The next morning we woke up and began furiously doing laundry in the bathroom of our room at the King George Inn in Jbeil, better know as Byblos, in Lebanon. Claudia was feeling much better, which was a great relief. She seemed glad to be joining in the activities again, scrubbing a pair of jeans furiously in the shower in her bathing suit. After cleaning, rinsing, and hanging up all the clothes that were not currently on our bodies, we began thinking about food and wheeling.

We had, during the great bargaining fiasco of last night, given up our rights to the generally included breakfast at the King George in favor of a reduced rate, so we needed to find something in town.  King George himself strutted around the hotel’s entrance, tending to the garden in the front of the property and producing a nasal murmur into his mobile phone.

We found our bikes outside, where we’d parked and locked them, right in front of the great black Mercedes in the manager’s parking place. Someone had been courteous enough to cover them with a large gray cloth, perhaps to deter thieves.

It was as we were pulling the dusty great cloth off our bikes that I realized I had left my bathing suit in the room (you see, dear reader, we had plans to head to a beach again), so I excused myself to run back up and get it. When I attempted to unlock the door, however, I found myself unable to do so. Either the lock or the key had ceased to cooperate.

So we brought the proprietor’s son, Tony, into the picture, and he too struggled with the door, eventually giving up. We were locked out of our room, with my bathing suit inside, but he assured us he would have the problem solved by the time we got back from our wheel. So we pulled the cloth off the cycles, and figuring I could just buy another suit or go in my ExOfficios, hopped on my Speed TR, whooshing down the hillside and back into the city.

Inside town, we wheeled right by the Librarie Al Jihad. “Jihad,” Claudia explained to us, in reality has a totally different meaning than the whole Alquaida-ized version with which we are familiar in the west.

It refers more to an interior battle for enlightenment, she explained, which sounded good to us, and fit very well with the idea of libraries. So we rode on, giving it the AsiaWheeling-well-named-library seal of approval. As we made our way deeper into town, the call of our growling stomachs began to grow in strength, and we began, with increasing mania, to dash in and out of restaurants in search of food.

We ended up finding it at a sort of down-home snack joint, where we were able to a get a large plate of French fries, some hummus, and a few smoked fish wraps. The food was tasty, but left us feeling very heavy, sluggish, and a little sick.

There is a Lebanese practice of sneaking French fries, as ingredients, into dishes where you wouldn’t find them.  The result is often tasty in the short term, but an uncomfortable belly bomb in the longer term. We figured there was no better cure for the heavy greaseball stomach and sluggishness than wheeling though, so we climbed back on the cycles and continued exploring, albeit at a slightly slower pace.

Soon we came upon the seaside, where just as in Beirut, crystal clear blue Mediterranean water, lapped invitingly against a coastline scattered with hotels, resorts, and clubs. Interested as usual in the people’s beach, we wheeled on, eventually to be rewarded by what looked suspiciously like a public beach.

It was blazingly hot that day, and we were all too happy to spot a small convenience store. Our previous efforts to buy water in this city had been met with Tokyo-esque pricing, and similarly Japanese volumes. But this place looked a little more down home, and to be honest, we were getting so thirsty that we would have paid whatever we had to. We haggled a decent deal on six two-liter bottles, and as we were leaving, we noticed a large system of closed circuit televisions and cameras, which allowed the proprietor to keep an eye on the ice cream cooler outside. When we asked about the elaborate system, she explained that people had been stealing from her ice cream cooler. “So you’re saying the ice cream is not just free?” Scott joked.

“Nothing is free in Lebanon,” she said with a shocking deadpan. And with that, we made awkward goodbyes and climbed back on the cycles.

As we were wheeling down to investigate more closely, we ran into a Lebanese man who lived in Philadelphia. We spent a while chatting with him. He was far from the only foreign Lebanese in this country. Lebanon sports an external population of over 10 million, living in other countries all over the world. And not only do these Lebanese send money home to their families in Lebanon, but many of them come home to visit for the summer.

This might explain, at least in part, why we were finding Lebanon to be so startlingly expensive. During the summers, at least, it was filled with all the affluent Lebanese from foreign countries coming back home to flash a little.

Meanwhile, we had found a good spot at the beach, and Scott and Claudia had used a nearby seafood restaurant as a changing room. I just took my pants off near the water, hoping I was not scandalizing the populace too much. Then, leaving our stuff in a great trusting pile, we headed off into the blue water. We swam out, away from the coast, enjoying the cool of the water. It had been startlingly hot, and it felt amazing to be in the cool blue sea.

Just then a chiseled and well tanned man in a row boat came over. He explained to us that we had better get back to shore, for the water here was filled with jellyfish. Some of them were really big, he explained, throwing his arms out dramatically.

It was then we noticed that, indeed, none of the other beach goers seemed to have ventured out this far. So we began to swim back. And the rumor proved true, for as we swam, I began to notice stings, and then Claudia got struck as well. Then I caught a really bad one on my leg. We all began swimming faster and eventually reached the beach running back to our pile of things, with yelps and hollers.

We were quite happy to be on dry land again, and wiled away the next few hours reading about the Lebanese economy on the wiki reader, and singing songs on the ukulele.

That night, we returned to the hotel, and called a great meeting of the AsiaWheeling field team. We needed to reevaluate our plans. Lebanon was proving startlingly expensive, devastatingly touristy, and for one reason or another, we felt a pull to move on. With the marked exception of our meeting with Mueen and the Red Bull team, our interactions with the locals had been some of the most mediated, most predatory, and least pleasurable of the entire trip. The Lebanese food that we had looked forward to turned out to be a choice between swanky $20-per-plate type places, or cheap greasy street food, which consisted mostly of hidden French fries.

Frankly, I was fed up. I didn’t feel welcome. Furthermore, I felt that the way to be welcomed was to come and spend a lot of money. I thought back to the humble little city of Genshui, in southern  Yunnan, where we had been taken under the wing of that restaurant owner, and continued to return back to his shop for more feasts and long conversations, to meet his friends and family, to be brought into his life. And that fellow didn’t even speak English.

Everyone here spoke English. Despite that, for the first time in six months of rambling, we were consistently unable  to connect with the place in anything more than either the most superficial or most intellectually mediated way. I know, I know, dear reader, this is an atypical stance for your humble correspondents to take. And please don’t get me wrong. Lebanon is a beautiful country, just bursting with natural wonders and rich history. But I just don’t think it’s the place for AsiaWheeling.

It felt artificial, manufactured, and mediated. The men of this country are engaged in a never ending cycle of competition to see who has the fanciest car, who frequents the coolest night clubs, who has the best pair of acid-washed designer jeans, or the newest sunglasses. The women are so painted, so packaged, and so modified as to appear only partially organic life forms.

In an effort to gain Internet access, we inquired with the staff of the King George whether it would be possible to plug in our laptop to their network.  After Scott was shown various dead Ethernet connections on multiple floors of the hotel, Tony, George’s son invited him to sit on the steps outside their personal residence on floor two.  As the Internet trickled wirelessly, syncing emails and uploading posts to AsiaWheeling.com, shouts and hollers of domestic dispute flowed forth from the residence.  Business with family seemed tough, especially the hotel business.

Lebanon was an important place to visit, an awesome cultural and economic spectacle, but after about an hour of discussion, we decided it was time to go back to Syria, where we felt at home.

That next morning, as we woke up amidst the sleeping hordes at Talal’s New Hotel, Claudia was not feeling well. She had managed to pick up a food-born pathogen that Scott and I had somehow escaped. As a result, the team was moving very slowly, hopping from bathroom to bathroom, making our way from the hotel to breakfast, which we decided it would be easiest to execute back at the Le Chef.

Moving so slowly through the city gave us plenty of time to notice and appreciate the strikingly European buildings that were all around us. It was still AsiaWheeling, but there was certainly not a lot of Asia in this place.

Breakfast seemed to do little to help Claudia’s state, and so we returned her to the hotel, where she would spend the day relaxing. Meanwhile, Scott and I headed out to the meeting with Red Bull, with Claudia safe and sound, and hopefully on the mend, in the company of the owner of Talal’s New Hotel. The owner was unfortunately not named Talal. He was, however, a self proclaimed nurse and promised to take good care of our dear West Asia Cultural Liaison.

So with that we hopped on the Speed TRs, just the two of us again, and began wheeling toward a certain Starbucks, a few kilometers down the coast in the less touristy business district of Beirut.  Wheeling to the place was certainly raw. We made our way along a very large and busy road. The traffic was fast, and cyclists were very uncommon, which meant that our fellow travelers knew little about what to do when they encountered a cyclist in front of them. At one point on the wheel, Scott caught his long broken dynamo hub-powered light in his spoke, which made a sickening sound and savagely bent the thing. We stopped to tear the broken light off and tighten the spot back up, then hit the road once again. We rode fast, signaling our intent early and often, and eventually we made it to the Starbucks.

Not long after we’d sat down, and well before our sweat soaked shirts had begun to dry, we spotted a laid back, sunglassed character wandering into the shop, making that kind of tentative eye contact that is so common among those who are scanning a room for someone they’ve never met before. It must have been Mueen, our Red Bull contact, and we walked over to make ourselves obvious.

