Oman's Omens

 

At the outset, the plan sounded fool-proof.

Leave less than an hour before sundown, explore a site in order to lay a Hash run later in the week, and then return home to prepare dinner. In order to make the plan even more viable, it was decided that Silas would accompany me and that we would ride to and explore the proposed site with Heather, who has issues with depth perception when it gets dark and the terrain gets rough. Can you see where this is headed?

Heather had chosen the Hash site based on the fact that it is right off of the Lollipop Roundabout (aka The- Roundabout-to-Nowhere), which has a certain romantic appeal, especially as the sun is setting over this cement circle in the middle of a road that truly leads to nowhere. We headed off-road and plunged down the ungraded dirt path, severely testing the shocks on her Pajero, and rounded a bend to reveal a looming support wall for the new highway. This, we decided, would be the best location from which to start exploring.

Exciting stuff.

"That wadi," I pronounced, "is the best wadi. Let's look at that one first." I really had no idea where we were going but the wadi looked so inviting. I know, I know, you are thinking wadi like this, aren't you?



And it kind of was like this, minus the water. And the trees. And the cooling shade. And those plants on the left. Now throw in an uneven floor strewn with knee-deep sandy gravel and rocks that are slippery even when dry, and that was our wadi. It wasn't long before things started to look ominous.

Ominous sign #1: A giant grey and blue scorpion went shooting across our path and skittered under a rock. Or maybe it was a blue desert lizard. Ah, scorpion looks more ominous, doesn't it?



Ominous sign #2: A racer snake slithered under my boot, timing its plunge just right to make Heather shriek.

                           

Ominous sign #3: Somewhere someone began artillery practice, positioning the practice shots in such a manner that it sounded like they were taking potshots at us three idiots.

Ominous sign #4: The sun went down and we were a thirty minute walk up a wadi looking at The Old Man of Muscat aka Cock Rock before we noticed the sudden absence of light.

Ominous sign #5: Silas, the human GPS, began to advise us in the most grating, whining, cry-ridden voice that we were nowhere near where we thought we were.

I know, with the scorpion-lizard we should have packed it in for the day, but the Hash must go on. So on we  went.

"Not to worry!" I told Silas. "Just over that rise is the Lollipop Roundabout. We will just scale this massive, scree-ridden rock face and BOOM, we will be on the road and can walk back down to the car." Silas grabbed his crotch and jumped up and down, looking doubtful, shaking his head and protesting: "No! It's the other way! We are in the wrong place! This is all wrong!"

And sure enough he was right.

Just as full darkness fell, we were feeling fairly confident that we were back in the wadi we had originally wandered up, but the walk out was still fraught with stressful hyperventilation, silent thoughts of the feasibility of building a makeshift tent from four boot laces and a sweat-soaked t-shirt, and a curiosity regarding how long a quart of water and two shriveled dates might last three mildly-dehydrated individuals before we would be forced to eat one another.

I would like to use some colorful verb to describe the way we walked out of the wadi in the darkness. I was thinking "skipped" or "strode"--you know, something that would suggest we were full of confidence and overcoming the elements around us, but truthfully the best one I can come up with is that we "minced" out. As a matter of fact, I minced so carefully that I ended up mincing so very gracefully onto a snake.

The snake, not enjoying the mincing, began to flail--I could feel it knocking against my boot, and I could see its body in the dull light of the highway next to which we had parked. As an extra bonus, I could hear it hissing madly. At that point, well, I'll admit it--I screamed. This in turn caused Silas to scream continuously until Heather was ready to clock him and feed him to the wildlife. I jumped two and a half meters into the air, releasing the snake and calming Silas somewhat. Once the adrenalin levels had leveled off slightly, we set off again for the car, which we could now see under those lights, shining beacon-like. A Pajero never looked so inviting.

Thinking a goat path might be more snake-free than the rocks that we had been on, I carefully led Silas
toward the hard-packed dirt just visible 20 meters away, only to nearly step on another snake. Silas again started to scream, frozen into place, wailing, "A snake! A snake! A snake!" My suspicion is that Heather used some secret magic power to levitate him off the path and over this latest road block because from where I was standing it looked like there was no moving him.

The remaining three minutes' walk was punctuated by residual screams until we finally were safe again in the Pajero. However, it wasn't until we had climbed up the dirt road to the Lollipop Roundabout that we felt we had arrived back in civilization. And that roundabout? That is obviously not the Roundabout-to-Nowhere--it is the Snake Wadi Roundabout. And I do not recommend a nighttime visit. Especially with Silas.