Fahal Island Swim Complete

Swimming is hard work and my body is not designed for it. Period. Or, as Tehva now likes to say, "Full stop." But, in the name of non-aerodynamic people everywhere, I decided to give this Fahal Island thing a go.

In the weeks leading up to the actual swim, info leaked down the chain to reach me and said information would either paralyze me with fear or lend a brief respite from the nerves: "My friend Mohammed says that he was fishing at Fahal Island last weekend and the waters were teeming with bull sharks!" This riveting story falls into the paralyzing category--bull sharks are known as vicious long-distance swimmer consumers, at least in my imagination.

"My friend Adel was out fishing near Fahal Island last weekend and he said the waters were full of jellyfish!" This allayed my nerves because I figured that bull sharks must hate jellyfish as much as I do and, thus, they would stay away.

"A few years back they cancelled the Fahal Island Swim because of ..." fill in the blank with a.) red tides; b.) choppy seas; c.) bull shark invasions. In fact, two days before the swim the sky over Muscat looked like this:

 and I thought, "Oooo, with those clouds I bet the seas around Fahal Island will be rough on Thursday. Maybe it will even be cancelled!" And yet Thursday dawned and the sea was like glass--somewhat choppy glass. Okay, it looked glassish between the teeny-tiny waves.

But there were no bull sharks evident and so I donned my highly attractive red swim cap and into the water I went,

along with 87 of my closest friends, only one of whom saw a shark. Kathy very wisely kept her mouth closed regarding the shark which, she later said, looked very confused about the sudden and unexpected presence of 5 power boats, 70 kayaks, one stand and paddle board, one canoe, and 88 humans 4 kilometers offshore. See the one with the goggles and red swim cap? That's Marlee, our "trainer". See the other one with the red swim cap and goggles? That's Nick. He backstroked the whole 4 km!

The Fahal Island Swim is a BYOKayak event (old lady sunglasses not required) and so I brought my own. Isn't he cute? If this were an endurance event in the USA, I would suspect that the requirement of a support boat was an avoiding-litigation thing. In Oman, I would suspect it has something more to do with safety, shipping lanes, and potential bull sharks. At any rate, finding my support kayak in the midst of the other 160 bobbing beings proved to be less of a challenge than I had been warned, mostly because no one else's kayaker was wearing granny glasses.

The swim, once it began, felt easy and smooth. The water was a perfect temperature. The "smell bands" that sometimes permeate the waters off the coast of Oman were absent that far out. Instead, my nose was filled with off-gassing from the brand new red swim cap I was wearing (required by the FIS organizers), the fumes from the support boat that was supporting two nearby swimmers, and the sudden need to vomit that overtook me about a kilometer into the swim.

I will spare you the gory details but simply add that it is possible to vomit in the sea and not drown while expelling one's...you get the picture, even though my kayaker didn't. Instead of photographing the vomit incident, he reportedly was waiting for me to drown and, at the same time, considering jumping to my rescue. This, however, would have endangered his old lady glasses and so he remained safely within his kayak.

Two hours on and I discovered that my plan to swim the right way had resulted in actually swimming the wrong way. In this photo you can see the point toward which I was told repeatedly NOT to swim.  But not to worry, it ended being a very scenic point to tootle around, and harbored all sorts of reef fish and a black and white speckled manta ray. 

Out of the water at 2 hours and 19 minutes. I finished in the bottom ten percent of the pack but I finished! No bull sharks sited.

Omanization

This country is going through the sometimes painful process of Omanization, and I have realized this because our toilets stink.

Now that the temperature of our tap water hovers at a steady 120 degrees F, the bacteria have taken over and the stink seems here to stay. On top of that, one of the pipes that connects the toilet to the wall (and ostensibly the plumbing system behind the wall) has begun leaking, leaving a sludgy puddle on the floor, and the shower plunger no longer works on the garden tub in the master suite.

