For ages, the hijab, a head covering worn by Muslim women, has been a symbol of the East, a symbol of modesty and mystery. The practice of veiling has deep seated religious roots, originating when the wives of the Prophet Muhammad veiled themselves from worshipers who came to visit their home (which was converted into the first mosque). However, the hijab is an avenue for political expression as much as a religious garment.

Many think (and have thought) of the Middle East and the West as two opposing spheres of thought and cultural heritage. Despite the gross over-simplicity of this idea, the belief has been and is being used in conjunction with the practice of veiling to support political movements and rally people around nationalistic ideologies in the Middle East.  Kemal Atatürk, in his campaign to westernize Turkey in the late 1920s dissuaded Turkish women from wearing the Hijab.  For the garment was seen as a cultural artifact, alienating to the West. Today, with an awareness of the cultural connotations of the hijab, some women use the garment as a socio-political tool and veil in tacit rejection of the West, be it of the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan or of past damage to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and then Palestine during the period of colonization and systems of mandate.

It is certain, though, that many women today still wear the hijab for reasons of perceived chastity and modesty. It seems that veiling can at once empower women and strip them of identity or agency. But there is no doubt that it is an injustice when women are forced to veil or not to veil for social reasons.

One way the veil can empower women is by allowing them to move freely within public spheres and escape sexual harassment on the street, a growing problem in the Middle East. It is thought that women wearing the hijab are harassed less because they are “good Muslim women,” mothers and wives who project an air of modesty. So we can consider the veil as a tool that allows women to be treated with respect in public spheres, rather than as sexual objects open to verbal or physical harassment.

But the question I have is: what came first, the chicken or the egg? Do women veil to escape harassment, or did the trend of veiling prompt widespread harassment of unveiled women?

A strange concept, certainly counter-intuitive, but bear with me. The veil, in religious terms, serves the purpose of covering a woman’s body in order to quell the devious thoughts of men. Perhaps extreme, but there have been campaigns which push women to veil that promote just such an idea. The caption of this add reads: “A veil to protect or the eyes will molest.”

This poster characterizes women’s bodies as sweet and tempting, and men’s eyes on them as spoiling. It seems that the consensus here is that a woman’s body is inherently sexual, something to be desired. The act of veiling springs from this belief, and attempts to counter the issue by obfuscating the temptation of the body.

However, it seems to me that wearing the hijab reinforces, intensifies, and to some extent creates the belief that women’s bodies are sexual objects, cementing this belief as a culturally accepted conviction. This phenomenon fits in with the sociological theorem “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” In this mode of thinking, if veiling is accepted as the norm for women’s dress, a woman who chooses not to veil is automatically deemed immodest, and, however unfairly, can be seen as fair game for harassment. In this vein of thought, the hijab desexualizes individual women, but sexualizes the concept of “woman,” possibly creating issues for women who do not veil.

Others would argue that veiling at times has an effect opposite to that of quelling temptation directed toward the covered woman. Veiling can give women a more subtle power as sexual agents. As Scott and Woody can attest, there is a certain allure and eroticism associated with the garment. Furthermore, when someone sees a veiled woman,  one’s imagination can create the woman as attractive, unbounded by how she may actually appear behind the façade of cloth.

No matter how veiling is perceived — by foreign men as alluring, by foreign women as confounding, or by its wearers as preserving or political, the veil will not be lifted any time soon. As religious conservatism gains momentum in places, more and more women are choosing to cover. With global tides carrying people and Islam across borders and seas, it is becoming all the more necessary to understand the implications of this sartorial phenomenon.

When Scott asked if I could write a post on Islamic Finance for the blog, I nodded with enthusiasm. To be honest I am a relative newcomer to this topic and a non-Muslim, and though while supremely curious I feel I run the risk of offending others on a subject that can be sensitive. Nevertheless, here we are.

The first thing that caught my attention about Islamic finance is its recent origins. Although religious scripts governing Sharia law have been around since Prophet Mohamed’s time, Islamic finance only emerged after the Second World War. It didn’t emerge as a result of new, groundbreaking economic principles, but as a response to a series of clashes between western and Muslim nations, which led to a rise in pan-Islamism.

Among the consequences of this movement was a change in the ways of commerce among Muslims. As Gulf nations withdrew petrodollars they held in the West and began dumping them in their own backyard, cities like Dubai and Kuwait emerged as hubs for the practice and display of Muslim financial piety. By the 1970s, Islamic scholars, economists, and intellectuals were busy studying and interpreting passages of the Quran for the creation of a framework for Islamic finance.

Theological Underpinnings

There are several factors that appear to make modern day Islamic finance different from conventional finance, the most important of which is the prohibition of interest. Wikipedia amply lists all these traits.

Al-Baqarah 2:275 Those who consume interest cannot stand [on the Day of Resurrection] except as one stands who is being beaten by Satan into insanity. That is because they say, “Trade is [just] like interest.” But Allah has permitted trade and has forbidden interest. So whoever has received an admonition from his Lord and desists may have what is past, and his affair rests with Allah . But whoever returns to [dealing in interest or usury] – those are the companions of the Fire; they will abide eternally therein.

But this prohibition isn’t unique to Islam. The Old Testament also regards the charging of interest as immoral. Exodus and Deuteronomy specifically regard lending to the poor as a sin.

Biblical Parallels

Exodus 22:25 - You shall not give him your silver at interest, nor your food for gain.

Deuteronomy 23:19 - Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of any thing that is lent upon usury

Leviticus 25:37 - Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase

It was only during the European Renaissance when Protestant reformer John Calvin changed the status quo. He argued that not all rules in the Old Testament set out for Jews (who were permitted to lend to gentiles) were applicable to Christians and that one must not interpret these passages in a literal manner. The bible should simply serve as a guide. But Calvin’s real concern was the exploitation of the poor through high interest rates. In Calvin’s letter to Oekolampadius, he writes that he is unwilling to condemn usury so long as it is practiced with equity and charity. Whoever borrows should make at least as much, if not more, than the amount borrowed, meaning that as long as one is fair and reasonable, charging interest should be allowed.

Calvin’s words were such a blow to the Church that interest became legalized across Europe. This was a major turning point in history. It is interesting that Calvin’s view, which forms a basis for modern day capitalism and bank lending, was effectively reversed by Islamic scholars in the 1970s. Is this to say that Muslims, who did business like others in corporate America up until the 1970s, were all of a sudden subject to the new rules of Islamic finance? Yes, in a sense. But there is a twist to it all.

According to Sharia scholars, a guaranteed rate of return on an interest rate is prohibited because the lender and borrower typically bear an unequal level of risk. For example, Sharia scholars prohibit the issuer of a bond to default on an interest payment and then go bankrupt, because those at the bottom of the pecking order virtually have no claim to their monies. Therefore much of Islamic finance is about creating a mechanism that reaps the benefits of bank lending with the appearance of profit sharing (Mudharabah).

Financing Structures

Consider a car loan. If I were to take out a loan in the UK, the bank lends me money and I repay the loan at a predetermined interest rate. Should I become unfit to service the loan, the bank revindicates (repossesses) the car, collects what is owed, and refunds the remainder (if any). If I were to go to an Islamic bank, the bank buys the car, and then sells it to me at a premium, also to be repaid at predetermined intervals (Murabahah). Although I end up paying the same amount under both scenarios, Islamic scholars believe that the latter scenario is only fair because should I default, the bank simply revindicates the car with no further claim on me. In the earlier scenario, the bank may further pursue me for any remaining principal if the repossession doesn’t provide enough. Thus Islamic banks do charge for the time value of money.

Another popular Islamic investment product is a sale/lease bond, aka Sukuk. Suppose I am a property developer and wish to build an apartment complex. I would sell a piece of real estate to a special purpose vehicle (SPV), which raises the funds by selling share certificates. The SPV leases the asset back to the issuer (me), thereby collecting principal plus interest and passes the proceeds back to the sukuk holders in the form of rent. At the end of the lease, the SPV sells or gives the property back to the issuer.

