The Star Party

“Do you have a GPS?” asks Srey as she climbs into the car.

“No, you are it.”

“Oh, well do you know where you are going?” Srey asks.

“No, but you do…don’t you?”

Srey pulls the door shut and nods authoritatively. “It is easy to get there.” Srey doesn't mince words when it comes to adventure. So off we go, me hoping that it is actually as easy as she has said, for I have neither a clue nor a contact number if we are to get lost. 

Srey scopes the course

The road to the desert, it turns out, is a straight shot, with the exception of one left turn off of the highway, which we take with the able guidance of Srey the Human GPS. 

The girls sit in the back and wear down my cell phone’s battery with trivia games while Srey and I gossip (mostly my job) and navigate (mostly her job), simultaneously keeping our eyes peeled for produce stands on the side of the road. What else do you do on the way to the desert?

After we leave the highway and start to curve our way through the stubby mini-mountains, the terrain melts into monotony, broken by the occasional camel and prickly shrub, until two hours into our trip when we come to a screeching halt in the middle of the town of Ibra.

Oh no. Juma’a prayer. 

It is just after noon and we have ground to a halt in front of the only mosque we have seen in miles. Friday is the Muslim equivalent to Sunday—the holy day. And what we have just driven into is the equivalent of the after-church lunch rush, where all of the well-dressed and recently- churched head to the local diner to cash in the church bulletins for 10% off the Sunday special. 

Except in this case no one is headed to the local diner. They are headed back to the labor camps.

Headed back to the labor camp at a turtle's pace

And they are not in a hurry.

We sit and watch dozens, hundreds, thousands of men stream out of the mosque and climb into trucks or slide easily into SUVs and 4x4s. Then we watch them sidle their vehicles up to one another for a chat. 

After their chats, they pull out in front of where we sit in the road and they also sit, engines idling, still chatting. A few of them smile and give us the “just wait” signal, which always reminds me of a stereotypical Italian gentleman gesturing to make his point clearer. They pinch the fingers of their right hands together and point them straight up in the air, shaking their hands toward and away from their heads.

We sit and sit and sit, wondering how far we are from the Mintrib Roundabout. 

And then, as if the Red Sea is parting, the traffic parts and off we dart to Mintrib, sliding into the meeting point just in time to be, well, extremely early.

This is the meeting point for the monthly astronomy tour which is in the desert this month. For just

5 OR per trip, we are allowed to follow the Astronomer Guy, we will call him AG, into any of a dozen far flung locations around Oman. This monthly adventure usually comes at the new moon and includes hours of star gazing, both with and without telescopes, laser pointers which shine beams that seemingly touch the stars, and a varied group of people to chat with for an evening.

We pull into the Shell Station and AG comes stomping up to the car. Since we are the only ones present, he can take the time to instruct us in tire deflation (“No more than 20 psi in the desert!”), sand driving (“Keep those tires straight and don’t stop moving no matter what or you will be stuck! And we don’t want that!”); following distance (“No closer than about 200 meters please”—as an American I am still somewhat metric challenged and thus fail miserably at trying to visualize this distance, resolving instead of follow a really long way behind everyone else); braking in the sand (“DON’T!”); and red light use (“Be sure your lamps have a red light setting—white light will destroy our night vision—set the lights on red please.”)

People begin to trickle into the meeting point--Belgians, Sri Lankans, Brits, Emiratis, more Americans, Australians, Canadians, Venezuelans, Colombians—and then, after an hour of tire deflating and gassing up, we are off. 

The "road"in

I am white knuckled into the first kilometers of the desert. I let the others drive so far ahead that they look like nothing more than puffs of dust in the distance. I NEVER touch the brakes. But then I realize that driving in the sand rocks! The orange sand is fine like no beach sand I have ever seen but is also supportive of the Santa Fe, and as the desert cools the chilly temperatures cause the sand to compact and become even more solid under the tires.

Who would fuss at these cherubs?

We stop in a particularly solid spot, on top of a massive dune, to have AG yell at us for allowing the girls to hang out the windows.  Okay, in truth they were actually sitting with their bums on the windows and their upper bodies nearly slung across the roof’s luggage rack, but they were channeling their inner Bedouins and loving the feel of the wind in their hair and the grittiness of the orange sand in their teeth. 

They grumble and groan and pull themselves into the car but are recovered enough by the time we reach the camp to good-naturedly set up the tents. 

The evening is an astronomy feast with views of Jupiter, the stars, nebulae, constellations, and even the Andromeda Galaxy, followed by the sun the next morning.

The solar scope revealed more sunspots than AG had ever seen before 

And sand...lots of sand. In the morning the wind picks up a bit and carries it in curls off of the dunes. 

There are many places in the world that have deserts and dark empty spaces where the stars look close, but I would bet that there are precious few AGs walking around with telescopes and an interest in explaining celestial bodies to absolute strangers. And even fewer who will tolerate teens hanging out windows as they cruise through the desert.