He was indeed Mueen, and he stuck out his hand, and introduced himself. We then sat down and enjoyed the biggest cup of coffee we’d had since we’d arrived from the Gulf. We discussed AsiaWheeling’s philosophy of travel, our adventure to date, and the role that caffeine plays in our lifestyle. You see, dear reader, we ride, day in day out, on some of the gnarliest traffic in the world, literally taking our lives in our hands each day. Preserving our lives requires alertness, vigilance, and lucidity. The number one thing that we can do to encourage that state of mind is to sleep plenty each night, and practice good wheeling technique. But sometimes that just won’t get you there. So thank goodness there’s also caffeine.

We had enjoyed the added lucidity and energy that came along with all the Red Bull we drank while road tripping the Gulf, and we were excited to add it to our lifestyle again.

With the coffees done, we headed around behind the Starbucks, and folded the cycles throwing them into the back of our new friend’s SUV, for the drive over to Red Bull HQ. As we rode, we discussed Lebanon and Lebanese food. “You know of this salad called the fattoush?” he asked. Of course we did, having been eating it nearly daily for a month now. “You see there was a time in Lebanon when there was not much food to go around. We invented this dish as a way to avoid wasting our stale flatbread. The hard, stale bread would be crumbled, blended in with greens, and dressed with oil..” The notion certainly sounded great to us.

Mueen then asked us when we’d last eaten. The answer was, of course, a few hours ago at the Le Chef not far from our hotel. But that seemed enough time to him to be justified in insisting we stop at a restaurant on the way, specializing in a local flatbread called Manakish.

Once there, Mueen ordered us two, and a couple of bottles of Ayran, the local salty yogurt drink.

We finished those as we battled the traffic to get the rest of the way to the headquarters. Inside, we were quickly introduced to the team, all of whom were fantastic people.

We spent a particularly large amount of time chatting with the head of the “sports” division, which in Lebanon, at least, consists largely of motorsports. To give us an illustration, he and Mueen shared a few of their “drifting” videos with us.

For those of you who do not know what drifting is, it’s a motorsport in which the driver exceeds the amount of torque that can be placed on his wheels sending them spinning in smoking, screeching blurs against the ground, and launching his car sliding around a parking lot, drifting like a pat of butter in a hot pan, left and right on burning rubber. Red Bull had sponsored a number of such competitions in Lebanon. And I must admit, the videos were pretty impressive, with the drivers squealing in manic arcs through open lots, around cones, and even through the tight corners of parking garages.

Having finally caught our fill of drifting videos, we headed out to grab some cases of Red Bull and strap them to the bikes.

It felt great to strap so much delightful elixir to our Speed TRs, and we made sure to pause for a group photo before splitting.

And then off we went, back downhill and into town, working our way toward the hotel where we hoped to find Claudia  on the mend.

It took us a while to get back, as we battled traffic, laden down with Red Bull, and confused by the lack of signage.

We were forced to stop quite a few times to ascertain our position. Luckily, plenty of the locals spoke bits and pieces of English and all knew where our hotel’s night club district was. So eventually we succeeded in arriving back at Talal’s New Guesthouse to find Claudia looking better, but still far from 100%.

From there, the three of us wheeled to the bus station, which was hidden in an enclave underneath a giant raging highway. In true AsiaWheeling style, we bought the last three tickets on the next bus to Byblos, and commenced sitting around and waiting for our departure time.

I sat down on the side of the platform and played the uke, while Scott chatted with the locals, and Claudia snoozed against a pile of bags, cases of Red Bull, and folding bicycles. In a short while, the bus arrived and we climbed on.

It was a surprisingly short ride to Jbeil, which is the Lebanese name for the city, which surrounds Byblos, and it seemed only seconds later that we climbed off into the night. It was not a touristy bus, evidenced by the fact that we were the only people to get off in Jbeil. With all our bags unloaded and piled nearby, we took a moment to take stock of our surroundings. We were on a street corner, next to the inter-city highway. There were a group of Lebanese army officers nearby us, holding fancy automatic weapons, and scrutinizing our behavior. We openly scrutinized them back, and watched as a few more of them arrived with bags of falafel wraps, handing them out to all the soldiers.

Claudia headed over to ask directions to the center of town, while Scott and I unfolded the cycles. Then we were wheeling again. It was not a big place, and finding our way to the center was quite easy. We checked out a few of the hotels in the city center, but found them all to be well over $100 a night. Even with Claudia sick, we needed some place cheaper, so we wheeled on.

It suddenly became apparent that it was time to eat again, so we pulled over at a shawarma place, and ordered some wraps.

The wraps were delightful and we were even able to plug in our computers and consult the Lonely Planet. The news was not good. It seemed that the entire city was essentially devoid of reasonably priced accommodation. There was one place though, called the King George Inn, which was only $60 a night. This, we decided, would be our next target.

And so with that, we left Claudia to look after our stuff, and continued to compute, while Scott and I headed out on what turned out to be quite the lengthy uphill battle toward the King George.

When we finally arrived, we found the place to be staffed by a very friendly young man, by the name of Tony, and his somewhat curmudgeonly father. The asking prices turned out to be significantly more than what was printed in our perhaps outdated Lonely Planet, but after a fair bit of inspecting of rooms, and heavy bargaining with the son, we were able to arrive upon something that we figured would be manageable for a couple days at least.

We then began haggling over what would be a fair price to have them drive us back down the hill to pick up Claudia and the bags. That too was a tedious affair, but eventually we found common ground.

So we climbed into the father’s shiny black Mercedes, marveling at how Lebanese people all drive such fancy cars, and headed down to pick up Claudia. The man spoke very little English, but was quite fluent in French. So I tried on my old French skills from Grinnell Public High School and began to converse in a most broken way. As we drove on, chatting imprecisely, the father began to renege on all our agreed-upon pricing and started once again inflating the room toward $100. When he found that Claudia was also going to be sleeping there, he redoubled his efforts.

We waited him out, though, and eventually through continued exhausted bargaining and general pricing shtick, we arrived at the same price as before, turned over our passports for registration, and collapsed into bed.

We woke up once again amidst the sea of bodies at Talal’s New Hotel in Beirut and headed out in search of breakfast and connectivity. The hotel had advertised wireless Internet, but the wireless network was actually more like a tiny drizzle of information, which was being split between countless unwashed laptop-toting backpackers, where actually loading a page was an excuse to celebrate.

We had been corresponding over e-mail with our Red Bull contacts in Lebanon, and we needed to call them to confirm a meeting for the next day. Doing this over Skype, on this network, at least, would be impossible, so we set out in search of SIM cards.

Before we got too deep into that endeavor, however, we would need to feed ourselves. Today we headed out in the opposite direction, searching for breakfast.

We ended up selecting an interesting and quite delicious place, by the name of “Le Chef.” It was decently affordable, and massively tasty. The staff was also quite fascinating, for they had been trained to yell at people as they passed by on the street, and to whoop in celebration when people entered the place. However, in all other interactions they were the most somber, understated and disinterested service people you’d encounter anywhere. They were particularly baffled when Scott and Claudia came in, but I lingered outside, doing some quick repairs on Claudia’s bike, whose chain had lost tension. They ended up whooping twice in false alarm as I busied myself with her Speed D7.

Stomachs full, we picked up once again the search for SIM cards. After repeated attempts to purchase them, however, we were sorely disappointed to discover that even the cheapest cards were in excess of $50 USD. After paying only two or three bucks in most of the countries we had visited to date, this seemed positively ridiculous. So we decided to head out in search of a payphone, ducking in and out of the little call shops which are attached to many of the gas stations here. Payphone prices too seemed unreal, charging 60-75 cents a minute for local calls, so we wheeled on, determined to find a way to make the contact without paying more than a night in a Chinese business hotel to do so.

Finally we were able to locate a seaside beach-resort-restaurant-and-bar type place, which allowed us to make a call for free on one of their waiter’s cell phones. Scott paced around, triumphantly talking with the folks at Red Bull and scribbling data onto a spare AsiaWheeling business card. Meanwhile Claudia supported our benefactors by purchasing some ice cream.

With the meeting all set for tomorrow, and directions to our meeting place in hand, we left in high spirits and climbed onto the Speed TRs. We headed back up the hill that overlooked that classic Beirut seaside view, and made our way back down the gentle incline toward the city’s many beaches. We had strapped swimsuits and sunscreen to the bikes and had all intents and purposes to spend the day at the beach.

Most of the beaches, however, were attached to swanky clubs and restaurants, and charged for entrance. We were much more interested in finding the people’s beach. So we wheeled on for some time,  when we spotted a particularly beautiful section of coastline that was not your classic sandy beach, but did appear to be a people’s swimming hole. We decided to take a Rauschenberg and head in to investigate.

We made our way down the cliff, along a rather treacherous stretch of gravel road to the seaside, where we found plenty of people swimming and fishing in close proximity, along with a plethora of cobbled together structures that  housed restaurants, bars, and hookah spots.

We locked the bikes next to a bunch of fisherman’s mopeds, and headed out on foot, picking our way over the rock formations and following the sound of people yelling and splashing in the water.

The swimming hole we found was gorgeous. It consisted of deep, crystal clear blue water, surrounded by startling picturesque cliffs. The water was easily approached by the network of large plate-like formations that were so emblematic of this coastline. We found an open spot on the rocks and began to relax.

I whipped out the ukulele, and we began to strum and sing. Soon we attracted the attention of some picnicking Lebanese chillers, who invited us over to join them. They were all college age chaps, enjoying an idle summer soaking up rays in Beirut. They spoke only a tiny bit of English, but we managed to joke around and even find a few songs that overlapped between their taste and what I knew on the ukulele.