Other types of Islamic financial transactions exist. But to me the above examples are enough to suggest that Islamic finance is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Islamic finance uses complicated structures to achieve the same goal as conventional finance, but with added cost and decreased transparency. At the end of the day, profit and interest by any other name is still profit and interest. It is hard to imagine that this was the Prophet Mohamed’s objective.

Interest in Indonesia

Having grown up in the world’s most populous Muslim nation, I want to share my observations on Islamic finance in this part of the world. In my opinion Indonesia sees Islamic finance like a dot in the horizon. I can assure you that the majority of business done in Indonesia is definitely not Sharia compliant. Even more fundamentally, more than half the population, which lives in poverty, has probably never even heard of Islamic finance.

The problem with Islamic finance is that it has no global standardization. It emerged in the 1970s in the Middle East, which explains its varying level of demand in different Muslim countries. And as Islamic finance continues to emerge in different parts of the world, it faces the danger of generating greater differences and inconsistencies. A recent Bloomberg article calling for certification among Muslim scholars is further testament to this problem.

Don’t the Saudis own shares in Citi? Are wealthy Indonesian Muslims putting their money into Singapore or their own Sharia banks?  As the market continues to develop, time will tell how market priorities interplay with religious doctrine.

The following day, we spent most of our time working on correspondence for you, dear reader. We lounged around Sid’s place, hacking away on our computers, and doing a fair amount of schtick revolving around The Pixies’ tune “Hey.”

When Sid arrived home from work, he recommended that we visit a certain Arabic restaurant near the Dubai Creek that he was particularly fond of. Since we had hitherto not discovered anything that Sid was fond of that did not also strike our fancy, we agreed.

It was no surprise that the restaurant was incredible. And we feasted into the night on pastes, falafel, lentil soup, and a plate of mixed grilled meats. We then opened up the laptop and spent a few hours doing trivia, while we smoked Hookah.

It was Jackson’s last night with us in the Gulf, and all concerned were quite sad to see him go. As we sipped on minty lime drinks and chatted about financial depravities, I felt my heart grow heavy. It was so nice to have Jackson along on the trip. He added such a delightful spice to our daily lives.

The next morning Claudia and I awoke to find the apartment empty, and Jackson and Scott downstairs hard at work packing up his Speed TR for the journey home. For a moment, glancing down at our watches, we feared that we had overslept Jackson’s departure. So we were relieved when Jackson and Scott came back upstairs. By then, however, it was already well past time for Jackson to catch a cab. It was a hurried but heartfelt goodbye.

And then there were three.

We figured: what better way to mourn the departure of the illustrious Jackson than to go on a wheel? So we did exactly that. Claudia, Scott, and I unfolded the remaining three Dahons and headed out into Dubai.

Outside Sid’s apartment, in his general neighborhood, there were wide pedestrian ways, which made for easy wheeling. But soon they began to dissolve, and we were forced onto the road itself.

We then realized this was to be no wheel for beginners. The traffic was fast, and none too used to having cycles on the roads. All the sidewalks appeared to be only partially constructed so, Mario-Carting (as AsiaWheeling refers to cycling on the sidewalks) was not an option. So we rode fast, amidst the traffic, and trusted in our ability to signal our intent and the quality of our Vietnamese motorcycle helmets.

We were heading toward the main street of Dubai, an eight-lane, skyscraper-lined behemoth, by the name of Sheikh Zayed Road. It was an easy landmark, since it loomed, gigantic, over all the city. Once we finally made it there, the traffic was almost too intense for wheeling. We stuck to the side streets and only entered the main torrent when it was absolutely necessary.

Eventually we decided our next waypoint should be the ocean, so we hoisted the cycles up and scrambled over a large pedestrian crossover, plunking them down on the other side,  and wheeling on, now perpendicular to the Sheikh Zayed Road. We were heading toward a giant, fluttering, UAE flag that we knew was near the seaside.

Part way down the gravelly drive, we stopped to fill up our tires with the Speed TR’s in-seat pumps. When I opened mine up, a small stream of sand fell out of it. I was worried for a moment that the sand may have gone deeper as well, ruining the pump, but thankfully that was not the case.

Tires well pressurized once again, we wheeled on, into a very expatriate neighborhood. We were beginning to be able to smell the sea, so we knew we were close. We left the residential zone, and crossed a large empty gravel lot toward a huge Iranian hospital. Outside of the Iranian hospital, we were pulling an uber-lichtenstein when Claudia’s pedal fell off into the street. There were some moments of confusion and anxiety as we dashed into traffic to retrieve it before some Lamborghini or Land Rover crushed it. Unlike our Speed TRs, Claudia’s Speed D7 did not have detachable pedals, hers instead folded up against the cycle, so the pedal falling off was something to be alarmed about.

Luckily, the repair required no tools, just some careful manipulation of springs and bending and snapping back into place of plastic bits. The Iranians walking in and out of the hospital paused, forming a small crowd around us, quietly looking on as we performed bike surgery.

Then we were wheeling again. Soon we came upon a large beach, where a paved path led out onto a kind of jetty.

We decided to wheel out to the end of the jetty and take in the view, which was magnificent. There we met a group of young men whom we decided not to let ride the cycles. Normally on AsiaWheeling we are more than happy to indulge locals who are interested in tasting the raw freedom of the Speed TR themselves. For one reason or another, these chaps gave us a bad feeling, and we decided to decline. So we snapped a quick picture and split.

From there we followed the directions of this sign:

And we wheeled the one or two kilometer bike path that runs along the beach. It was a nice gesture by the Emerate of Dubai toward wheelers, but was far too short to provide anything other than a mild whetting of one’s appetite for cycling.

Claudia’s stomach had begun to hurt during the ride, so we decided to call the wheel. From there, we headed back toward Sid’s place, using the giant towering Burj Khalifa as a navigational tool. The sun was dipping low, and traffic was picking up as we pulled onto a great bridge arching over the Sheikh Zayed Road. The ride was high voltage but beautiful. From up on the bridge, we could see all the architecture of Dubai laid out around us, colored gold by the setting sun. It was exhilarating, dampened only slightly by the exhaust I was breathing at the time.

Back at Sid’s we began packing up our things for tomorrow’s flight to Jordon. The Gulf had been a magical place, in no small part due to great people, like Sid and Jackson, who helped us to make it so magical.

That evening, Sid opened a bottle of wine (quite the luxury here in the Gulf), and we lounged around the kitchen discussing Life, The Universe, and AsiaWheeling. That evening, Sid treated us to a meal at the restaurant of the hotel downstairs. It was a nightly theme restaurant, with tonight’s theme being Africa. For one reason or another, AsiaWheeling was most interested in the extensive salad bar at the place. It had been quite some time since, I guess, we’d eaten raw greens, and we reveled in the opportunity.

Before retiring for the night, we managed to do a little work on the web, though not before encountering a few blocked sites to our surprise with the following warning with a woman wearing a Batoola:

We crawled into bed that evening, not knowing quite what the rest of the Middle East would hold, but if the Gulf was any indication, it would be incredible.

It was a sad moment, that next morning when we realized we would need to leave the comfortable womb of the Intercontinental Hotel in Muscat.

As a decent conciliation, we would be climbing back into the Previa and racing across the desert back to Dubai, where we could look forward to another couple days in the pleasant company of our dear friend Sid.

As I walked out of the hotel with my filthy yellow technology bag, my ukulele, and my weathered Panama hat, I wondered what they must think of us. How often does a guest as strange as AsiaWheeling’s team Prevlaunch show up at this kind of place?

We sat down in the giant expanse of the lobby and considered ordering coffee, but further scrutiny of the price and the recollection that we were still very long on Red Bull, brought us back to our senses.

I sat in the lobby, sipping a Red Bull and watching the other guests, most of whom were very well dressed western and Omani businessmen.  I opened my computer and did a little work, while Scott and Claudia took a last tour of the grounds. Meanwhile, Jackson, in his infinite kindness, was handling the luggage (or at least directing the operations of the hotel’s luggage handlers).

