“Dress easier, no tricks,” Mike told me, “leave your cell phone and wallet at home. We’re not going to the restaurant.”
I don’t know how real tourists and safarists dress up, and just in case I climbed onto the Internet to inquire about equipment. After half an hour of searching for on-line stores, I began to simply look at the pictures: courageous fans of extreme tourism looked impressive - slender, lean like antelopes, with hard straight eyes and stubborn chins.
I looked sadly at my reflection in the mirror: it seems that Zhvanetsky wrote his “appearance of the builder of communism” precisely from me.
At exactly six in the morning, the eyes opened by themselves, a hand reached for the phone. No, no one has called yet. That's good, I'll be the first.
The gathering place at a gas station in Sharjah at the famous Book is Book Roundabout. Friends say that once, on New Year's Eve, a Russian old-timer tried to conquer the Koran monument and read what it says there, for which he paid - he spent a couple of days in the “monkey”.
At 7.15 I'm already there. Russian tourists roam the shop at the gas station in T-shirts, shorts and slates. Outside it is damp, stuffy, empty.
7.30. The caravan of mountain climbers is not visible. By 8.00 am I fall asleep in the car.
At 9 a.m. the first jeep was packed full of noisy British teenagers. Behind the wheel, Sandra, freaking out from ora.
I have known Sandra for five years. She is 40 with a penny, skinny, like a stray local cat, and just as impudent. But he always regrets “the poor Russian victim of the totalitarian system”, that is, me, and he strives to feed everything. She cooks frankly poorly; probably that’s why the whole teenage gang immediately attacked my basket with edible and swept everything clean. It seems we’ll have lunch with Sandrine chicken sandwiches and sweet pickled cucumbers.
At ten o’clock, two Pajero slowly floated into the gas station. In the first car, Mike and Troy. Troy twirls a card in his hands - his red face is already glowing with tension - he is the navigator in the head car today, and he must take us to a place without getting lost in the many roads and paths that jeepers rolled onto safaris.
Once, Troy drove us to a picnic 200 kilometers into the darkness and got lost. Here they say that all roads lead to the sea and only one to the Omani roadblock, which does not allow tourists. There we arrived at sunset, waking up half a day in the sands and stones, hungry and angry.
Mike pokes a finger at the card and says that he saw the cards in the coffin, that where we’re going, you won’t “miss”, and that if we trust him, he will bring us to our place in an hour or two.
In the second car, Pete and Kevin. Wives are not visible, which means men are very seriously preparing for the trip. Apparently, they will again play extreme golf.
Extreme golf in Irish is a very exciting and highly entertaining sight. After lunch with beer, men spread plastic mats and shoot balls in the desert or in small freshwater ponds - wadi. Especially this game is loved by children and dogs.
We load into cars - I climb to Mike, Sandra distributes the gang to other cars. I wake up because I am shaking violently, which means that we have already left the asphalt road and are driving along a country road.
I really like to drive off-road, off the beaten path, so that my eyes do not stumble on the creations of human hands. In this regard, trips towards Al Ain are good - along the road for many kilometers a desert stretches with rare bushes of vegetation, some boogers sniff back and forth, the air melts and sweeps the sand with glossy streaks. If you move away from the car and walk barefoot along the warm sand, the desert will embrace silence, stroke or stun, spank the wind at its discretion.
To me, who grew up in the foothills of the Trans-Ili Alatau, it always seemed empty and poor. Even the Kazakh steppe and semi-desert impressed with the day and night activity of the inhabitants. And here there is only sand, silence and sky - a huge, transparent morning; faded, grayish-yellow midday and cloudy, with pink highlighting of the setting sun, evening.
Mike was my first guide and teacher here in the UAE. Once delivered in the foothills of the Hajjar for a morning photo shoot. Good photographs are taken only by a patient photographer - you have to get up before dawn, at four in the morning, and stomp to a place you have chosen in advance, lie low and wait for the desert to wake up. Because of my inexperience, at first I missed everything, then I learned to pinpoint the moment when a small lizard or bird emerged from the bushes, and screamed with joy like crazy, scaring animals. Mike cursed and promised to sell me to some tribe.
