area has its own sand colour, it seems), and all this in a 600km drive.

Hatta is, like Liwa, a town built around its forts. There are, apparently, cave pools (only accessible by 4x4) and archaeological digs as well to see, but we only had time for a quick stop in at the Heritage Village (it does seem like every single town here has its own Heritage Village), which had been modified with added (false) walls for some sort of a TV show. We didn’t see anything much happening but, as it was the middle of the (hot) afternoon, no sane person was wandering around outside.

We, being insane, walked up to one of the restored towers where we could truly appreciate the area and stood there enjoying the eagle eye view we had of the neighbouring farms.

On then, through a tiny bit of Oman (where I, being silly said, “Let’s stop at the next roadside shack selling clay pots”, without realizing that it was the last one, and so ended up not feeding my need for pottery things to stack in corners and/or be smashed by the cats), and on through a sandy desert, where one may wish to rent one of these charming homes.

I suppose that if you want to live in a roof-less cinder block shack in the middle of nowhere, you can just call that number – remember the country code for the UAE is 971.

Too much construction and too many highway detours made for a longer drive than usual, but we found that people were super friendly and ready to give us directions in perfect English (How is it that some Indian guy in a ramshackle grocery store in the middle of a desert village can speak better English than just about any other place in the world?), as we wound our way back home.

In another two weeks, we will be arriving in Canada and, inshallah, enjoying a few more roadtrips, albeit with slightly different scenery! And, speaking of Canada – Happy Canada Day!!! I boiled up some maple syrup and made some experimental maple candies to celebrate. As almost the only Canadian out here, though, there will be no party, really, this year.