With the Previa loaded, we said our goodbyes to this palace, and headed into the city of Muscat, with the goal of finding food. Unfortunately, not far into our stroll, we started to realize that most of the businesses were, for one reason or another closed (perhaps a mid-day napping break?).

So with an eye on the watch, knowing that we needed to make it back to Dubai that night, we hit the road, relying on the Red Bull and raw willpower to push through the hunger until the next restaurant opportunity.

We had some fruit left from our in-room picnic, so we munched on that as we drove. One of the stranger purchases that Claudia and I had made the day before was a type of citrus fruit called the curry lemon. We wanted to cut up the fruit, but the vibration of the road was increasing the risk of Claudia cutting off her fingers. So we pulled over.

They looked and smelled like grapefruits at the time of purchase, but upon dissection, the name proved to be more apt than we’d hoped. They were, in fact inedible, perhaps they were good for making juice, but they could not be comfortably eaten straight. And we had these fruits, opened and reeking… what to do? In the end, jettisoning them in the desert seemed the best move.

It was good to be driving through that beautiful landscape again listening to John Zorn’s Dreamers. We stopped for gas not far outside good old Sohar and purchased some startlingly cheap shawarma pockets to go with our startlingly cheap tank of gas. We attempted to recreate the glory of our original Ras Al Khaima avocado drinks, but were sorely disappointed to find that the similarly named items at the roadside shawarma stand were just green McDonald’s style milkshakes. Too sweet for me.

Despite the milkshakes, our love for Sohar welled up inside of us. Being so close to that fine place once again, we could not help ourselves. We climbed back into the Previa and designed this “Sohar So Good” T-Shirt.

We crossed back into the UAE, this time at a new boarder. As always, the experience was streamlined and friendly.  Our fellow travelers were well dressed Germans, who appeared to be living the lifestyle depicted in Louis Vuitton luggage advertisements.

We were happy to allow them to cut in front of us, just to get the chance to study them further.

Not far into the UAE, we found ourselves suddenly in a region of giant sand dunes. The sun was just setting, and it was simply too beautiful not to stop, so once again we called a waypoint.

We took off our shoes and ran into the dunes, feeling the hot sand underneath our feet.

We spent the next hour or so playing in the sand, shooting photos of one another, and generally reveling in the desert landscape.

We took the opportunity to give some love to our underwear sponsor, Exofficio.

When the sun had sunk too low to photograph any more, we headed back over the barbed wire fence that we’d hopped to get off the highway and into the dunes, and piled back into the Previa.

By the time we got back to Dubai, the in-town EuropeCar had closed, so our best choice was to head to the airport. Sid was so kind as to offer to drive us back from the airport, even in the face of all the sand that we inadvertently dragged into his apartment.  What a chap.

Our alarms went off bright and early,  and for once my SIM city 2000 theme blended in with a cacophony of ringtones that pulled our team into the already blazing sunny morning. We even got the opportunity to catch Sid on his way out of the house for work. He looked well ironed and dapper, and greeted us with a big smile. “Off to Oman today then?”

Right he was. The night before, as Scott and Claudia were bringing up her long lost and finally recovered baggage, we had explained to Sid the rental car swap that we had initiated yesterday and he most graciously offered to assist us in engineering an equitable termination of our deal with Stellar Rent a Car. They were none too eager to take the vehicle back, but in the end, we were able to pay them for about a day and a half of rental, and though some discussion of a petrol fee had occurred earlier during our iteration, none was ever levied.

But before we could head toward the wild desert, we had some exciting gifts to open. First was the Dawn Patrols. We opened the boxes and uncovered two pairs of very attractive spectacles. The new sunglasses had that spotlessly clean warm gleam one finds in showroom automobiles. There were two pairs, one in black, with silver lenses, the other in a kind of tortoise shell, with gold lenses.

We tried them both on, but it seemed obvious from early on that the black ones would best fit Scott and the brown ones me.  I put the glasses on my face and admired the world around me, then admired myself in the  mirror. These were going to be the perfect glasses for Prevlaunch. We also unfolded and inspected Claudia’s new Dahon.

She was a beautiful specimen, also gleaming and new, with a black matte finish, and black matte seat post and folding apparatus, and a set of tasteful beige-wall tires. They were not, however, our beloved Schwalbe big apples, the kevlar lined tires. As you, dear reader, already know, we had not suffered a single flat. “Are these kevlar lined?” I asked.

“So says the man who sold it to me at Providence Cycles.”

Fair enough. With Jackson and Claudia sporting brand new folding cycles, one might suspect Scott and I to look back toward our filthy and beaten up Speed TRs longing for new equipment. This is, however, decidedly not true. Instead, I looked back at my dear Speed TR and thought: just look at what one of these things can do. I reflected on all the places my cycle had been, all the different streets over which it had rolled, and the thousands of kilometers that we had put on them. And they were by no means on their last legs. It is a fine machine, the Dahon folding bicycle, and I was thrilled to see two fresh ones entering the world.

We loaded all the cycles into the only Toyota we had left,locked the car, and headed to an Indian restaurant across the street from the rental agency. The restaurant supplied us with a very large and inexpensive amount of curried mutton and roti, served with a giant platter of fresh onions, tomatoes, and lemon wedges.

Part way through the meal, our Malaysian friend from Stellar ran across the street to explain to me in Indonesian that our new Previa was parked illegally and I needed to feed the meter. I had no idea that we even needed to pay to park. Luckily all was well, and he even spotted me some change to feed the meter. A fine chap indeed.

Back at the restaurant, while we were picking at the last of the food, Jackson and Claudia headed around the corner to an electronics shop. The Previa had only a tape deck, which as any experienced road tripper knows is superior to all except the AUX-in jack, in terms of its ability to pipe audio straight from an iPod or laptop. All we needed was an 8^th inch to cassette cable, of which they had a few in stock.

Without further ado, we headed out into the desert, scanning the road for signs, scrutinizing our maps. Then we were finally on the main road to Musandam, listening to a little of the old Podquiz. Spirits could not be higher, as we drove through the desert completely legally at 140-160 Km per hour, depending on the ever-changing speed limits. The sun was bright, but it was cool and quiet as we blasted along inside the Previa.

It was our dream, turned reality: listening to Nas’ Illmatic, arguing about bits of trivia, drinking Red Bull, and tearing through the beautiful desert at 90 miles per hour. AsiaWheeling strikes again.

Our first stop was in a rather industrial Emirate called Ras Al Khaima.

The capital city is situated on a river, and as such makes it an ideal hub for manufacturing and transporting  materials around the UAE. One of the traditional focuses of Ras Al Khaima, I believe, is cement manufacturing.

We were interested in getting a drink, gasoline, and directions to the border of Oman. So we pulled off the main road and began cruising. The place was sun-drenched, industrial, and fascinating. We spotted a blended drinks shop along the side of another small road, and parked the Previa, heading through the blazing sun and into the cool shade of the interior of the shop.  Inside we found a friendly and large staff, a small restaurant, and an astonishingly succulent 90 cent avocado smoothie with fresh crushed pistachios on top.

Jackson and I had the avocado, while Scott and Claudia chose some kind of pomegranate crème.

We drank our smoothies, across a broken concrete road from the shop and watched the ballet of shipping and industry performing before us.  The smoothies went fast, and after we had tossed the Styrofoam cups, we headed out on foot in search of a rest room. We were not sure whether the laws for public urination involved chopping off  hands or worse, so we headed into an HSBC branch office.  Out of curiosity, we probed the staff there in hopes of acquiring literature on sharia-compliant mortgage loans, though were not able to walk away with anything substantial.

The women inside were very friendly, and though they did not know exactly how to get to Oman, they gave us some general clues. They were the first women in full Burka that I had ever interacted with and I could only see part of each woman’s face, but I must admit, I found both of them quite attractive… something like the allure of  conversing with someone at masked ball.

We followed their directions, across a bridge to a gas station where I took great pleasure in filling up the entire tank for 11 USD.

