Up betimes, as Sam Pepys says, in a slightly chilly dawn, and cooked up Nestle's 3 in 1 to get us started. I'd never seen it before, it's coffee, milk and sugar in a packet and makes a syrupy but sustaining drink. Nothing like the black espresso with a dash of hot milk I favour at home.
Lots of mountains and a long deviation inland as the coast road is either nonexistent or being repaired. We missed out the beaches where turtles breed, partly because it would have added kms and also it isn't the right time of year. And I have done the 'sitting deathly quiet on a beach all night while the turtle lays its eggs' thing, twenty years ago in Pakistan.
We were approaching the place Rustom had been to look at a hotel site proposed by a client (that's his job), a place called Duqm or Ad Duqm, large on the map, but small in fact. We arrived around dusk, and were seduced into a restaurant for some good hot Indian food (the menu is always the same but we were favourably impressed by the quality: chicken fry or curry, mutton (=goat) fry or curry, veg, dal, rice and/or paratha). We wondered loudly and often where the chickens came from as we NEVER saw one, in fact haven't seen one since coming to the Arabian peninsula at all. The same goes for cows. We get milk, said to come from Al Ain, which we have driven through twice, but nowhere is there a suggestion of a farm, a cow or even a bottling plant for reconstituted powder milk. I did get some camel's milk (see plenty of them) and it tasted v much like cow's.
It was dark when we drove past the putative hotel site, and Rustom remembered the rough roads to the beach, so we bounced along them for some twenty minutes. It's strange but you have the illusion when driving in the dark that you are surrounded by trees or something, there is a feeling of being flanked by things taller than you are - we both felt this. So when we found a likely sandy place we got onto the beach, could hear the surf, and stopped for the night. It was therefore rather a surprise, come dawn, to find ourselves the only object for miles around, a totally flat and empty beach stretching as far as the eye could see in all directions, and the sea a stone's throw away. A few tiny scrubby bushes, no trees.
It was the most beautiful dawn I have ever seen. The nail-paring moon had risen around 5 a m, and the sky started to lighten at 6. We had been able to leave the back of the jeep open to the breeze, as the temperature was comfortable, as I lay in my sleeping bag, watching the sun rise over the sea, and Rustom gently slept beside me.
Earl Grey tea was the chosen tipple, and some cashews and figs and a cereal bar. No elaborate cooking for us Sagittarians.
We continued for mile after mile down the flat coast, and then turned inwards to the oil-rich desert, where nodding donkeys patiently raised the black stuff to the surface, seemingly untended by humans.
Not a particularly attractive drive, but interesting to those of us who aren't used to such sights.
There was a crossroads in the middle of nowhere that had a restaurant (where we lunched) and a very sophisticated bank with cash deposit facilities. Nothing else.
) & lots of other "eastern" Oz areas, but not those tracks you mentioned. Shows what a city girl I am, huh?