Before we knew it, the sun was sinking low and it was time to jump in the water. So in I went. The water was cool and welcoming. It was also plenty salty, making it quite easy to float. Getting out of the water, on the other hand, was none too easy. The tide was low enough that the rim of the rocky plate was about two feet above me. So I watched the other swimmers and studied their methods. It seemed that the way to get back on land was to wait for a wave to come in, and let it take you up high enough to grab onto the edge of the plate and scramble up.

I swam over slowly, biding my time, and paying attention to the approaching waves. As I got closer to the edge of the plate, I could see that it was indeed a very lively place, covered with sea plants, and all kinds of little spiny creatures moving around, squirting out little jets of water, and generally being crustaceous. I took a deep breath and hoped I was not about to get a torso-full of sea urchin spines and began to scramble.

It worked, and with only a few minor slices, I made it back onto the rocks. It must have looked gnarly, for neither Scott nor Claudia followed me in.

We continued to idle there with our new friends until the sun sank below the horizon.

We woke up in our room at Talal’s New Hotel in Beirut, Lebanon. Despite the fact that it was well after 10:00 am,  we picked our way over the bodies of the other sleeping guests, which were strewn all around the place, in order to get outside.

The first order of business was, of course, eating. And we found a reasonable looking place not far from our hotel. It was a kind of a delicatessen, advertising falafel wraps, hummus and the like.  Being accustomed to the normal Middle Eastern practice of ordering a number of plates and eating them with bread, we did so.

The owner was more than happy to oblige us, making sure, however, to caution us that plates would be more expensive than sandwiches. The sandwiches were very affordable, though, so we figured all would be okay. Wrong we were, for when the bill came, it was so large that it could have bought 25 sandwiches easily.  It was probably time to protest, but, perhaps in a moment of weakness, we just paid the bill and left in a foul mood, hoping that a little wheeling might help to erase this expensive and distasteful experience from our minds.

And that it did. We headed first down to the oceanside, where we began to skirt the coast, taking in the city of Beirut, which rose into the hills to our left.

It was quite an impressive place, bustling with giant new construction projects, and already punctuated with modern-looking high rise apartment blocks.

Looking to our right, the geology of the coastline proved not only interesting, but strikingly beautiful.  On top of it, giant cast concrete shapes provided an intended erosion barrier between the beach clubs and the sea.

The city was perched on a bank of cliffs, overlooking the luscious blue of the Mediterranean Sea. As the cliffs made their way down to the water, at the point where the surf made contact, they spread out into large plate-like structures which served as the perfect spots to harbor all kinds of sea plants and animals. The structures themselves, I had a suspicion, might even be the result of many years of habitation by creatures that left some kind of sediment behind. These days the wide seaside plates, also acted as a perch for the many sun-baked local fishermen who dotted the coastline.

Traffic was, in a completely unprecedented way, completely insane. We were becoming accustomed to the sound of squealing tires and the smell of burning rubber; the sight of young Lebanese men in luxury cars drag racing at stop lights was also no surprise. I even saw a few cars pull hand brake turns in relatively empty intersections.

Given all this automotive madness, we were quite glad to move off the street and onto a kind of seaside promenade, which had been constructed in what one might call the European style. We rode along this, enjoying the sun, the water, and the various seaside operations that were scattered along our route, many of which seemed to be focused on scraping muck up from the seafloor and monetizing it in some way.

We were forced to join traffic again when the road rounded a corner and we began to climb, following the cliffside as it grew higher and higher above sea level. Soon we were rewarded with a grand view of the Mediterranean Sea.

It was a vision we were familiar with from the posters that hung in most Lebanese restaurants in the U.S. It was the impossibly blue-green glassy ocean, out of which giant golden rocks jutted, accented with tufts of green plant life. The idyllic scene was only slightly marred by a giant flotilla of plastic post consumer waste, which had, due to the prevailing currents, been corralled just below the epic rock face.

On we went, tearing ourselves away from the view and continuing to slug up and over the hill, which spilled out into a long easy downhill back toward sea level. Partway down the hill, however, we spotted a bent and crumbling barbed wire fence, which separated us from a giant abandoned lot overlooking the sea.

We decided that with the fence in so dilapidated a state, and with Lebanon being, as it is, mostly devoid of government, it was likely no one would mind if we just wheeled right on in.

Inside we found a grid of half finished concrete streets that might, at one point, have been intended to serve a small grid of housing blocks. They had long been neglected, though, and were now strewn with trash, and overgrown with coastal grasses. We continued to wheel on into the abandoned lot, past a number of shipping-containers-turned-housing structures. Most of them showed signs of at least semi-recent occupation, but we did not run into any inhabitants.

All around us were the remnants of half built buildings, and the refuse of vagrants. It was delightfully raw. As we rode on, we wondered: what had ceased completion of this housing project? What had taken this prime piece of seaside real estate and turned it into a post apocalyptic wasteland?

At the end of the crumbling half-built road, we were rewarded with a delightful view of the rich blue sea and the patchwork of plate-like formations which were to be found where the cliffs met the ocean.

We took a moment to sit down and rest in a makeshift cliff-side bungalow, where we found a couple of serviceable plastic chairs and a little shade.

We spent a while taking it all in, perched up there with the magnificent view, before climbing back on the cycles and riding back to the main drive.

We headed on, past a rather large road-side sheep-selling operation, which heralded our entrance into the older and poorer part of the city. Lebanon is a very mixed place, with Muslims and Christians of many ethnicities living together, now at least in relative peace. We had been staying in the richer, Christian part of town, but we were now heading into the poorer Muslim section.

We rode on past fruit sellers and countless auto parts shops.  The architecture in this part of town took a turn for the fascinating, with the return of the Damascus-style intersection between traditional Islamic buildings and 1970s brutalism.

Our pining for Syria was only strengthened by this bit of pro-mayonnaise graffiti.

On we went, deeper into the Muslim part of Beirut. Not more than 20 years ago, these two parts of the city had been at war with one another. And though peace had returned to the city, one could defiantly feel that the Christian part of town had come out on top. The streets here were more crumbling, filth was more prevalent, children wandered with no shoes, and the general nature of the buildings and businesses around us was less about flash and glam, and more about getting things done, putting food on the table, and the like.

Speaking of food, we noticed we were hungry and stopped when we saw a few vendors selling bananas and  Arabic sweets out of the back of a bread truck.

The sweets were amazing, though the vendors proved particularly grumpy when they discovered our order was just a small sampling of each.

So on we went, wheeling harder now, really pushing ground by. We stopped at a couple of bike shops, in hopes of buying some new bike lights, but it seemed that in Beirut all bike shops were actually toy stores, which just placed bikes outside to lure cyclists in and them sell them beach and sandbox-related products.

As happens from time to time on AsiaWheeling, we took a wrong turn and ended up in a family’s yard.

This one was particularly interesting as it contained a smiling child holding a rifle. He was more than happy to point us back toward the main road, and waved us off leaning on his firearm.

Soon the city fell away and we were out into a rocky desert. Up ahead we could see a large tunnel looming, and we decided to take it. It was a particularly hairy mission, pedaling through that deafening tube, enduring strange puffs of wind, and close calls with mad Lebanese drivers.

We discovered it was a tunnel underneath the Beirut airport when we found ourselves suddenly outside again, squinting in the sunlight, ears ringing, and surrounded by barbed wire fencing and radar towers. Perhaps even more interesting than the airport was the fact that we had found ourselves also at a giant sewage outlet, where it seemed all the excrement of the city of Beirut was being let out into the sea. We paused to catch our breath and watch the complicated merging of the river of filth and the beautiful blue sea.

When we climbed back on the cycles to head onward, we found ourselves riding though a remarkable wasteland of trash. The garbage was piled high along the side of the road for kilometers. It was as though a thousand buildings had been torn down, still full of stuff, and all the refuse piled along this freeway.

Now well out of the city, and free of traffic lights, pedestrians, and other obstacles, the traffic speed picked up greatly.  Once again, it seemed prudent to move from the road proper onto the large sidewalk that ran alongside it. And once again, like in Jordan, this sidewalk proved to be just littered with broken glass. We once again trusted in our Kevlar tires, and our general ability to avoid especially pointy bits, and wheeled on.

Not far after the sewage outlet we found ourselves arriving upon a new city, by the name of Saida. There, we decided begin our journey back to the Beirut. We seriously considered making some great loop, but it appeared to us that one might end up trapped in some restricted airport zone ahead of us. So we pulled our Dahons around, and started the long retrace back to the city.

We arrived just as the sun was setting, and we were absolutely starving. We dined that night at a pretty swanky Lebanese place, ordering our usual Middle Eastern meal of hummus, salads, kebabs and flatbread. The meal was glorious, and at a white tablecloth, multiple-forks-per-person type place.

As I ate I tried not to let the fact that our mediocre breakfast at a random sandwich joint had cost almost three times as much…

The next morning we woke up in our room at the Ziad Al Khabir Hotel and hopped right on the cycles to head out in search of new experiences in Damascus. We wheeled directly out of the Sudanese flophouse district, near the old city, and into the newer, richer, flashier, university district.