Somehow she nearly died on the spot from surprise when she saw a hare. I didn’t even believe my eyes - I thought, some kind of lost cat. Oblique was smaller than ours, dun, slightly battered and shabby.
Mike explained that this is a real hare: they are found in the foothills, but they almost got out of here, because they are shot at a barbecue.
The same thing happened with the desert leopard, which was hunted down by local hunters. They say that especially successful tourists hear the distant roar of these cats at nights, but we were not lucky: we did not even see any traces.
But small herds of wild donkeys thrive. Curious, greedy for handouts and shy. Once their ancestors were ordinary domestic laborers, but one day they went AWOL and did not return.
The car braked sharply, dropping me from the seat. We must have arrived. The first stop of our trip was the mountains near Wadi Galil (Ghalilah? /? Litibah). There is the "Stairway to Heaven" - a mountain with a steep climb and a village on top.
The height is about 1900 meters, if the guide does not lie, the path led by the local Shihu tribe leads to the top. Troy claims that there, in order to climb the mountain, it is necessary to negotiate with the local Bedouins, otherwise they can destroy cars. We made it smarter: we drove up from the Omani side - from the Sayikh plateau, which goes into the “hidden valley”, and looked at the crazy tourists climbing the almost vertical wall from the side of Wadi Galil for a long time.
The local sources of fresh water - Wadi - seem to come from nowhere and also disappear into nowhere. Sometimes, in rainy seasons, there is not enough space for water and it floods everything around, so you can only go on foot and with great care - it can easily be demolished and beat on stones with a stream.
Picnics at such springs are very popular, so those ponds that are close to well-worn roads are filthy to disgrace - broken glass, garbage, the remains of lunches and dinners and (where there are stones) graffiti are everywhere. Wahids, Musa, John, Sani and Vasya, in clumsy, multi-sized letters, perpetuate their names with enviable tenacity.
We were lucky to find a few unexplored places where almost nobody happens - it is difficult to get there and sometimes it is not easy to find. An acquaintance told how he and his friend unsuccessfully traveled around these wadi every weekend for two years, following the map of the Off Road catalog, until they got out of the car and went on foot - and 100 meters from the rolled road they accidentally stumbled upon two puddles among stones.
The second group was waiting for us in the Omani city of Kasaba. Luckily, we went to the coastal village of Khar Najd to rent a boat to visit the abandoned village of Makad, on the island of Jazirat Makad, where, as the same guide promised, many ancient fossils.
Unfortunately, not only Russian travelers are led by the eternal "maybe" - in Khar Nzhda we found only small fishing boats without hosts and an absolutely empty beach.
The only thing that saved us was that Ali, our guide hired in Kasaba, remembered Kumzar.
And the unforgettable Google last night told me that Kumzar was once a Persian outpost, built on a hilltop beyond the reach of artillery. A garrison of 400 Persian soldiers in 1624 desperately defended the fortress from being captured by the Portuguese.
Admiral Ri Freire's flotilla marched from Muscat to Musandam that summer, trying to capture Persian outposts along the coast.
The fate of the besieged in Kumzar was sad - a detachment of 700 Portuguese slaughtered the entire population, regardless of gender and age, burned and devastated the city and fortress. Sandra threatened that if we did not find the boat, she would do the same to us.
The boat, apparently, was also scared, so it was found very quickly - the shamed men nevertheless turned to professionals for help.
We returned to Kasab late in the evening. Troy proposed setting up a camp at the top of Jebel Harem in order to fully justify the title of extreme tourist. After a tiring day, bustle and sunstroke, we fell to sleep, as weathered.
And the next day, once again finding ourselves in urban civilization, we decided that the next time we would not push so many routes into one trip, and that even savages should organize everything in advance.
Yaroslav Kireev