As we are merely squatters here, we do not have to deal with these problems directly. Instead we can call the landlord, who is actually a very attentive guy, but who is not so talented with plumbing.

The landlord's solution to the toilet leak and chronic puddling was to come up, pinch the pipe a few times, and advise that we begin to turn off the water supply to the toilet tank when it is not needed, which means that the toilet doesn't get flushed as regularly as it used to, and that leads to more stink.

More stink led us to our friendly neighborhood Carrefour for more toilet cleaner, which we go through at a frightening pace. In the States in our little three bedroom rancher with one bathroom, we went through one bottle a year. Here we have gone through approximately 143 bottles since our arrival in Oman nearly two years ago.

So we were prowling through the aisles of Carrefour, sniffing the different toilet cleaner flavors when we drifted around the corner to the sugar aisle and found ourselves face-to-face with what looked a heck of a lot like a fellow American. "Are you British?" she asked in a lovely Mid-Western accent. "Because I just heard you say the word 'sugar' and you sound like you are British (can you really tell that from just the word 'sugar'?--apparently not) and I really need someone to tell me about all these different British sugars..."

We then stood for ten minutes, as one will, chatting about sugar crystals; however, eventually the conversation ambled, as it will in countries where a certain percentage of the population makes way too much money, to hiring a reliable driver here. She recounted her trials with her current-but-soon-to-be-fired Omani driver who spent the majority of his time fiddling with the automatic locks in the car, and his absolute inability to open the door for her or to accept the wages she offers. She finally threw her hands up and swore that she would next hire an Indian. They, after all, will open the door for an employer and happily accept those wages. And I guess they can keep their fingers off of the auto-lock button.

This begs the question, how much should one pay a driver who is on duty just until 2 p.m. and is only accountable for driving one expat oil worker's wife to the gym, social engagements, and the mall each day? Apparently not as much as the Omanis are asking.

Back to the house and fast forward four weeks, which brings us to today. A person who knows about plumbing is in the bathroom fiddling with the pipes and apparently having some success. He is not Omani, naturally. I have just returned from another ordeal at the grocery store, where the executives in charge of decision-making cannot decide whether they want to employ Omanis who are generally nightmarish at the registers but are, in the end, Omani, or they want to employ Filipinos, who are lovely and efficient at the registers but are decidedly NOT Omani.

Last week my checkout girl was Filipino. She did all the things we Americans like: she smiled and greeted me before she started scanning everything. She didn't stop to examine her nails half way through the job. She   didn't stop at any point to chat amicably with her BFF who just happened to wander up. She very ably scanned everything on the belt and did not bark at me to slide my own bag of flour/6-pack of sodas/insert- any-item-weighing-over-2-pounds here.

Today my checkout girl was Omani. It pained me to watch her scan my order, mostly because, before she scanned anything, she first asked me in Arabic, "Is this yours?" Then, in spite of my answer to the affirmative regarding the case of water, she refused to scan it as it was too big and heavy for her to move along the belt. Instead she told the man standing behind me to pick it up and hand it to me. I frankly am not sure if it ever got scanned. Such is the price of Omanization.

This is such a trigger topic and everyone here has an opinion. Of course it is necessary to have a population that is trained to take care of itself, even in the most rudimentary ways. The gas money will not last forever and, when it is gone, it will be up to the Omanis to fix their own toilets, scan their own groceries, sweep their own streets, flip their own burgers, repair their own cars, do their own ironing, clean their own houses, and raise their own children.

And yet, as we are witnessing here, these jobs make for dirty dishdashas and broken fingernails and as of right now no one in a white dishdasha or with a nice manicure seems to want to do them, which makes for lots of jobs for the rest of us. But only until the petroleum money is gone or until there is another political swing and it is decided once again to strictly enforce the employment of Omanis in jobs which they clearly don't want to do.

Long live Omanization. It makes for good entertainment at the very least.