Hiking With the ROP

"Hello. Are you busy today?" At 8:40 a.m. the phone had rung, which is bizarre since nearly everyone I know texts instead of calls. Calls are pricey but texts are practically free. In the name of looking like I am not a lazy bum I was trying my best to make it sound like I had been wide awake when the call came through.

"A little." Not really but the lazy bum thing once again...I have an image to maintain.

"All right, well the police are here and they want to go out and find that grenade. I cannot remember the way exactly to find it. So you need to come. I will see you in 20 minutes." **click**

I have such nice friends here, and when we go out walking together we tend to find things like shell fragments and hand grenades. The finding is not such a problem, but when my friend reports those explosives to the police and the police want to go out and recover the explosives early on the days that I am on school holidays, well, that sucks.

Joy was still around when this all went down and she is organized enough to dump the pictures from her camera's disc every night. Her camera with plentiful memory instantly qualified her as the trip photographer. Srey met the two of us at the university's administrative building and guided us into the perfumed depths of the vice-something-or-other's wing where we were greeted by three very wise-looking, portly Omani administrators dressed in immaculate white dishdashas, and two policemen wearing tan jumpsuits, black woolen berets, and shoes with absolutely no tread on them.

Greetings were exchanged all around, hands were tentatively offered (Joy, Srey, and I ARE women after all--*danger*danger*) for limp-wristed shaking, and the police indicated that they were ready to go after that grenade. I couldn't help it...I had to do it...Honestly, how many times in your life can you look at a man and say, "Those are some beautiful shoes. But can you walk in them well enough?" The police were dismissive, as if they wandered into mountains everyday in suede camel boots with no tread.

We arrived at the trailhead, marked by a monolith, a washed-out dirt road, and a fossilized oyster bed. The police hopped from their tan Land Rover. "Okay, where is the grenade?" they asked, and looked a bit disappointed when we three women responded with, "That way. Up." Immediately one of the coppers volunteered to stay with the car lest a group of marauding camels come through and try to eat the mirrors, while the other cop started up the trail behind us.

He huffed and puffed, chugged and snorted up the first rise, smiled when we reached the top and asked, "Where is the grenade?" He asked twice more as we walked and then resigned himself to a long hike through the hills of greater Muscat. He chatted about his family, his bomb squad trainings abroad, his travels overseas, and the universality of the middle finger. He sweated through his tan jumper and declared that this was a very fast walk.

After 30 minutes we came to the valley of the grenade at which point he phoned his partner and explained that he was taking so long because this bomb was a LOOOOOONG way from the cars, like 5 or 6 kilometers! (As if) And then the moment we had been awaiting all morning--we spotted the grenade. It was lime green and laying on its side surrounded by dirt and stones; on its side "Grenade" and "CCC" had been clearly stenciled.

Being the local bomb expert he strode right over to the thing, nudged it with his toe, and picked it up. Then he started shaking it. Srey threw her arms up and we three women backed away (actually I think Joy snapped photos while Srey and I backed away). When a former Cambodian refugee throws her arms up and backs away from an explosive, one tends to follow suit.

Instead of exploding and throwing bits everywhere, the bottom of the canister dropped its plug of stone and dust poured out its bottom end. "Yes! It's dead this one! Yes. It is just an old grenade. See?" As Joy busily snapped photos, he explained the mechanism of the pin you pull and how you arch your arm to throw it. He showed where the smoke pours out and how the smoke's color is different according to the canister's color, and...

"Hold the phone. This is not an exploding grenade?"

Our expert laughed. "No, no, this is a signaling grenade, like for the army if they want their friends to come find them after an exercise and pick them up."

And with that our expert started out of the valley with the grenade in hand, tan jumpsuit sticking to his back, smooth suede shoes carrying him smoothly down the goat trails and up and over the rocky cliffs back to his car. So it wasn't an exploding grenade, but it was worth getting up for--how often do you get to hike with a bomb-laden Omani man in smooth-bottomed camel suede shoes?

Making Amends

The Kia Rio has now been retired as a faux wheel drive vehicle and has begun a life of luxury. On weekends it sits in the covered parking space instead of dune bashing in the Empty Quarter or chugging up and down wadis. It has become a true saloon car instead of an almost four wheel drive.

And in its place we have the Hyundai Santa Fe. Previously owned by a friend of ours who has moved onto greener pastures, it is tricked out with tinted windows, royal blue paint, and cruise control. We no longer even have to exert the effort to unlock the doors individually with a key--with

the push of a single button all doors unlock simultaneously. While all of this is nice, Silas most appreciates the individual air conditioning vents and reading lights, and the fact that the cargo area folds out into two extra seats, allowing Tehva to have her very own "cage".

Driving the Santa Fe allows me to feel less of a peasant here. It is big, which means that by default all of those itty-bitty saloon cars must respect me. It has four wheel drive which means I can take it into wadis without worrying about whether or not I will ever come out again.

And the windows are darkly tinted which means that Joy can change in the front seat without that Omani bus driver seeing her--until he got right in front of the car and looked through the windscreen--the tinting there is almost nonexistent per Omani law. Then he nearly wrapped that school bus around a cement wall. Best of all, the Santa Fe looks like we paid more than 10 riyals for it, unlike the Kia Rio which possesses an air of plasticity and appears to have come out of a vending machine. You know, the kind where you insert a quarter, turn a knob, and get a plastic ring. Or a gum ball. Or a Kia Rio.

So feeling less the peasant, I decided to pack up Joy, Rachel, Abigail, and my own brood, and head to Qurm where, you no doubt will remember, there is a skating rink and lots of other people who drive nice, big cars. We thundered down the highway, burning lots of fossil fuels all the way. As we drove along the engine purred instead of doing the Kia Rio Whine. We looked down upon other people on the road instead of hoping, as in the Rio, that they would notice us and PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE not hit us. The children, content with their individual vents and bounty of space, never even noticed one another. It was pure bliss.

And there was the skating rink after a trip that felt all the faster for the comfort experienced during the ride! But just as quickly as I pulled into the skating rink's lot I also noticed that the parking spaces are itty bitty there, made for a Kia Rio, not a hulking Santa Fe. So I did what any SUV owner would do--I decided I would make the car fit, dammit. I pulled up and then reversed and then pulled forward and then reversed. And just as Joy offered to get out (not to worry, she was fully dressed at that point) and help me negotiate this anorexic parking spot, I hit a tree.

The tree wasn't big--as a matter of fact it was little more than a collection of three unassuming branches sticking up out of the ground. However, it was big enough, and I was going fast enough, to allow the tree to leave an impression on the back of the car.

Did I mention we had owned the car for three days at that point?

Needless to say, my argument that Tony had dented AND scratched the Rio within a month of its purchase, on a cement wall that was right in front of him, in broad day light, held absolutely no water. Apparently denting the Santa Fe is a sin much worse than scratching and denting the plastic car.

Although I am reassured by many that body work is cheapy-cheap in Muscat, and that dents are so commonplace here as to be almost not worth mentioning, I still am being made to rectify the situation. And so, if you find a few weeks go by without a blog post, well, you will know that I am busy making amends.

My knees are killing me.