When we got back on the road, we discovered it was only 10 or 15 kilometers to the border. It had become very dusty, and it was through a kind of dust fog that we made our way to the ocean, and with it, a small but well fortified Emirati customs station.

It was a strict, but very relaxed border experience. We were asked to park our car, then get out and wander over to a window with our passports. The officials spoke good English and were very polite. The politeness continued as well, even as they charged us each a hefty exit fee.

From there, we were flagged by a Emirati soldier onward into no man’s land, which we made short work of, arriving at Omani passport control a few minutes later. There too, we encountered polite workers, in flowing white robes, speaking great English, and charging us plenty of money. We paid in Emirati Dihrams, having not gotten our hands on any Omani Reils yet.

The dust began to clear as we drove on, along a beautiful, brand new, empty road. To our right there were great jagged, completely plant-less cliffs.

To our left was the deep, clear blue of the Straits of Hormuz.

We pulled over at a beach,  and headed down to look more closely at the sea.  It was gorgeous, and made all the more so by the polarized lenses on our brand new Dawn Patrols.

We climbed back in the Previa and drove a few more miles, until we noticed a fellow wheeler heading along the side of the road, and pulled over to give him our hearty support.  We congratulated the chap, giving him a can of Red Bull to aid him on his journey.

Wheel safe brother, wherever you are.

And then we were in Khasab. Khasab is a small hamlet, but the largest in Musandam.

It was an import/export town, and if what we had read was correct, supported itself largely with the business of illegally transporting cigarettes and other taxable goods on super high-speed boats, across the straits of Hormuz to Iran.  And sure enough, as we drove we saw quite a few boats with what looked like a redundant number of giant off-board motors.

We began investigating hotels, but quickly learned that they were all quite expensive.

So we tabled the mission of finding somewhere to sleep, and instead drove to the beach.

It was a gravelly beach, and following the precedent of the locals, we pulled the Previa onto the gravel and ran into some nearby caves to change into our bathing suits.

We quickly discovered that the thing to do here was to cliff jump.

So after swimming around a bit in the rocky beach area, we climbed up the rocks to the top of some nearby cliffs.

We spent the remainder of the sunlight jumping off the rocks, from ever higher outcroppings into the crystal clear blue water.

Ah, life was good.

We climbed back into the Previa after the sun had set and began searching for food. The place we ended up settling on was a kind of outside café. The owner was very opinionated about what we should order, so we let him have his way and soon out came some soups and salads and hummus, followed by roasted fish, and finally tea.  It was all quite delicious, and we ate at the single wooden table, sitting in a pool of fluorescent light that poured out of the kitchen. As we leaned back, savoring the bits of flavor left in our mouths, it seemed once again that a more foolish man might think the deck was full of aces.

After the meal, we headed to a very down-to-earth Sheesha café, where we lounged around smoking water pipes, sitting on plastic chairs outside a crumbling cinder block structure, and drinking tea.

Meanwhile all around us, old men with beards in flowing white robes, discussed very serious sounding topics. Claudia was the only woman in the place, and she explained to us, was probably technically not even allowed inside. “These kinds of places are men only,” she explained, “but we’re just Gaijin smashing this one.”

“Gajin Smashing” is a term from the Japanese expatriate community, for when a foreigner is allowed to do something that is generally not allowed or frowned upon, simply because he or she is a foreigner. It’s an interesting notion, that of women being banned from this place. Were we being disrespectful in coming here, smashing our way in with a woman? Or we were doing some strange kind of God’s work? Speculation is welcomed in the comments.

When we were done with the hookahs, we paid the startlingly small bill, and drove around until we decided we had found the absolute cheapest hotel in town (still a pretty ritzy place), and after haggling over the price, the owners explained to us that it would be strictly against the rules for all four of us to stay in a room, and that we needed to get two rooms at least. This seemed crazy. One room already was nearly 70 dollars. So, in frustration, we decided to just leave and sleep in the car on the beach, in what we dubbed the “Hotel Previa.”

We brushed our teeth in the bathroom of the hotel and then departed crunching back onto the gravel of the beach, and pulled up next to the cliff wall that contained the caves in which we’d changed.

We unloaded the cycles from the back of the car and locked them to the rim of the Previa. We then leaned all the seats back, passed around the bottle of Klonapin, and, after doing a quick 20 minute round of trivia fell into a most delightful and peaceful slumber.

Meanwhile the moon and stars shone brightly, reflecting off the tranquil Straits of Hormuz, and the occasional cigarette-smuggling power boat skimmed off toward Iran.

We had at least another day of waiting for Claudia’s luggage, but unfortunately time was getting scarce. We needed to start exploring. So cycle or no cycle, we decided to take our newly rented Toyota Innova on a mission to the neighboring emirate of Abu Dhabi. But first we had a meeting to attend.

As you, dear reader, no doubt already know, AsiaWheeling is proudly partnered with Red Bull, and has, until this point, been supported in the lucidity department by Red Bull energy shots, which have not a few times, saved us from a situation in which an under-caffeinated zombie state might have taken hold, with possibly drastic consequences. We were, however, now long depleted of all save our last two in-case-of-emergency-only shots.

So we were going to meet with the team at Redbull about replenishing our supply, which would be especially useful here in the Middle East, where we would be driving for long stretches through what we had heard can be hypnotically monotonous desert roads. As we had read, cross-country drivers in the Gulf must be vigilant, quite seriously, against the very real hazard of hitting a wandering camel, or encountering a night-time driver who feels that headlights are not necessary.

Also we learned in our research that in the UAE and Oman it is actually illegal to have too dirty a car, and that when driving a truly filthy automobile, one can expect to be politely stopped by the police and fined. What an interesting land we had entered!

So while Jackson and I loaded the team’s three Speed TRs into the Innova, breathing a quiet prayer for Claudia’s lost D7’s safe return, Scott and Claudia headed out in search of coffee and shapes. They immerged from a nearby Starbucks just as I pulled around in the Innova, air conditioning already blasting in its struggle against the blazing heat. I steered with one hand and drank hot coffee or ate crumbled bits of ice cold cheese croissant with the other. Meanwhile, cars tore by us, the sun blazed, and the desert wind whipped up a froth of dust while we tried to navigate the city. Dubai was not an easy place to get around. Signage was present, but rarely it seemed, when you needed it, and in all but the luckiest of cases, determining the name of road on which you were driving was impossible.

In addition, the drivers were mildly insane. Fabulously expensive vehicles regularly whipped and soared by me at what must have been over 100 miles per hour. Luckily the road was huge, and traffic was light enough that we were able to make it to the airport with only minimal difficulty.

Back at the airport we found our way into a kind of import/export office park. We rolled in, the Innova chock full of cycles and AsiaWheeling personelle, past a number of security gates, all of which happily let us in, no questions asked.

Inside Red Bull’s Dubai headquarters, we were met by a strikingly beautiful receptionist, who directed us toward an energetic young man approaching from the depths of the offices.

His name was Roger, and he stuck out his hand, asking “normal or sugar free?”

“Sugar free,” we all replied.

The team sat with Roger for some time discussing Red Bull’s business in the middle east, AsiaWheeling, and the future of our two great enterprises. He was from Lebabnon it turned out, and we allowed the conversation to deviate for some time, as Roger explained to us his favorite waypoints in that country.  Soon we were joined by Elie, another member of the local team, with whom we had exchanged a few e-mails. The six of us headed across the street to a small pasta joint where our new friends most graciously treated us to a delicious lunch. With full stomachs, and  feeling plenty alert from all the Red Bull, we stood up to leave. I took this opportunity to dash away from the group to go pull the Innova around for energy drink on-boarding.

Of course the back of the thing was chock full of bicycles for our upcoming wheel in Abu Dhabi. This seemed a perfect opportunity for us to show off the Speed TRs.

We unloaded the things and everyone took a short wheel around the Dubai Airport free trade zone lot.

From there we loaded our stash of Red Bull into the Innova and bid farewell to our new friends in the energy drink business.