We ended up selecting some food from a “Chicken from the Machine” joint, and supplementing it with a few salads from a nearby salad joint. While Scott and Claudia dealt with the chicken, I headed over to the salad place, to make our selection. While I was waiting for the diligent chaps there to put together our order, I chatted with the owner, who had spent the last 15 years working and living in Saudi Arabia, in the kitchen of a similar salad place.

When I asked him about his views on the country, he described it as a clean place, with lots of money and opportunity. “It is a place for good Muslims and rich Muslims,” he said. When I asked him what brought him back to Syria, he commented, “Damascus is my home,” and added with a chuckle, “and I must say I was neither a rich nor a good Muslim.”

And with that he handed me my salads. We bid each other farewell. He assured me that if I returned, he would happily call his friend to hold down the shop for a few hours so we could drink tea and talk more about the world. I thanked him warmly for the offer and walked back out into the dry warm air and the sunshine. I was falling hard for Syria as I walked back toward the park where we’d all agreed to meet.

I found Scott and Claudia setting up shop at a picnic table. A group of schoolgirls had gathered round them, and were in the process of queuing up to take the Speed TRs for a ride around the park.  While they took turns riding the Dahons, we dug into our little picnic feast.

With that done, we headed out in search of coffee and a little wifi, which while it had been nigh on impossible to find in Jordan, proved quite plentiful here in Syria. We decided to have our first cup from a roadside espresso bar ,which we cycled past. The coffee was delicious, and the fellow who owned the place was a delight to interact with, humming little haunting bits of melody as he pulled the rich frothy shots.

We ended up more fully setting up shop at a café a few blocks down the way, where we were able to, for the price of a few more cups of coffee, connect to the Internet and finally begin to make a more serious dent into our long neglected electronic lives.

After working for a few hours, we hopped back on the bikes and began pedaling once again through the fascinating streets of Damascus. We stopped on a large triangular median so Claudia could ask a couple of fellows, who were sitting on plastic chairs watching the traffic, for directions. They were supremely helpful, if somewhat boisterous, and we hung with them for a while discussing our trip to date, and our quickly growing infatuation with Syria.

Back on the road, we quickly found ourselves engulfed in quite the traffic jam, which encouraged us to head out on a more atypical route, attempting to avoid the smothering exhaust of the gridlock, and bringing us, somewhat unexpectedly, back around to the other side of the old city. So we decided to work our way through the old city, riding through the tiny streets, and reveling in the richness of our surroundings.

Suddenly it was time to eat again, so we picked up a few 30-cent shawarma wraps on the street. Here in Syria, the shawarma comes with the most delectable garlic mayonnaise. In case we had not underlined it in previous posts, AsiaWheeling has a real soft spot for mayo, and this was certainly some of the best mayo of my life.

Armed with the sandwiches, we headed a block or so down the road and leaned our bikes against the ornate doors of a museum.

However, no sooner had we begun to eat than, low and behold, the great iron doors began to open. We hustled to move our bikes in time to let a team of grunting and sweating fellows move some giant panes of glass into the place.

On our way back, we headed to the large covered market, to give it another once over. It was certainly an impressive concentration of buyers and sellers, and thanks to the giant patchwork of tarpaulin that covered it, the midday heat and sun had done little to slow the rate of commerce.

On our way out of the covered market, we passed a couple of fellows with this modified bicycle.

It had been modified so that it could be powered by a tiny little deafening gasoline engine. They offered us a ride on the thing, but, not confident in our ability to pilot the beast, and fearing for our lives, we declined. Instead, we just settled, rather, on a demonstration of the starting of the motor.

From there, we headed out of the old city, and found ourselves briefly getting trapped in a large and smoggy bus terminal.

Navigating out of the byzantine overpasses, we stumbled upon a quite ancient looking courtyard, where a number of people had set up touristy shops.

As soon as we got off the bikes to poke around, we were swarmed by children interested in taking the Speed TRs for a ride.

We obliged, and while we wandered around, the kids raced in circles through the courtyard, whooping, yelling, and generally exhibiting the common response among individuals first exposed to a folding cycle.

From there, we headed back out onto the streets. The sun was growing low now, and we paused outside a large unsettling-poster vendor, while Scott wandered around through the Syrian rush hour pedestrian traffic, chatting with his parents on the phone.

From there, we found ourselves unexpectedly wheeling into a mechanical components dealership part of town. When we caught sight of an NSK bearings dealership, we immediately called a waypoint. NSK is our favorite bearings manufacturer, and we decided we might as well indulge in a few spares, in case one of our wheels started eating bearings again as Scott’s had in Laos and Cambodia. The fellows in the bearings shop seemed very interested in our ridiculous look. We attempted to flatter them by complimenting their bearings, but they would have none of it. They knew their bearings were the best in the world, and no amount of flattery could do any more than beat a dead horse.

Outside of the bearing shop, we ran into a German man, living in Damascus and studying Arabic.

He was quite the gearhead, and we spent the next 40 minutes discussing bicycle engineering and in particular the Speed TR’s SRAM internal planetary transmission.

We had been quite happy with ours, and as it turns out he was in this neighborhood looking to buy a planetary transmission for his own bike.

We bid him farewell, wishing him luck in his search for the perfect planetary transmission, and headed back to the Zaid Al Khabir. At the advice of the front desk, we hauled our bikes up to the lobby, where they would be safer from vandals and rapscallions.

We paused for a moment to admire the front desk’s phone before heading back to the cozy confines of our somewhat crumbling room.

I was suddenly jostled awake by a firm hand on my shoulder. It was the driver of our bus from Amman to Damascus, shaking me. He dared not touch Claudia, sitting next to me, and after I was awake to some degree, he indicated that I should wake her too. In fact, it turned out, men and women were not even technically allowed to sit next to each other on this bus, and we had been inadvertently perpetrating another Gaijin Smash.

Regardless, I woke Claudia, and, in a somewhat addled state, wandered off the bus and out into Syria. It was pitch black, cool and dry outside. I looked at my watch. It was just a little after three in the morning. The bus driver had removed our bags and bikes from the belly of the bus, and they lay on the road in a puddle of streetlight. And with a rev and a squeak of the suspension, the bus was gone.

We were soon approached by a small gang of young men, who emerged from the shadowy alleyways of this highway side in Damascus, shouting about taxis. When we began to show them our bicycles and unfold them, indicating our intention to wheel into town, they began to giggle and switched from selling mode into inquisition mode.

Soon we were in the midst of an uncomfortable conversation, in which lines of communication were fraying and the topics included the war in Iraq, Barak Obama, and Obama’s relative comparison to George Bush. Here, in the middle of the night in Damascus, left on the side of a nondescript highway by a grouchy bus driver, being harassed by random cab drivers, you might think, dear reader, that we were a little on edge.

Drastically the opposite. For one reason or another, we were calm, cool, and collected.  In fact, we were feeling quite positive about being in Syria. We strapped our belongings down, climbed onto the bikes and headed out, calling out our goodbyes as we rode, though the gang of men yelled at us to stay for more parlor talk.

The road on which we traveled had been recently paved in a most absurd way, with giant piles of asphalt in some places, and huge rounded, deliberate looking potholes in others. To make matters worse, many of these obstacles were hiding in the shadows, and occasionally cars would whip by us at startling speeds, careening through the night.

Despite all this, we were in very high spirits, singing as we rode, “She’s a Lady, Oh Oh Oh, She’s a Lady!” and generally feeling good. At a large roundabout, we stopped to ask a man wandering the streets which way into the city center, but he turned out to be either very drunk, or on some other kind of drugs. Luckily, another, also slightly inebriated chap emerged out of the night, and directed us to ride subversively across a bridge toward a cluster of Gothic looking buildings.

And then we were there. It was the center of Damascus, and it was beautiful. Most of the buildings had a very old world imperial look to them, with ornate decorations, and good number of spire-like attachments. The city was also quite clean, and smelled faintly of roasting nuts. It was great to have arrived in such a comfortable and interesting place. Unfortunately, it was now about four in the morning, so we had a few choices to make. In the end, we decided that we might was well take this one all the way to Brooklyn and just stay up all night.

So we headed over to a nearby 24-hour hookah and tea café, parked our bikes outside, and to the great chagrin of all involved headed in.

“This is definitely a place where women are not normally allowed,” Claudia mentioned as we all sat down. It was true, the clientele were all men, sitting at little square felt tables, smoking hookah, playing cards and drinking little cups of sweet tea. The staff was all smiles, as were our fellow clientele, who seemed quite interested and amused by the foreigners who came out of the night on folding bicycles.

I left Scott and Claudia there to head out in search of an ATM. I found a few of them, but none appeared to support my American MasterCard. So I returned to the café empty handed. By that point, it had been ascertained that the staff was willing to accept Jordanian Dinars, so knowing that we could pay our bill, we simply relaxed into our seats, dealt the whist, and let the morning work its way around.

In Syria they use mostly a local “Arabic” system of numbers, which is coincidentally actually the Indian system of numbers, while the ones they use in India (and the U.S.) are Arabic numerals. Regardless, we needed to learn to read the new style of numbers, so Claudia, as our West Asia Cultural Liaison, insisted that we keep track of the whist in Indian numerals.

