Off to Oman for the day, a chance to see more of the country from what is advertised as "a fun, happy, musical occasion while renewing your passport visa."
I meet my fellow travellers, a happy mix of Canadians, Irish and Spanish and one incredibly sulky Italian, and our rather well appointed and air conditioned VW van.
The Irish guy has done it five times and laughed when I said it took 8 to 10 hours. Two each way he said, easy but dull.
We set out and it's actually quite pleasant compared to the treacherous Abu Dhabi run. At first it was lots of sand, then lots of big spikey mountains, and some camels. And rows of brightly colored, falling apart shops that looks like south Manchester in the late 70's.
Couple of stops for passport stamps later, AED 50 to re-enter and we head back.
The fact that it's national day on the coming weekend and the 2020 vote today in Dubai did begin to add to a certain friskiness of the road. Minibuses packed with migrant worker families looking hot, and bored, kids squealing in the fetid air.
We turn a corner and literally In front of us it looks like the Pakistan Afghanistan border, on a really bad day. At least six miles of traffic at a standstill, as immobile as the air.
Two hours of crazy Dick Dastardly like manouvers, being dive bombed by dudes in Lamborghinis, who know the lanes aren't anything to do with them, racing from lane to lane and back again, growling over their engines in frustration. Road trains packed with recycled cardboard boxes packed into new cardboard boxes, dropping them on car roofs as they shuffle past.
Two hours of wandering listlessly for five long, mind numbing miles we roll into the Dubai border stop.
The car and bus loads have exploded over the half mile of burning, soft
carpark. It's a sea of surging, screaming, shouting people waving arms, passports, babies to get the attention of half a dozen passport guards who are busy pretending ten thousand people don't exist.
Eventually we become part of a game of pass the EU/US passport holders, sent from queue to queue and door to door. The lines cruelly disappear after half an hour leaving us to find another just as it disintegrates, before reappearing on the other side of a fence, or a bin, or both.
There are camels fainting in distance. Two German woman try to get in front of us but an Irish woman with three kids all but head butts them and they retreat into their bunkers. Two hours more of this and we pop rather unexpectantly into the relatively calm mayhem of the customs office, holding back a thousand screaming Indians with a stern look I get the hallowed stamp. Then, like a girls blouse, I decide to collapse just a tad, hey it was hot, and pop off to use the toilet, unfortunately I'm faced with, well let's just say it was a non flushing, non wiping environment where the flies were the only ones happy as shit, as it were.
We flee back to the camper van full of aircon and hit the road at a surprising speed so we hit Dubai only an hour or so later, and meander into the centre to drop people at some mall I've never seen before. Then onto the evening traffic to the marina. Any minute now we'll be singing cumbaya, everyone is laid back and talking of doing it again next month. How soon we forget.
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