After a few wrong turns and some heavy use of the constantly visble Burj Khalifa as a tool for dead reckoning, we pulled onto what we had been told by Sid’s friends last night around Hookahs at the Palace Hotel was the most dangerous road in the region, the infamous E11.

Why you ask? In my opinion, there are a few reasons, and if you’ll allow me to speculate, I’d like to list them.

1. Driver Mentality – Drivers in the UAE are generally rather wealthy and somewhat immune to things like traffic fines. Basically, they can do as they please behind the wheel. This creates a culture of speeding, lane entitlement issues, and rare signaling of intent.

2. Fancy Cars – Emiratis drive fancy cars. And fancy cars also tend to be quite fast. With so much capability at one’s fingertips, who could be blamed for driving like life is a video game?

3. Poor Highway Design – Sleeping Policemen, as the Indonesians refer to speed bumps, are placed quite liberally in the middle of the highway to indicate an upcoming round about. Rather than building overpasses and on-ramps, all intersections on this highway are giant five-lane round-abouts that create all kinds of confusion, not to mention occasional airborne moments due to the occasional unexpectedly early arrival of a sleeping policeman.

Despite the purported danger, I was getting the hang of being behind the wheel, and the more I drove in the Gulf, the more confident I became about my maneuvers. Though no matter how many times it happened, I never got over the fantastically expensive vehicles that would pull up behind me and flash their lights for me to change lanes. Ferraris, Bentleys, Bugattis, Maybachs, those were the only cars that could stand out against a constant backdrop of BMWs, Mercedes, and Audis. The Gulf was a wild place indeed.

While we drove, Jackson received a call from his dear friend and our dear host, Sid. It seems there had been a problem with our car insurance. Despite the previous estimations of the car rental agency, due to the fact that I was under 25, they would not be able to issue insurance for Oman… only for the UAE. This was certainly a problem. We wanted to leave for Oman as soon as we got Claudia’s cycle, but for now it seemed we would need to go back to the drawing board transportation-wise. Plus pay at least a day’s rental for this vehicle.

We decided to table the can of worms, due to our arrival in Abu Dhabi.

We decided instead to focus on finding one of the two bicycle rental joints in the town to get a little bit of inaugural four-person Gulf wheeling under our belts.

This proved easier said than done, and once we entered the city, we spent about three  hours driving around, calling various business, and receiving confused no after confused no to our queries.

It seemed that bikes could only be rented by patrons of certain hotels, or that the bike rental places had gone under. Furthermore, the owners of Abu Dhabi’s few cycling shops were merciless, and had no interest in renting us even their most dilapidated cycle for the afternoon.

Finally, in frustrated desperation, we decided to stroll over to the seaside path, where we had planned to wheel, thinking at least we might take in the view. The sun was setting now, and a golden glow was spreading across the sky. Soon it would be too dark for safe wheeling anyway.

We had been, of course, drinking Red Bull all afternoon, and as you might imagine, dear reader, we were all spectacularly vigilant, and not a few of us needed to take a leak. As we walked toward the beach, we spotted, of all places, a EuropeCar rental agency directly in our path. This immediately struck us as a good place to use the rest room, and it was only after the sober light of a released bladder began to set in that we realized, maybe, just maybe, they might be able to save us from the aforementioned Oman insurance problem.

The gentlemen at the front desk were superbly friendly, and as we chatted with them about rentals, we found that we were indeed in supreme luck. We had been looking for months for the illusive beauty of a Toyota Previa, but all that we had found had been either extraordinarily expensive or unavailable for a lad of only 24 years.

But, low and behold, not only did this Abu Dhabi Europcar offer us a Previa, but they provided us with insurance on the spot, notarized before our very eyes by a woman in the back, and stamped with a resounding smack. Then, in case you thought our fortune could not get any better, Europcar undercut the price we had been quoted at Stellar by almost 15%. It was becoming quite a successful day indeed.

We strolled out of the lot to find that our Previa had already been pulled up and was getting a quick wax-down by a team of Pakistani gentlemen. I ran down the block to get the Innova where we had parked her (parking in Abu Dhabi, by the way, is an incredible exercise in spatial thinking, not unlike a cross between origami and Tetris). And as I jogged, amped up on Red Bull and the electric thrill of a problem vanquished, I found myself singing a certain joyous tune. Not more than three bars into the song, I realized why I was singing….

Allow me for a moment, dear reader, to pause the story and slip into a bit of a flashback to the AsiaWheeling planning process.

The place: Grinnell, Iowa.

The time: 7:48 am, October 24^th 2009.

The weather: cool fall morning, misty, crisp.

Scott had recently been operated on by the AsiaWheeling surgical team at Surgical Associates of Grinnell in order to remove a number of nasty shapes from his body. He was still recovering from a particularly deep incision on his foot, and another on his back, and had mostly been on the couch, working diligently on the redesign of AsiaWheeling for you, dear reader. He had taken up the habit of wearing a certain black velvet smoking jacket of mine, cursing grumpily, taking prescription painkillers, and walking with a viciously gyrating hobble.

I was late for an appointment to have some apparatus or another on my car repaired and I had asked Scott to drive behind me in my mother’s partner, John’s, Toyota Previa. Scott had been gingerly struggling to get a sock over his still somewhat openly wounded toe, while I had been struggling to get John’s Previa out of the patch of grass just off the driveway where it had been parked for some time. Having recently bought a new car, you see, the Previa had not been driven in months and had, among other things, become totally coated in wet fallen leaves, and sunk deeply into the mud of our front lawn.

I pried the driver’s door open with a viscous squeak and climbed in. It smelled like a thousand cups of spilled coffee inside. Kind of a comforting scent, actually. I put in the key and turned the engine. The dash blinked to life and she started quickly, but moaned and whined once she was running. I tried to clear the windshield of leaves with the wipers, but it seemed only effective in smearing a kind of brownish tannin goo all over the glass. Who needs to see? The road will be empty anyway, I thought, and tried to reverse onto the gravel drive. I pushed the gas and the wheels just spun in the mud. I tried to rock the car back and forth, forward then reverse, and began to make some headway, spinning huge chunks of mud into the air. Finally the tire caught a grip, but unfortunately, on the forward lunge rather than the backward.

And with that, the Previa plunged part way into a bush, sinking even deeper into a mixture of dead leaves and thick black Iowa mud.

Scott chose this point to hobble out of the house, wearing the black smoking jacket, hunched over slightly against the cold and the pain in his back, and cursing at the amount of time it was taking for his morning painkillers to hit his system.

“Sorry brother,” I explained, “but you’re going to need to help me push.”

And so with plenty of grunting and swearing, and for Scott, bless him, probably a shoe full of blood, we got the Previa out of the muddy bush and onto the gravel of the driveway. With that I climbed in my car and Scott climbed into the Previa.

We arrived a few miles away at the service station, and Scott climbed out of the Previa a few spots down from where I had parked at the opening to the service garage. I looked at him in the gray cold light, and was startled to see him standing up straight, possibly even grinning… then suddenly he started dancing. As I drew closer I could hear him singing as well.

“She’s a lady! Oh oh oh, she’s a lady! I’m taking about my little lady”

[audio:http://asiawheeling.com/music/Tom_Jones_-_Shes_A_Lady.mp3]

It was a strange powerful vehicle this Toyota Previa.  And now we were about to drive one to Oman!

And in honor of our great fortune, and what will from hereforth be referred to as “Prevlaunch 2010,” we would like to proudly introduce a new item in the AsiaWheeling trading post: the “She’s a Lady” Previa lover’s tee-shirt. Enjoy.

I pulled around the corner in the Innova and Scott pulled behind me in the Previa. We certainly were supporting the rental car industry in the Gulf.

I kept humming “She’s a Lady,” as Jackson got on the phone with his friend Brian, who we would be meeting for dinner. He was only a few blocks away, and we pulled around the corner to meet him.

Brian is a relatively fresh Harvard grad who picked up a job working for the Abu Dhabi Investment Council, one of the biggest pools of invested capital in the world. On this info alone, I was already interested to meet the chap. And then, when he walked up wearing of all things a Panama hat! Well, you could say he had already won the hearts of the AsiaWheeling team before even saying hello.