Amidst the multilingual calculus, a young man at the neighboring table leaned over and began chatting with Scott.  Clean shaven but firm, he introduced himself as Hosam.  As his friends chuckled over the smoke of hookah and the slapping of playing cards, Hosam introduced himself as a friend in the unfamiliar city of Damascus.  Son of a local sign maker, and employee of the Yellow Pages, this enterprising chap plied the market for advertising and promotion.  Exchanging phone numbers with Scott, he leaned back into his chair and carried on with his cronies, periodically bouncing his watchful eye back to our table.

As we folded up a game of three-person whist, another fellow came over to our table to take a look at my deck of M&Ms branded playing cards. He seemed to approve. We were soon to discover that Syria was perhaps the only country on the trip thus far where popular Mars products like Snickers and M&Ms were hard to find. We decided to take the opportunity to ask him if he knew of a cheap hotel around here. In fact he did, and since the sun was now beginning to spill over Damascus, we decided to take him up on the recommendation.

We paid our bill, which, in spite of the high exchange rate between the Syrian Pound and the Jordanian Dinar, was still quite affordable. Back on the cycles, we found the city to be even more beautiful in the daylight than it had been at night. It was so much cleaner than the cities in  Jordan had been, and the buildings were a delightful mix of the very new and very old. This should have come as no surprise, since Damascus was in fact the oldest city we would visit on the entire trip, having been continually occupied since about 2000 BCE.

Before riding too far from the 24-hour cafe, we were stopped by a group of Iranian tourists. They were mostly women, dressed all in black, toting fancy DSLRs and video cameras.

They were especially interested in Claudia, though being Persian language speakers, her Arabic did little to help us communicate with them. We were soon to learn that Syria is just packed with Iranian tourists since most of the Shia Muslim pilgrimage sites are to be found in Syria.

We continued to wheel on, ostensibly looking for the hotel, but mostly just loving Damascus.

Eventually, with a little help from a few pedestrians, we found the Hotel Ziad Al Kabir. The place turned out to be a Sudanese flophouse of sorts. It was nestled on the third floor of a very old building, mostly full of tailor shops and printers.

The hotel consisted of a central lobby for reception and prayer, followed by  a long, high ceilinged hall, lined with cracked wood and sanded glass doors, leading into similarly high ceilinged and crumbling rooms, outfitted with ratty steel framed beds cradling thin aging mattresses.

A small kitchen emitted the tantalizing smell of caramelizing onions and Sudanese spices. Our fellow lodgers were mostly from Sudan, and milled around the premises in flowing robes, and tending to their magnificent mustaches. The owners were all smiles and spoke bits and pieces of English.

Perhaps it was an increased romanticism induced by the lack of sleep, but we instantly fell in love with the place, especially Claudia. They claimed a fixed rate of $4.00 per person, and by then we had fallen in love with the delightfully grimy vibe of the place. So we booked a few nights.

We headed to the rooms, and flopped down onto the beds, trusting they would be clean enough to prevent any skin infections, and pondered napping.

In the end, however, with the sun shining and Damascus calling, we decided we had better head out on wheels.

Breakfast would be key. It had been some time since we had eaten anything. Luckily the city seemed full of delicious looking food. We ended up stopping at a flatbread joint, where one could select from a variety of pizza-esque flatbreads.

We were still in need of an ATM that would work with our foreign cards, but the fellow here too, seemed happy to accept Jordanian Dinars, albeit at a somewhat slanted rate. The flatbread, which might be best compared to Turkish “pide” was delightful, and the plastic chairs outside the place, were just operational enough to provide us with a place to sit and eat.  In search of a refreshing diet cola for the team, Scott headed out on a mission while we waited for the oven to warm.  In the process, he found himself in the thick of a pilgrimage troop, all haggling on the street for Chinese made garments and houseware goods.

One man even posed for a photo with his Polaroid 600 SE.  A true devotee: to the camera, to the mustache, and no doubt to the pilgramage.

So with food in our stomachs, we headed out, continuing to wheel, passing giant 1970s-looking brutalist Islamic architecture and thousand-year-old stone bath houses.

Suddenly we found ourselves in a giant outdoor used goods market, where all kinds of bizarre products were for sale.

We dismounted to walk through the area, investigating everything from old appliances, watches, and books, to wired telephones and other 1980s technologies.

Outside the market, we finally found an ATM (probably our 7^th or 8^th attempt) that accepted our foreign MasterCards. Now we had some Syrian pounds in our pockets and my goodness were they beautiful.

From there, we wheeled on, continuing to soak in this delightful town, riding past fountains and mosques, down palm tree lined streets, and impressive government buildings. We stopped for a snack at one of the many Arabic sweet shops, where we were able to load up a plate with baklava and other similarly honey-and-nut-based pastries for only a couple of dollars.

Our next goal would be to repair Scott’s Sri Lankan sandals again. The fellows in Amman had done a decent job, but the rigors of hiking through Petra had managed to tear the new stitches out. We headed into the “old city” part of Damascus to find a shoe repair shop.

The old city of Damascus is quite the hectic place, with plenty of traffic whipping around with little regard for lanes and general protocol. The streets become narrow, and pedestrian traffic intensifies. Meanwhile, the concentration of little shops selling all kinds of amazing foods and goods spikes, as does the number of people burning things, cooking in the street, yelling, making noise, carrying swords, welding in public and generally getting Syrious.

While we were wandering around, we were approached by a local chap, with a quite enviable mustache, who offered to help us get our bearings in this new and complex neighborhood. He even offered also to help us haggle with a shoe repair man to get Scott’s sandals fixed.

For the price of about $1.00, we got a full repair to both sandals, with very thick white thread, going over the ripped seams multiple times. From there, the same chap who had helped us before began insisting that we wander with him into a giant covered market, which he assured us was unmissable.  We wandered for a while inside, but finding it too crowded to safely wheel, we explained to him that we would need to revisit the spot on foot in order to properly experience it. He thanked us for letting him guide us around, and we thanked him for his kind help, bidding fond farewells. Syrian people were proving to be absolutely sweet as pie.

From there we proceeded to get hopelessly lost on the tiny and interwoven streets of Damascus’s old city. It was truly a glorious wheel. We must have passed by hundreds of structures which were over a thousand years old, many of which were covered with intricate tiling or hammered bronze accents.

Mosques, bathhouses, shops, homes… they were all so delightfully intricate and unique, yet somehow all of a cohesive overall style. Damascus was such an esthetically pleasing and intellectually tantalizing town.

Another thing that we were noticing was the pharmacy signs. Rather than the standard western move of the cross, or the mortar and pestle with “Rx” on it,  the pharmacists use this fantastic serpent looking into a goblet.

The cars in Damascus were also incredible. The streets were filled with the full spectrum, from brand new BMW SUVs to Ladas, to 1950s retro sedans, to cars that seemed to be frankensteined together from pieces of 2 or 3 different original machines.

The drivers were generally friendly, yielding space to the cycles, and due to the sheer number of cars on the roads, the speed, in the city at least, was generally slow. It was amazing traffic to be part of.

We continued to wheel, back through the covered market, which this time had cooled just enough to allow the cautious wheeler to make it through at slow speeds. It was about then that we realized it was high time to eat again.

We ended up selecting a rather posh Syrian Colonial style restaurant, tucked into an old building. The food was incredible, and not too expensive, at least by the standards of what we’d been paying in Jordan. We dug heartily into a giant fatush, an array of pastes and yoghurts, and some egg-roll-esque cylinders, filled with an oily and salty Syrian cheese blend.

Back on the streets, we kept wheeling, calling waypoints from time to time to investigate all kinds of interesting items that were for sale or attached to the surfaces all around us.

Not far outside the city, we stopped at a bike shop to buy Claudia a new bike bell. Hers had broken at some point during our transit from Amman. The new one we got her was a fantastic Chinese bell, with a deep rich tone, and amazing packaging.

Now armed with a new loud bell, we wheeled on, past hundreds of pictures of the Syrian president posed in all kinds of situations: as soldier, fighter pilot, statesman, or generally keeping it real with the heads of Iran and Lebanon.

We had been going for a while now, but the sun was still high it the sky. Was it time for a nap? Perhaps, but AsiaWheeling generally forsakes midday napping for midday coffee drinking. So we headed out in search of coffee. When we stopped to ask a fellow wheeler where we might find a cup, he said he knew a good place, and asked us to follow him there.

So we did, wheeling behind him through increasingly tiny alleyways, and eventually to the door of what turned out to be his own shop. The shop consisted of a small central room, with a couch, two chairs, a table with three telephones on it, and a glass cupboard full of examples of the types of hammered pots and pans, which it appeared he sold wholesale. The other room of the turned out to be a kitchen, when his wife burst out of it, with the first pot of coffee.

We were to be his guests, it seemed. He asked his wife to get started on the second pot of coffee, and, while we dug into the first, began to converse with us in Arabic. Claudia did a fantastic job of playing translator. The coffee was glorious: thick and black, just barely sweet, with cardamom pods floating in it. The man’s wife was also quite friendly, though she was asked to stay in the kitchen most of the time and was not invited to participate in the group photo.  A shame indeed, as she may well have been the least awkward character in the snap.

After spending what we felt was a respectable amount of time chatting and drinking pots of coffee with this man, we climbed back on the bikes and headed onto the road once again, riding past a giant street of watermelon sellers, which led us far from the old city out to the newer housing developments.

We eventually had wheeled out into the semi-agricultural suburban lands that surround Damascus. Many of these suburban Syrians seemed to have pretty large plots of land on which they grew fruits and vegetables, which we found quite impressive.

