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Home: Middle East: Oman: Desert: Bedouin Road:
one man in the desert
Ah, my darling, when over the purple horizon shall loom/
The shrouded mother of a new idea, men hide their faces,/
Cry out and fend her off, as she seeks her procreant groom,/
Wounding themselves against her, denying her fecund embraces.
D H Lawrence, Amores, 1916
As desert sands blow across freshly sprayed bitumen, Oman’s newest road is inching its way where no sedan has previously ventured. This is virgin territory, where the Sharqiya desert meets the sea, a stretch of blank coastline where soft dunes subside into strips of flat beach, occasionally exposed at low tide.
A land without roads is where the romance of lonely places reaches its peak. If you stand on a coast with endless desert on one side and ocean on the other, it is tough not getting carried away. Think clear skies and stars, sand whipped over soft waves – this is absolute escape. But such weekend escapades quickly give way to a reality not so pleasant on a weekday. Imagine you had to live here, eking out a living by fishing. Once off the boat, you would have to load your pickup with fish and ice. Then, you’d have to get it to a market: either by driving up or down the coast on the hard beach when the low tide exposes it, or across the desert, through sandy trails. You would have to buy a 4WD, of course, and choose between sand and road going tyres. Sand tyres are hopeless on the road, when you get there, and road tyres are prone to sink into sand. You will not have mechanics, garages, filling stations, air compressors, restaurants, fresh water or the AAA if you break down. A fiercely independent spirit might overcome such necessities, but even a Bedu knows which side his bread is buttered.
A new road would mean that thousands would benefit. The fishermen would use less fuel, pay less for maintaining their trucks and get to their markets faster. They would have easy access to medical care, fresh water and everything we take for granted. Such connectivity would also mean that more tourist development could take place – so far the only option is a lone youth hostel that has just reopened after months spent in oblivion between Al Ashkharah and the point where the existing road dead-ends.
At the other, southern extreme of the desert coast, a lone wooden hut is your other point of reference, where the road caves into sand. Haji Amir has been sitting here for years, in a painstakingly tidy room, between a few pots and pans and a bed. Next door is his little workshop, and a compressor to fill tyres deflated for the sand. His most frequent customers are the Bedu fishermen, who stop when coming out of the desert. They’re usually from isolated settlements like Ras ar Ruways, their pickups loaded with fish. They’d race over desert beach, get Haji to fill their tyres, and then continue over tarmac. Some might go over to Masirah Island, where ‘fish factories’ would sort their catch according to type, size and weight, before carrying on to markets hundreds of kilometres away.