We ate Lebanese food, quite tasty and affordable, at a nearby joint, then climbed back into our two cars. We decided we should probably investigate the Emerates Palace Hotel before leaving the city of Abu Dhabi.

So we pulled back onto the highway and headed for the giant glowing dome of the hotel. First a few things to introduce this particular hotel: The total cost of building the thing came in at just over 3 billion dollars, and so high are its operating costs that if some estimates are correct, it could run at full capacity for over a hundred years without breaking even.

At some point during the drive, Scott passed me, and then immediately began calling me asking me to slow down and wait for him. The end result of this was that he arrived at the hotel well before me, while I cruised slowly along the shoulder scanning the horizon for our beautiful white Previa.

In the end, we finally figured out what had happened, and I sped up toward the hotel. As I pulled in, the guard looked down at Jackson’s shorts and explained to him that he would let us into the complex to take pictures, but that we were asked not to enter the bar with shorts on. We agreed, and finally met up with the rest of our team, briefly considering just leaving the place. Finally, we decided to pay the valet to park our two Toyota vans, and head inside.

We pulled up the entrance next to Hummers and Lexi, and parted with our rental car keys. We headed from there inside. And I will have to hand it to them; the place was impressive.

Totally and completely impressive.

We spent a while wandering around, sitting on one of the many imperial sofas, perusing an exhibit of Islamic calligraphy.

We also spent a fair bit of time gawking at the gold bar vending machine in the place too. While the exact purpose of such a device still somewhat alludes me, I am certain it is at the very least of much use to money launderers.

Soon exhaustion began to lay in, and we decided that heading back to Dubai would be prudent.

On our way back, we noticed that the gas tanks on both cars were beginning to get strikingly low.  But we were in the UAE, we thought, certainly we would be able to find a gas station… So we drove on. We dropped Brian off without seeing a station, and began to head back to the main road toward Dubai. Still no station. The low fuel warning light in the Innova had been on for quite a while, and while Jackson, who was at that point providing an unending source of positive vibes and moral support, assured me that we would find gas, I was beginning to get worried.

There was a lot of desert out there, and we were quickly leaving a zone of human settlement. As a last-ditch effort, I headed out in search of a town some seven km away from the main road. When we reached it we found all sources of petrol to be either closed or out of business.

Finally, after driving around for a bit, we pulled over for a conference. All concerned climbed out of their Toyotas. We suddenly found ourselves bursting into uncontrollable laughter. Here we were in the Persian Gulf and unable to find gasoline.

We finally gained control over our emotions and climbed back in the vans. We headed along a road that ran parallel to the main road to Dubai, and eventually a gas station appeared. Thank goodness. The line there was immense, but we were happy to wait. And even happier to purchase gas at the price of 35 cents a liter (about a $1.30 a gallon). With tanks freshly filled, we made our way back toward Dubai, Scott and Claudia in the Previa, and Jackson and I in the Innova.

From there, the two teams broke up, as Scott and Claudia headed toward the airport to pick up Claudia’s bags, and Jackson and I proceeded to get hopelessly lost in a do-loop on one-way roads, which somehow after 45 minutes of terrible looping around, spat us out right at the foot of the Burj Khalifa and Sid’s house.

We awoke the next morning feeling quite rested and rolled out of bed to find ourselves in a beautifully decorated, sun-bathed apartment in a futuristic housing development somewhere in the Persian gulf. Sid had awoken early that morning and headed off to work. Following his instructions to a T, we made ourselves comfortable, enjoying our ability to relax into the morning.

I plugged my Mac into Sid’s router and began broadcasting wireless through the apartment.  Meanwhile an away team was sent downstairs to the giant in-house shopping complex to acquire materials with which to create breakfast. The away team returned with no-doubt fabulously expensive eggs, bread, and –of all things unholy– bacon.

We put on Deeper Than Rap by Rick Ross, cooked a fabulous breakfast, and generally played house.

The team’s spirits were high, and it was becoming obvious that good team chemistry would propel these four wheelers toward Oman.

The only question now was about the car. Since before our arrival at Motta’s pad in Kunming, we had been working closely with Claudia to contact car rental outfits in the cities of Dubai and Muscat. The optimal choice, of course, would be to rent a Toyota Previa in Dubai somewhere, and drive the thing first to the Musandam Peninsula, a wholly separate part of Oman known for it dramatic desert coastline, and then back down through the UAE to the central parts of Oman, exploring small cities along the way, culminating in a visit to the glorious and ancient city of Muscat.

The only things that stood in our way, however, were price and my age. Jackson, of course, was over 25 and thus fully legal to rent a vehicle all over the world. However, being 24 seemed to produce some mild difficulties or encourage some inflated fees. Jackson, on the other hand, through a set of unique circumstances, was without a license. So that left me as the oldest licensed driver in the group. Unlike gasoline, renting a car is not cheap in this part of the world, no matter how old you are. That was what we had discovered in our efforts to do so remotely. It was our hope, however, through guanxi, or through the power of in-person bargaining, we would be able to find a more reasonably priced rental car.

This task was primarily Claudia’s, and it was not any easy one. She continued to make phone calls, while we spent most of the next day working on correspondence for you, dear reader. In addition to the rental car issue, Claudia spent a fair amount of time fighting with the officials from Air France and Southwest. Her bags, we learned, had been located, and they seemed to be on their way to Dubai. This felt like an easy success, and the successes only seemed to continue, as we met back up with Sid that evening.

We wandered over to the gigantic mall across the street, and spent some time talking with the rental agencies there. Unfortunately, while we were seeing more reasonable pricing, none of the rental agencies seemed to support a Previa or Previa-equivalent option. So Sid pulled out the big guns, calling a company on the other side of town that  his business often rents from. And it was so that we ended up climbing into Sid’s brand new rental car and heading across town in search of Stellar Rent A Car.

The folks at Stellar explained to us on the phone that they too, unfortunately, did not have a Previa, but they did have a slightly smaller Toyota model called an Innova. After some brief calculations, we  concluded that we would be able to fit all of us and our gear into such a vehicle, so we were ready to pull the trigger if the price was reasonable. With four wheelers, we were able to consider much larger expenditures, and we were determined to make our dream of cruising through the Gulf a reality, and frankly, Dubai had given us a bit of an increased appetite for expenditure. We were in luck, for  they also claimed to be able to provide us with the much-needed Omani insurance package. All was falling into place it seemed.

As we drove, Sid chattered away with them in Hindi, which we were quickly discovering was the much more useful language here. Without fail, whenever Sid would roll down his window and question a passer-by as to directions or the like, the fellow would respond in fluent Hindi. And so it was with much excitement that we approached the rental counter at Stellar Rental a Car.

Sid, in his effortlessly exacting manner, worked us a deal and guided us through the insurance purchase process. I was somewhat astonished that all we needed to rent the car was a U.S. driver’s license and a passport. The insurance documentation would be finished the next day, and in the meantime we would be insured to drive in the UAE.  It sounded good to us. So we shook hands, exchanged a down payment, and strolled over to check out the car with one of the employees, who was from, off all places, Indonesia. Jackson, our dear Indonesian Bureau Chief, and the gentleman chatted away in Bahasa Indonesian, which coincidentally Sid knows as well, being an old high school friend of Jackson’s.

Driving home, we enjoyed the local Dubai radio broadcasts and tried our skill at navigating back to the Burj Khalifa, which was not an easy task.

The roads constantly funneled us into alleyways, dead ends, superhighways, and boulevards which seemed to direct us towards the Burj until veering off in the final stretch.  We had been informed that McKinsey & Co. was responsible for much of the conceptual planning of the city, and considered calling one of their local offices on the chance that they would be obliged to help us navigate these byzantine roads over the phone.  Fearing they would charge us with scope-creep, we continued to use our own guesswork to eventually return home.