Many of the suburbs of Damascus are positioned in the foothills of the Ante-Lebanon mountains, which flank the city. So it was into these foothills that we rode, stopping after a particularly intense climb to try some of that amazing Syrian ice cream, which our dear Mr. Fu had so often raved about.

The ice cream was indeed fantastic, as was the graffiti on the buildings around where it was sold. Fueled by coffee and ice cream, we headed deeper into the foothills, calling a waypoint at this Islamic cemetery.

Up and up we went, higher into the Ante-Lebanese mountains. Soon the city of Damascus spilled out beneath us, and the sun began to sink low.

At this point, Scott decided to head back to the Hotel, but Claudia and I decided to keep wheeling on in search of a sunset view of the city.

We headed up a somewhat crumbling and rather empty side street. We were making very good progress getting up the mountain, and were just about to approach the perfect viewing spot, when a group of three Syrian military men began yelling, and running towards us. It appears we had accidentally taken the access road to a Syrian military base. In fact, we learned from the soldiers, the entire top of this hill was a base, so all spots that might have a view of the city were actually off-limits.

Fair enough, we thought, and wheeled back down the mountain to meet up with Scott.

We woke up to a sunny Jordanian morning, light pouring into the somewhat squalid confines of our room at the Hotel Asia.

The first task was, of course, to find coffee. Luckily, we quickly discovered that Amman is a fantastic place to find coffee. All hours of the day and night, the streets of Amman are lined with street coffee stands, sporting giant ornate coffee pots, filled with boiling hot thick black Middle Eastern coffee. Little plastic cups of the stuff can be had for anywhere between 15 to 50 cents.  Not knowing the ins and outs of the coffee ordering system yet, we simply ordered the default brew, which was just this side of undrinkably sweet.

From there we continued to head out on foot in search of breakfast, stopping from time to time to enjoy some of the more unique signage in this city.

We eventually settled on a restaurant a few blocks down from the Hotel Asia. We walked in and were shown upstairs to the “family” dining section.  The downstairs, Claudia explained, we could assume was for men only.

The ceiling in the upstairs dining room was rather, low, but no obstacle is too large to keep AsiaWheeling away from its hummus.

We sat down and ordered what was becoming our standard Middle Eastern meal: salad, hummus, bread, and some type of meat or exotic paste.

The food was fabulous though the fattush salad that we had been eating recently was replaced here by a plate of salty pickled vegetables. For the meat, we chose a plate of pressed ground meat kebabs, all accompanied by more Middle Eastern coffee.

With bellies full, we headed back out into the crowded and sun-soaked streets of Amman. The next waypoint was a repair-job for Scott’s Sri Lankan sandals. They had become rather torn and tattered in the months since we had purchased them in Colombo. Luckily, on our walk back from the hotel we passed an outdoor shoe repair stand. It was run by some serious village elder-types, who quickly took interest in AsiaWheeling.

Tea was ordered and we were asked to sit down while one of the owner’s sons went to town on Scott’s sandal.

The tea was delicious, and served in the classic Jordanian style, plenty sweet and with mint leaves in it.

We sat around chatting, attracting a large and larger crowd, chatting about our take on Jordan, about life in America, about business opportunities in China, and about the relative merit of learning different languages. Soon the shoes were done, but it seemed there was still plenty more chatting that needed to be done. It turns out that another one of the local dons who had arrived to witness the strange Americans ran a bus company. He offered to charter us a free ride on one of his buses to tour the city.

We tried our best to explain that we were all about wheeling, and only mildly about busing, but it was at first misinterpreted as the Middle Eastern practice of refusing any offer two to 13 times before accepting. Eventually, though vehemence and redundancy, we were able to actually communicate that we were cyclists, intending to explore the city by bicycle. This was met with awe and confusion.

We promised to return later to show off the cycles, then excused ourselves. Back at the Hotel Asia, we grabbed the cycles and some bottles of water, and hit the streets. It was hot in Amman, but not nearly as bad as it had been in the Gulf, and we were excited to wheel in this new, more approachable weather.

First thing was first: we needed to replace those bells that the Omani kids had stolen. This city had much too gnarly a flavor of traffic to attempt to wheel with no bell. Since the dastardly theft of our bells and lights, I had been wheeling and ringing a kind of phantom bell, brushing my finger by the empty bit of air where my ringer used to be, and cursing myself and those little scoundrels each time my phantom bell failed to ring.

Luckily, though we saw few wheelers on the road, this city was quite full of bike shops, mostly focused on cheap Chinese-made children’s cycles.

We wheeled over to one near our hotel, and inquired about bells and lights. Lights he did not have, but bells were available. I picked up a Chinese rotary-telephone-style bicycle bell and began to play with it. The owner of the shop came over and explained to me in Arabic and pantomime that this bell was a piece of crap, but that he would give me a very good price. “For you,” he continued in words I did not know, “I would recommend this bell.” It was really an electronic buzzer that attached to the bike and required batteries. The noise it made was frighteningly loud and hair raising. Such a violent alert seemed very unlike AsiaWheeling to me, so we decided to purchase three of the cheap rotary-telephone-style bells. “Fair enough,” the man seemed to say, and lighting a cigarette, he began to help us attach the new bells to the handlebars of our Dahons.

As an added bonus, he insisted on giving us a large plastic bag filled with cucumbers, at no charge. The cukes were delicious, and as evidenced by the giant cardboard box of them that he showed us in the back of the shop, in great supply.

With many thanks and a hearty shaking of hands, we wheeled off, ringing the bells with joy. We continued to wheel downhill, through the thick traffic. We must have been quite a sight, for multiple times cars would pull up alongside us and offer their support with whoops and shrieks, pumping of fists, or sticking of heads out the window.

We pulled off this road onto a nearby one, climbing now up into the hills, onto narrow and ever more crumbling roads, many with very steep inclines. Most of the locals just stared dumbfounded at us, some of them called out offering assistance, or letting us know that we were probably getting lost. Little did they know this was our goal. At the top of the hill, we were rewarded with a splendid view of this neighborhood of Amman. Also at the crest of the hill was a section of railroad that we needed to cross. We were just about to lift up the cycles and portage across the tracks when an old man and a young boy arrived.

They began chatting with us, asking where we were from and what we were doing here. The old man spoke only Arabic, but the young boy spoke a bit of English. We gave them both chances to try out the bikes, and hung out for a while enjoying the view and each other’s company. Eventually the pull of the open road started calling our names, so we headed off. This tiny road connected back onto a more central road near a large mosque. We decided to pull over at a local shop to have a drink and a little snack. We left the bikes outside, unlocked and headed in.

We purchased a few bags of “Mr. Chips” and a small package of hummus to dip them in. While we were snacking, a crowd of children between the ages of five and 18 gathered around us and began to barrage us with questions, and demands to be photographed.

We indulged them, but soon the competition to be in photographs became so great, that some of the larger children started beating the smaller ones with their fists. When one of them picked another up by the neck, kicking and screaming, we decided that this whole experience was getting a little too raw, and we climbed back on the cycles, scolding the older kids, refusing to take any more pictures, and wheeling off.

We started to loop back toward our part of town, wheeling along a street filled with busted cars, most of which seemed to have just been parked and abandoned there, now apparently homes to vagrants. It was then that Claudia got a call from a friend of hers. It looked like we had dinner plans.

Now we needed to get across town. So we cut through a giant bus depot, and headed toward an overpass. We needed to figure out exactly where we were, so we stopped to ask a well dressed, strolling bloke for directions. The fellow turned out to speak passable English and was overwhelmingly helpful. He gave us very articulate directions, followed by a heartfelt invite back to his house for tea. We explained that we needed to wheel to a dinner date. He was understanding. As we left, he put his hand on his heart and bowed slightly. He then raised a finger up to his eyeball, pointing. “My eyes,” he said to us. Then, bowing again, and tapping his finger against his face, he repeated, “My eyes.” Anyone who knows more about what this saying means, and where it comes from is invited to share in the comments.

We pulled from there onto the large uphill highway known as King Hussein highway. We rode on for a while, but soon the traffic whipping by us became too unnerving, and we decided that taking the glass-littered sidewalk would be better.  As we rode, the three of us became somewhat spatially separated. During a moment when Claudia was neither particularly proximate to either Scott or I, a gang of young Jordanian youth appeared from the gravelly fall-off to our right. They grabbed at her water bottle, eventually tearing it off her rear rack, then began grabbing at her body, eventually running off with the water. I was in the front, and hearing some commotion, stopped, turning around. By this point I could see Scott and Claudia riding together, some ways behind me. I waited for them to catch up.

When I heard the story I was flabbergasted. “This is, unfortunately, quite common,” Claudia explained, startlingly cool and collected after such an occurrence, “especially for western women.” Scott and I were significantly more taken aback. What is one to do in such a situation, as a respectful traveler? Is it acceptable now to run back and grab the kids by the scruffs of their necks, lifting them off the ground and scolding them, pouring the remainder of the stolen water down the back of their shirts? Your guess is as good as ours, and most welcomed in the comments.

In any event, that was not what we did. Instead we kept wheeling, sticking more closely together. Soon we reached the top of the hill, and quite thankfully turned off the giant King Hussein Road, onto a more manageable side road. There we asked once more for directions, this time from a group of loitering youth. They too spoke passable English and directed us onward in sometimes hilariously compiled sentences, indicating a few directives simultaneously. In the end, being only slightly surer of where we were headed, we wheeled on, down a steep hill , and back up the other side, where we found ourselves at a large hospital complex.

