The adventures of a blonde and a very old car

“Gooood morning”, Mrs J chirped outside my tent.

Chirped, twitter, chipper... all related to little birds deliriously happy to greet a new day. Well, not this old bird.

I tried to open my eyes, swollen with lack of sleep and having had to strain to look at the road in the dark, with sand twirling in front of us like snowflakes in a snowstorm. They felt bruised. I felt absolutely no desire to greet a new day with birdlike enthusiasm.

“Hmmph”, I groaned and held my watch close enough to the little slits which were my eyes, and had to blink several times to focus. 5:30 am. In my book this was still in the middle of the night. Why, oh why, was Mrs J already up and chipper like a crow outside a bedroom window on a Saturday sleep-in morning? I knew she had been up for a while, because I had heard her struggle with the zipper to her tent for what felt like a thousand times in my sleep. Seriously, the guy who one day invents ‘the silent zipper’ for tents and sleeping bags will become an overnight millionaire. There is no louder noise than the noise coming from the person in the tent next to you, be it 2 m or 2 km away, getting up in the night to ‘go behind the bushes’.

The procedure always follows the same pattern. Loud un-zipping of the sleeping bag, a struggle with the zipper on the tent flap, which is loudly zipped closed again when the person too late realizes that it is the wrong zipper and only opens the fly net. Loud fumbling and mutterings in the dark and more un-zipping of the right tent flap. By then, you are fully awake. The person in the tent next to you squeezes halfway through the too small hole and has to un-zip a bit more, before finally tip-toeing to the nearest bush. Needless to say, the entire procedure is repeated in reverse when the fellow camper returns two minutes later. With a final loud zip, which sounds like a jet breaking through the sound barrier, your neighbour settles in with a sigh of pleasure, completely convinced nobody noticed they were up. By this time you yourself are not only fully awake, but you also realise that you now desperately need to pee. Silent zippers – I tell you, there is a huge market.

I poked my head out of the tent. We had been happy to find a small patch of flat ground close to the road late in the night when I finally got too tired to drive any further. Here in the daylight it looked very different. Our spot was flat alright, but so was everything else around us. Flat nothingness, apart from the road towards Salalah and electricity poles one after another in a seemingly endless row.

I looked at Mrs J and grunted.“Breakfast?” she asked.

In a sweeping 360 degree motion I pointed at the barren landscape.“Where? Have I missed the restaurant???”

Mrs J pursed her lips “Boy, are we grumpy today”. She pointed towards a bowl with dates and a thermos, which I knew we definitely hadn’t packed from home.

“Abdullah dropped this off an hour ago and said we could just leave the empty thermos when we set off, and he would pick it up later”. I stood in awe with my mouth open. Only slightly, but still.

“Abdullah who???” I wanted to know.

“Ah, just a kind man who stopped earlier to check if we needed help. We had a nice long chat and he gave me loads of insider tips of what to see on the way to Salalah. It’s quite a way, you know”.

Oh did I know.

The hot sweat tea, a handful of dates and the kindness of strangers did miracles for my mood. We sat in comfortable silence and listened to the emptiness around us, only interrupted by an annoying, lone, desperate fly which must have smelled the sugary tea from miles away and set off on its life’s journey across the barren land for this promise of plenty. Mrs J looked down at her once white, now slept in, linen shirt. “Do you think I need to get changed?” she asked.

True, the Pajero was still stuck in 3rd gear and we were still a long way from Salalah, but just like the stubborn fly, we had a goal. We were going to get there... just very, very slowly.