That evening, Sid introduced us to some of his friends in Dubai. They were all foreigners working in one capacity or another in the city’s finance industry. We chatted late into the night over sheesha smoke and more Arabic pastes, talking about AsiaWheeling, the city of Dubai, and global finance, in the garden of the massively luxurious hotel we had toured the day before.

Near the end of the after-dinner conversation, Claudia excused herself and climbed into a cab bound for the airport.  We chatted for a while longer, and eventually wandered back to Sid’s place. As we strolled back we got a series of SMS messages from Claudia, indicating primarily excitement in her discovery of yet another Johny Rocket’s in this town, this one with a sign in Arabic, and secondarily  that we would need to wait one more day for her cycle and bag. This was fine with us, we were enjoying Sid’s apartment and our relaxed Dubai lifestyle tremendously.

We had lost a few hours of sleep in the air, so three hours of rest would need to be stretched over what our Dubai-time watches seemed an eight-hour gap.

So, dear reader, you might forgive us for being in a somewhat haggard state upon arrival in Dubai.  We were badly in need of coffee and water, but it seemed that would need to wait. The sun was still not up in Dubai as we followed a crowd of our fellow passengers through a brightly lit, glaringly clean and seemingly brand new airport. Despite this, I knew from the Economist article I had been reading on the plane, that this very airport was scheduled soon to be torn down, renovated, and expanded to serve millions more passengers per day.

Due to its strategic location as a connector between east and west, the Gulf airlines have been expanding and stealing market share of late. And with a seemingly endless appetite for new aircraft and new routes, they showed no sign of stopping.

We looked at one of the many large shiny clocks on the wall (made by Rolex, I dare add). It was about 5:00 am. We took a sparkling staircase that wound around a bank of glass elevators down to an impossibly large hall. The interior design conjured images of the interior of the Istiqlal mosque in Jakarta, with dozens of large sparkling pillars, very high ceilings, and reflective materials attached to every surface. It was immaculately clean and gleamed with wealth.

The passport control officer, clad in the local standard (a white gown known as the dishdash and a white or red headscarf), glared at me from behind the counter. I handed him my passport, and he flicked through it, glaring back at me.

“Who are you meeting in Dubai?” he asked.

“A friend of mine, by the name of Mr. Jackson Fu,” I replied (honestly).

“Where does he live?”

“London, actually.  He arrives in a few hours. I will meet him.”

“Hmmm… and what will you be doing in Dubai?”

“We’ll be meeting with Red Bull UAE, renting a car, and driving to Oman.”

Bam. He stamped my passport and handed it to me with a shrug. “Welcome.”

On the other side of passport control, I met back up with Scott and we collected our bags and retrieved the bicycles from the fragile luggage counter. The service people were all clad in the same flowing white robes. All were supremely polite, though they never smiled in all my interactions. We flipped open a laptop and logged onto the free airport wifi, in order to make contact with our West Asia cultural liaison, a Ms Claudia Norton. She had arrived a few hours earlier, and had left instructions as to where to find her, and how to contact her in the form of e-mail. We also were intrigued to discover ourselves cc’d on a great many frantic e-mails concerning her luggage. It seemed, that through a constellation of bungled efforts, Claudia’s luggage had been misplaced in transit, and was currently being re-located and sent to Dubai.

This news was of particular interest to us, as one of the items in her lost luggage was a brand new Dahon Speed D7, which she would be needing for the next month and a half of middle eastern wheeling.  In addition, she carried with her a top secret shipment from our friends at Maui Jim: a set of their brand new “Dawn Patrol” models. We had been only able to find a few leaked images of these glasses online, and from what we could tell, they would be incredible. Regardless, we would need to bide our time in Dubai until the luggage and cycle could be located. Only then could we split for the open road, through the desert to Oman.

We used the last bits of credit on our Hong Kong SIM card to touch base with Claudia, and after forming a plan to meet in the city center, we began to prepare ourselves for the wheel into town.

Dubai’s airport is, unlike that of many cities we’ve visited, centrally located. The wheel to the city center did not look far. On the slightly cartoony tourist map we had, it appeared to be a relatively straight shot to the northwest.

Just to be safe, we purchased a SIM card from the du counter. The SIM card was fantastically expensive. At nearly forty dollars, it was more than we had ever paid for a SIM. Talk time was none too cheap either. In just coordinating a meeting place between Ms. Norton and ourselves, we used up half of the initial balance. This country, it seemed, was not going to be cheap.

Outside the glittering, air-conditioned interior of the airport, the sun was rising, and another steaming day was beginning. We dragged our bags out to the curb where a line of taxis patiently waited to take passengers to fantastically expensive, brand new hotels, and unfolded the Speed TRs. The cycles were in perfect shape, devoid of the usual dents and bruises that accompany checking them on an airplane.  What an airline! I thought to myself. As far as I am concerned, let them steal market share all they like.

The presence of the folding bicycles, of course, attracted the attention of a nearby Dutchman. He walked over to us and addressed us in Dutch. While flattered, we had no idea what he was saying, and soon we switched over to English. It turned out the fellow was an artist, brought here to do a special project in Dubai. He was going to do a project in Curacao, he explained, but Dubai ended up tempting him more. The pleasure was, of course, all ours. And we bid a fond farewell and wheeled off into the sun.

Thank goodness for the Maui Jims. It was already quite bright, and the sun had not even completely risen above the low-lying haze of dust, which helped substantially to soften the blaze. The roads were smooth as silk and brand new. Traffic was light, but it whipped by us in the kind of recently waxed, thundering, streak that can only be found in the Gulf. So far, the drivers gave us plenty of room, and a few even slowed down to gawk at the maniacs who chose to wheel from the Dubai Airport into the city.

We wheeled on past a great many one-story, brand new strip malls, selling all kinds of specialty imported goods. From large format printers, to Zamboni machines, we drove by it all. But where was the city? It was hidden from us behind the haze of dust, perhaps. We continued to follow our compass bells, heading northwest. This took us around the back of the airport, where planes soared only a few hundred feet above us while we wheeled. The roads were giant, truly huge, and most interchanges sported a clover-leaf style of over- and under-passes rather than forcing people to stop at a light.

Eventually, it became clear to us that all was not well in the navigation department. All the landmarks we expected to find were nowhere, and the city was not even visible ahead of us. Just then, as though sensing our predicament, Claudia called. She had arrived at our previously determined meeting spot, a certain Ministry of Culture and Tourism. She described the place as “creepy” and informed us that she was changing locations. Fine by us. We would do our best to arrive shortly.

We asked an Indian fellow on the street, in English, where to find the downtown and he pointed in the opposite direction. We took out our map, and he quickly identified our error. North was not, as it is habitually the world round, up. Rather, the map had been tilted some 53 degrees in the counterclockwise direction, leaving us pretty much dead wrong in our bearing. We thanked the man and headed back down the street. Meanwhile, a few more brand new jumbo jets screeched overhead, so low I felt I could have hit the landing gear if I had a chosen to hurl a sandal skyward.

That was to be the first of many interactions with Indian and Pakistani fellows in this interesting new city. The Emirates themselves number surprisingly few, and are all quite wealthy. Therefore, in order to build this new city out of the sand, a fair bit of labor needed to be imported. A great many of the workers came from the Indian peninsula, Pakistan, and other Desi countries.

With our new bearings, we began to see the misty outlines of a great spire in the distance, and soon a great many other buildings appeared dwarfed beneath it. This spire was, of course, the Burj Dubai, the tallest building in the world, recently renamed the Burj Khalifa. We suspect this had something to do with Dubai’s recent credit problems, and the massive bailout of the Emerates by its large and more well-funded neighbor, Abu Dhabi. Khalifa, of course, refers to the Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

We had already seen plenty of the Royal team here. Their faces were everywhere, displayed backed by flattering images of the city from space, or an aircraft, looking on sternly in their dishdashes. The Sultan of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, being always positioned slightly higher than his neighboring counterparts.

Soon, we began to be surrounded by larger, more substantial buildings. We passed a number of Russian fur shops, closed grocery stores, and finally restaurants and hotels. We continued to ask for directions and soon found our way to the meeting spot, or at least what we thought was the meeting spot.