The sun was now beginning to sink low behind a nearby mosque, and the temperature was falling to a cooler and quite comfortable dry Arabian night. Claudia was feeling winded and exhausted from previous events, and decided to take a break on a shady bench in the vicinity of the hospital, while Scott and I headed in to check it out.

We were soon accosted by a yelling and grumpy security guard, who seemed mostly interested in keeping us off the sidewalks. We apologized and headed back to collect Claudia. As we wheeled back toward the gate, another security guard came running up to us. “Uh-oh,” I thought, “now we’re in for it.” But it turned out this fellow was simply running out to direct us to where we had left our white woman alone, giving us a quick tongue-in-cheek scolding.

We continued to wheel upward, cresting the hill, just as the sun was setting. The uniform beige buildings all around us began to glow orange with the sunset.

From the top of the hill we wheeled down, flying through the cool wind into the night, and  into a new part of town.  Part way down the hill, Claudia’s phone rang again. It was our dinner date, calling to modify our plans from dinner to a mere after-dinner sheesha hour. This was fine by us. We refined our plans, beginning to scan the area for restaurants.

We were having trouble locating one that seemed a good fit, when Claudia spotted an old and rather well dressed man walking on the side of the road. She pulled over and began to chat with him. He turned out to be an Iraqi gentleman, and was just bubbling with restaurant recommendations. At the top of the list, of course, was a local Iraqi joint. It sounded good to us, so we followed his directions there, and locked out cycles outside.

The Iraqi restaurant was obviously a local institution, and was fantastically crowded, with a long line of people. They appeared to do mostly take out business, but we were able to locate a few plastic tables in a kind of side lot, where we threw down our helmets to reserve a spot.

We ordered a huge pile of pastes, a whole chicken, a large plate of salad, and some fried appetizers.  While Scott and Claudia executed the ordering process, I headed out in search of a place to wash my hands and use the restroom. I pulled back a piece of curtain and popped my head into a room where about 10 people were all lined up, standing on small carpets, and praying towards Mecca. I decided to wait to ask where I could find the loo.

The food was unsurprisingly incredible, and we feasted hungrily. It had been a long day of wheeling.

Soon Claudia’s friend, a Jordanian Brown University student arrived in a large Chevy SUV, thumping pop music. We loaded our cycles into the back, and drove off.

The Extremes of Experience Indeed.

We awoke the next morning, bid Sid a very fond farewell, heaving our packs onto our backs, the cycles, folded in their bags on our shoulders, and teetered our way downstairs.

There was no problem finding a large van-taxi to load all our stuff into, and with one last tip of the Panama hat to our dear friend Sid, we were off. Our driver was, of course, Pakistani, and he made small talk with us in very entertaining English as we raced along the brand new highways of Dubai, toward an airport-shaped shadow that loomed in the distance, enshrouded in dust.

Our cab dropped us off outside the Jazeera Airways terminal, and we headed to check-in for our flight. Jazeera Airways is a low-cost Kuwaiti airline. As a low-cost airline, they have a reduced luggage limit. We had encountered such things in the past. We consider reduced luggage limits to be one of the main enemies of AsiaWheeling Global Enterprises, but generally a little bit of sweet talking paired with perhaps a small fee gets us through, and gets the bikes onto the airplane.

Unfortunately, it seemed this time would be different. We were a fair bit over the (dare I say skimpy) 15 kg per person luggage limit, and the charge for the extra luggage was going to be huge. I’m talking hundreds of dollars. So we began pleading, begging, presenting business cards, explaining AsiaWheeling and our mission of peace, complimenting the airline’s graphic identity, the check-in counter attendant’s uniform, and Kuwait in general. Eventually, the attendant got on the phone with her manager and, low and behold, all extra luggage fees were forgiven.

“You are very lucky, you know that?” she said to us in English.  We know. We thanked her again and again, praising the glory of Jazeera Airways, in their infinite mercy. And with the bags and cycles headed down the conveyor toward Kuwait, we strolled on through security, and got our passports stamped by men in flowing robes who earned hundreds of thousands of dollars a year; we were leaving the UAE.

With this stamp, Scott and I would be retiring our passports for a while, switching over to our second passports, which we had begun to affectionately refer to as the “moon” passports. So I took my slightly fatter 10-year “sun” passport out of my Hong Kong fake leather cover and replaced it with our totally blank “moon” book.

The departures terminal of the Dubai airport was just as expansive and luxurious as our arrivals terminal had been. In particular, we were impressed with the duty free time planner they had posted.  It let the duty free shopper time his or her shopping adventures down to the minute, while still ensuring an on-time departure. Why doesn’t every airport have this?

We purchased a couple of drastically overpriced cups of coffee and falafel sandwiches from a Starbucks clone in the terminal and climbed on the flight.

The flight to Kuwait was all too short, but we were able to make good use of it, oscillating between looking out the window, and getting a little work done in the AsiaWheeling mobile offices, Jazeera Airways edition.

Soon the sprawling capital of Kuwait City began to loom below us, a uniform dust colored grid-work, smack dab in the middle of the uniform dust colored desert. As the plane flew lower, the city began to take on slightly more color, and we felt an almost uncontrollable urge to wheel it.

While hard at work in Sid’s apartment, we had already tried to convince Jazeera airways to let us spend a night or two in Kuwait, but it had proven dreadfully expensive to change the ticket. So in the end we had to resign ourselves to spend just a few hours in the international terminal of the Kuwait International Airport. When we finally unloaded into the airport, we found we had even less than the two hours we had coveted. We were quickly ushered by Jazeera staff through the airport to the ticket counter, where our connecting tickets were issued to us by a man who looked uncannily like a friend of mine named Max Strasser. We moved on toward our gate, just bubbling with curiosity about this place.

The flowing dishdash robe was definitely alive and well here, as was the female Islamic outfit, in all iterations from simple hijab to full burka. There also were a fair number of white and Arab fellows in military fatigues roaming around as well. We wanted so badly to learn more about this place, to wheel its streets, but we could not. So we reluctantly joined the line to board our flight.

We landed in Jordon and filed off the airplane and into the customs room. We changed our Omani Reils and UAE Dirhams into Jordanian Dinars at a large glass booth and then got in line to purchase visa’s upon entry.  The Jordanian Dinar is actually linked one-to-one with the British Pound, so calculating prices would be slightly easier than usual.

I must admit, part of me was worried that my entering this country on a completely virgin two-year passport might cause a red flag, even encourage some detainment or interrogation. Luckily this was quite far from the case. The man who sold me the 10-pound visa barely even looked at me or my passport. His counterpart asked me a number of questions in a very thickly accented English including whether or not I had a Jordanian phone number. I explained to him that I did not, but he just stared blankly back at me, made a face like he had just discovered a bit of sand in his mouth, puffed out his cheeks and lips, making an noise like a mare, and stamped my passport violently.

Claudia and Scott got through with even less hassle.

We collected our cycles, and headed outside the airport, where we unwrapped and began to re-assemble them.  There we attracted the usual crowd of baggage handlers, fellow travelers, and security personnel, all interested in witnessing the majesty of a Dahon folding cycle. We indulged them happily.

From our previous research, the airport should have been positioned about 25 kilometers outside the capital city of Amman. This seemed doable. So after some discussion, we decided to wheel into the city fully loaded. Armed with some directions from members of the crowd, we hit the road.

The countryside was beautiful. It was arid, but not as striking a desert as we had found in the Gulf. The farther we rode, the more we began to notice quite a large amount of agricultural activity. Also, for much of the way, there was a wide sidewalk that ran next to the road. This was especially nice, since it saved us from having to ride in the fast and sometimes reckless Jordanian highway traffic.

Unfortunately, the sidewalk was also littered with a hitherto unprecedented amount of broken glass. It seems the practice of throwing glass bottles out of your moving vehicle is quite common in Jordan, though I don’t know if we ever spotted someone in the act… it could also be that for one reason or another all the broken glass from the surrounding area is swept by some municipal team over to the sidewalk. Stranger things have certainly happened.

After riding for what must have been 25 kilometers, we reached an exit indicating it was headed toward Amman. Amman was, however, far from visible from our current junction. So we flagged down a cab and Claudia asked in Arabic how far we were. The man said 20 or 25 more kilometers. This was perplexing, but the day was relatively young, so we kept on. A few kilometers later, with still no signs of increasing urbanity, the hunger hit and we pulled over to a roadside shop to buy some shapes.

As we were purchasing food, the call to prayer began to sound from all the surrounding mosques. The owner of the shop kindly asked us to hurry up so he could close down the operation and go pray. We quickly threw some bottles of water, a couple bags of potato chips, and a jar of halva onto the counter, purchasing them with haste, and heading out to sit on the curb and feast.

While we were eating, we noticed a particularly haunting child, portrayed on the sign above us. Any speculation as to its relevance is welcomed in the comments. Just as everyone was arriving back from praying, we climbed back on the cycles.

We were riding now on a smaller road, running parallel to the highway. It had been quite a while since we’d stopped to snack, and there was still no sign of Amman. What had we done wrong? We must have arrived in a different (perhaps low-cost carrier related?) airport. Regardless, we had been riding for a while and there was no sign of Amman, though we did continue to be reassured by signs and traffic obviously directed toward the capital. Eventually, we came upon a restaurant, poised on hill in the middle of semi-arid agricultural Jordan.

