Desert camping

I joined a group of mechanical and electrical engineers with their friends and families on a camping trip yesterday. The convoy took around 2 hours to get to the campsite in a desert which seems to be in Sharjah territory.

Ebe, Dante and I arrived around an hour later because we got lost in conversation and lost the convoy. We were ahead of everyone but we didn’t know and were still traveling along Hatta road when we received welcome messages from the Oman Mobile Network in our cellphones. Oops …

The campsite was perfect. It was at the foot of the limestone range of Jebel Fayah, with rocky outcrops at the west, south and east sides. At the north was a sea of sand and, a few kilometers away, Jebel Maleihah or Fossil Rock. Simon and Jenny discovered the campsite in their earlier off-road trips.



We sat around the campfire and talked and sang songs and shared food and drinks. It was fun all the way from dusk to bedtime.

Bedtime was 10:30pm for most campers and an hour later for Nelson, Hermie, Shakeel and Saeed. For me it was midnight and various times thereafter. I was in and out of bed for hours. I don’t think it was because of Dante’s snoring that I could not sleep, or the sound of a passing airplane every 20 minutes or so, or the silent conversation of Aley and his two boys, who stayed by the campfire well past midnight. Maybe it was just the new bed syndrome.

In the morning, Shakeel served hot tea while Ebe distributed hot dogs and Edwin, warm cooked-in-the-shell eggs. Cool.



We packed up, cleaned the area and left around 10:00am. We stopped over at a quad cycle place along Hatta road. At noontime, we were on our way home. A bit tired and sleepy but feeling good ...