By this point we were explosively thirsty, sapped already of moisture by the plane flight, on which the temptation  to drink those tiny bottles of bourbon had done plenty for our spirits, but little for our hydration levels. All the shops had been closed as we rode,  so it was with mouths like sandpaper that we called Claudia to report our current position. She seemed to be nearby, but we could not identify a mutually visible landmark.  Eventually we settled on a nearby, giant luxurious Sheraton, which looked out onto a blue canal that cut through the city. “I believe they call this ‘the creek’”, Scott mentioned.

A passing Indian man grumpily directed us toward a vending machine near the creek, which only sold one thing: tiny bottles of cold water. There was a mild price gouge, but what can a thirsty man in the desert say to change the mind of a cold robotic dispenser?

We sucked down the water and watched the pedestrian traffic go by. It was the labor force of Dubai, on its way to work. Those who worked in offices, of course, sped by in sparkling cars, while the builders, cleaners, and guards walked or rode rusty Hindustan hero bicycles. The water was gone all too soon, and we headed over to the shade of a set of trees, no doubt imported and watered by the Sheraton and waited for Claudia to arrive.

Soon enough a cab pulled up, and out she climbed, wearing her only pair of clothes, and toting her carry-on luggage. We greeted her warmly, and as if sensing through the collective unconscious our reunified momentum, our phone rang with a call from the illustrious Jackson Fu. He was here as well, and was just loading his Speed TR into the back of a cab, curious as to where we should meet.

We had ridden by a particularly interesting Iranian restaurant on our way to the Sheraton, and we figured that might be a good place for breakfast, so we decided to hang out in the shade and wait for the return of the illustrious Mr. Fu.

This happened in remarkably short order. Another cab pulled up and out climbed a grinning Indonesian-Chinese man, his hands still cool to the touch from the air-conditioned cab, looking ready for anything. We helped to unload his bag and his cycle.

It was a Speed TR, much like our own, but one year newer. It sported a slightly more refined system of protection for the planetary transmission, a new rear rack, and like Mr. Fu himself, a generally sleek demeanor.

So excited were we to be in the presence of the one and only, most debonair and illustrious Mr. Fu, that we could not help introducing this new item to the AsiaWheeling trading post: the “Return of the Fu” T-Shirt.

We all exchanged warm regards, introducing Claudia and Mr. Fu, for their first face-to-face encounter, and unfolded our cycles. We could not wheel, however, due to the absent nature of Claudia’s Speed D7, but we were close. We were four wheelers, soon to united with four Dahons, and there was a whole bunch of Persian Gulf waiting to be explored. But first things first. Coffee and breakfast. We  locked our cycles, and dripping with sweat from the walk over, strolled into the freezingly air-conditioned Iranian restaurant. They were, unfortunately, not serving the full menu, but rather than head out on a starved search for sustenance, we settled for the set breakfast of coffee and scrambled eggs. We also were given access to a large table from which we could take our fill of middle eastern flatbread, tomatoes, cucumbers, strange neon pink Halal tinned sausage. We feasted and allowed ourselves to dry slightly. Over this humble Iranian breakfast, we hatched our master plan.

And like any great structure, our plan had certain crucial, load-bearing elements. One of these was a fellow by the name of Sid. Sid was a good friend of the illustrious Mr. Fu, and had most graciously offered to host us during our time in Dubai. What we needed was to touch base with this man. It was Saturday in Dubai, and as such the final day of the weekend. So we were in luck. Sid was not at work, but at home, and would be able to receive us.

So it was with little ado that we paid our bill and hailed a van-taxi. Luckily, a great many of the taxis in Dubai are vans, for no smaller vehicle would fit all four of us and all the luggage. The van began to snake its way through the city, one impressive building, followed by another, even more impressing structure.

As I looked around, I found myself commenting internally, and finally externally on the surprisingly tasteful and beautiful nature of these buildings. The architecture of Dubai is certainly unique, sensational even, and it is executed with a certain attention to detail, a certain ratio of dimension, which was quite pleasing. I was so far overwhelmingly impressed.

As we grew closer to our destination, I began to realize that we were heading directly toward the imposing Burj Khalifa, rising in jagged spires, impossibly high above us. Was it possible that the mysterious Sid lived in the shadow of this magnificently chilling spire?

Indeed he did, in a newly finished housing development that contained a number of apartments and a large hotel. The entire development was themed on the old middle eastern clay cities, but studded with large fountains, palm trees, pools and the like.

We pulled up in the cab and Sid sauntered out to meet us, wearing soccer shorts and flip-flops, the epitome of a gentlemen of leisure. He stuck out his hand and with a large smile introduced himself, welcoming us to his home. We looked up at the stunning surroundings, the towering Burj, flanked by the largest fountain in the world, the palm-lined drives, and immediately realized we would be for some time in this gentleman’s debt.

We made our way inside, to find a splendid lobby, sporting a great number of antique looking urns, and up to Sid’s apartment, which was decorated beautifully with a mixture of Indonesian and other exotic relics. He offered us coffee, which he served in a number of delightful, though nondescript tea cups, and one large red souvenir cup with a camel on it. “I got this one here,” he said with a grin.

After having some coffee and connecting to Sid’s most luscious supply of high-speed Internet, we wandered down to the pool for a little dip. It was hot out, and the sun was now blazing in the sky. It was also unexpectedly humid. It’s true that Dubai is a city in the center of a desert, but perhaps due to the presence of the ocean, it is also quite humid.

“This is actually not bad at all for the summer,” Sid explained. “You’re quite lucky.”

After a dip in the pool, we headed out on foot, across the street to a giant palatial hotel complex. It was gorgeous, truly impressive, sporting an intricate system of fountains and pools. We walked right across the center of the pools, along a little walkway, and as we walked, Sid explained to us about the Burj.

The tower had been designed to be the largest in the world, but during the design and construction project, its original dimensions had been eclipsed by other structures, so it had been refined and heightened mid project. This was in part why it had such a distinctive shape.

Sid continued to lead us through the grounds of this massively luxurious hotel and over a wide bridge, past the largest fountain in the world, and into the largest mall in the world. “In Dubai,” Sid explained, “it either has to be the biggest, or the newest, or the most of some category.”

And with that we walked into the giant gaping interior of the largest mall in the world, complete with a savagely populated indoor salt water aquarium full of sharks and sea turtles.

We wandered around the mall for a bit, noticing in particular the intensely fashionable sunglasses and purses carried by the women, and the glitzy watches worn by the men.

One reason this emphasis on flashy peripherals is the uniformity of dress. Many of the men wore the dishdash, and  an even larger proportion of the women here wore the full hijab. The hijab is generally a dark flowing garment that covers almost all of the body, including much of the head with somewhat obfuscating fabric. With the majority of clothing dictated by religion, peripherals were a chance to show wealth. As far as I’m concerned, however, even the hijabs and dishdashes themselves simply reeked of expense, with barely noticeable but intricate patterns of black on black, or white on white, with tastefully placed folds and cuffs.

We ate in the giant food court.  Though before we settled on a joint, we were sure to take a full circuit, including spending a good few minutes curiously examining the Johnny Rocket’s diner. In the end, we opted for your basic Arabian cafeteria food restaurant.

And with trays piled high with hummus, baba ganouj, tabouli, and other unknown but exciting salads, we enjoyed a meal of astonishing quality and freshness for the “food court” of a mall.

This was, of course, all served with steaming hot flatbread. As we dug into the feast, we realized how hungry we had become since our early morning adventures in Iranian breakfast buffets.

Strolling downstairs, we rounded off the meal with a cup of espresso and some lively conversation.

Strolling back to Sid’s house, we realized that we had been sold on Dubai — or at least were beginning to be sold — and that for all the hype and opulence, Dubai was easy on the eyes and comfortable to stroll around.

That evening, we collapsed exhausted into our beds, sleeping the sleep of one who has traveled many miles and finally found an oasis.