We decided to head in and ask why we seemed unable to reach the capital. Scott and Claudia headed in while I watched the cycles. They were taking quite some time, so I took out the ukulele and began to play. Soon a group of restaurant employees emerged from the kitchen to investigate what I was doing. They were all jovial fellows, and by the time Scott emerged with news of our location, we had a little dance party going.

It turns out that we were at least another 30 or 40 kilometers away from the capital, and that we would probably need to get a cab. Luckily, the owner of the restaurant knew of an unlicensed cab driver, who drove a large car or truck, easily able to fit our three cycles and all our bags. We decided to pull the trigger on the cab, even though the price was high enough that it would use most of our remaining money. We took stock of our remaining cash and decided that, though we were hungry, we did not have quite enough to eat at the restaurant. When we explained this to the owner, he insisted that we eat there for free, bringing out three pizzas and three bottles of water.

This unexpected generosity was going to be a theme of our travels in the Middle East, but especially then, it being so new, the action made me uncomfortable. What was the man looking for in return? What was the catch? Of course, there was none. I was just unprepared for Arab culture. We thanked him again and again, and hungrily enjoyed the pizzas.

The restaurant was nice, filled with flat screen TVs, sporting a large hard wood walled and floored interior, full of solid oak tables. How could this essentially depopulated bit of irrigation-dependent Jordanian farmland support such a swinging place? Thoughts of money laundering did cross our minds…

When the cab finally came, we were able to establish a price that was 30% lower than what had been quoted, allowing us to pay the man after all. In what Claudia assured us would be a “very Arab” way to do it, we thanked him again for the food and hid the full amount of the bill been under a napkin on the table, being sure to let the waiter see us doing it.

We climbed into the cab, which turned out to be one of those half-pickup/half-SUV  vehicles. There was indeed plenty of room for us and all the stuff, and with a few more goodbyes and waves out the back window, we drove off toward Amman. The sky was already becoming orange with sunset by the time we arrived. We felt giddy with our good fortune, and enjoyed the ride,  chatting with our driver in pantomime and through Claudia’s Arabic, and speculating as to what kind of illegal business might be laundering money through the pizza joint where we had just eaten.

Our man had quite the driving style. I felt surprisingly safe in the car, given that he drifted between lanes without signaling, chain-smoked cigarettes, and had wedged his phone in between the prongs of the steering wheel in order to better text while driving.

We unloaded our stuff once we had entered Amman city center, and bid our man goodbye. Amman is a city built in a kind of crater, so that entering it feels somewhat like climbing down from the nosebleed section of a stadium. The architecture and color of all the buildings is also more or less uniform, adding to the unique quality of the view. It is a very old looking city, but with decent roads, and plenty of wild drivers. Now that we were in the center, the city seemed to rise up around us, as though we were sitting right at home plate looking out into the stands.

The hotel that we had selected from our pirated copy of the Jordanian Lonely Planet PDF turned out to have been turned into a hospital of sorts, for when we arrived there, though the sign was still affixed more or less to the wall of the building, we were greeted by a large crowd of people in wheelchairs, on crutches, and sporting terrible scars and burns. They were very smiley and quite entertained by us, but also sorry to inform us that we could only stay there if we first got injured in some way.  This comment, made by one of the ringleaders, a large man of perhaps 50 years, in wheelchair and cast, was met with roaring applause and laughter by the rest of the patients. We smiled nervously and bid them adieu.

Luckily nearby we located another hotel by the name of the “Hotel Asia.” The place was only moderately filthy, not too expensive, and the owner spoke splendid English, having worked for some time with the U.S. forces in Iraq. So we decided to go with this one, paying for a few nights, and hauling our stuff upstairs.

It was certainly time to eat again, so we headed out into the Amman night, finding a large and very popular looking shawarma stand not far down the street. The owners turned out to be Egyptian and instantly took a liking to Claudia, who not only spoke their language, and had exotic and beautiful blond hair, but also had spent quite some time living and studying in Egypt.

Needless to say, she was a hit. The shawarma wraps were also delicious.

From there we wandered through the night to a rooftop café, where we wiled away a few hours playing whist. It had been some time since whist had played a role in AsiaWheeling. It was good to have it back in the mix.

It was good to be in Amman. It was a fascinating town, and despite the fact that the rooftop café charged us what we later learned was about %800 the normal price for tea, I was quickly becoming a fan of Jordanian people as well.

The sun was shining brightly, indicating that we had slept significantly into the morning. It was good, though, it had been very late indeed when we had arrived at that lonely public beach in Sohar. The beach was now much less lonely; in fact, it seemed we had collected a small audience outside the idling Previa, scrutinizing the cycles and peering through the condensation-soaked windows at us sleeping.

So we rolled out of our seats, greeted our audience, thanked them for their attention, and with a Billy Shears type introduction, presented them with Jackson, who performed an epic rendition of Speed TR  unfolding, followed by a rousing bit of wheeling.

With the car locked tight and fading into the distance behind us, we struck out in search of the secrets of Sohar. It was a sweaty place, though the moist seaside breeze was not so much hot as it was oppressively sticky. It also became apparent that we were not only far from the city center, but also quite a way from the nearest source of breakfast. So we headed back to the Previa, performed reverse rendition of the bike-folding act, and to the great chagrin of our fellow beach goers, disappeared into the hazy day, headed for the city center.

Scott had an insatiable urge that morning for Internet, and we drove for quite some time, Scott with his laptop open, searching for wireless networks. We found quite a few, but they were without fail either red herrings with no data behind them, or secured against us. Finally, after spending a fair bit of time attempting to sweet talk a local business into letting us onto their network, we finally gave up and chose a new tack: shopping malls.

So we asked for directions to the largest local shopping mall and parked our car outside. Inside, we were initially unable to find a source of wireless Internet, but Scott was intrepid. On the upside there was another sprawling super market. This seemed the perfect place to buy the breakfast foods we so very much needed to maintain sanity. So Scott and Jackson headed off in one direction, and Claudia and I in another, one team determined to find some way to access the Internet, the other to procure foodstuffs. We met up and feasted at a table outside one of the many coffee shops. Scott had great success in his search for Internet, finally syncing his email in the back office of a children’s fun center on the fourth floor.

So with stomachs full and sync’ed of emails completed, we unfolded the cycles and headed out to the road. Sohar turned out to be great for wheeling. Very nice, smooth roads, low traffic levels, and starkly uniform Islamic architecture. From time to time, as we continued to explore, the wheeling became mildly technical. You see, the city was bisected by a number of large highways, on which, while traffic density was still quite low, the speed and recklessness increased greatly, requiring some gnarly portaging in order to get from one street to another.

As we headed farther from the city center, we began to feel a change from the stark white buildings and giant sparkling mosques to a more rural vibe. The roads began to crumble into gravel and packed earth, and soon animals were roaming around us. Our goal was to get to the ocean; as far as our compasses and understanding of the local terrain were concerned, it couldn’t be much farther. We had even begin to smell that salty fishy musk, but the road refused to take us consistently in the right direction, instead meandering this way and that, and all the time growing ever worse. We stopped to take stock. and I climbed onto a nearby wall to scout things out. Up ahead, we could see the road connected with another in a T-style junction. And the other road, it seemed, might take us right out of the salt marsh agricultural zone through which we rose, and directly to the beach.

And sure enough it did. That same sweltering humidity that had made the car sweat so profusely overnight washed over us as we came upon the coast, which was dotted with overturned fishing boats. We took a left onto the first paved road we encountered, and headed down it along the beach. Soon we were joined by a group of young local wheelers, who were absolutely thrilled to see us in the neighborhood.

They were, unfortunately also quite reckless with their cycles, and possessed a nasty penchant for littering and challenging each other to races. We rode along with them for a while, but were quite glad to be free of them once they finally lost interest.

We also found this interesting piece of Omani graffiti, which we would love one of you Oman-savvy readers to unpack in the comments.

A few kilometers up the road, moving away from the water, we called a waypoint at a local grocery shop to buy water and Japanese sports drinks, to be mixed into a healing kind of dilute tonic.

Claudia pulled over and used her Arabic to ask a couple of Omani teenagers who were walking and smoking cigarettes by the side of the road how to get back to the Safeer Mall, where we had parked the Previa.  They gave us very good directions, and feeling just peachy, we pulled off the road onto a 500 meter section of packed dirt that  would let us get over to the mall parking lot.

As we rode, a couple of women called out to us, giving their support in Arabic. Oman… what a place.

We pulled back onto the road and drove on, cracking Red Bulls and listening to more trivia podcasts. We drove for hours through the desert, and eventually the sun began to set into the rugged tree-less terrain. It was then that we realized it was time to eat again. Perhaps something about all the Red Bull was suppressing our appetites, for we had now a few times during our drive accidentally gone way too long without sustenance.

We pulled off at the next exit, which turned out to bring us to a fascinating town by the name of Al Suwaiq. We pulled into the brightly lit city center, which was really nothing more than a maze of very narrow streets and single story concrete buildings. At least 60% of the businesses here were ladies’ tailoring shops, a ratio that was so unbelievably high, that to this day we wonder how so much ladies’ tailoring business became centralized in this region.

It was, I dare say, not a majority Omani city. In fact we were to learn that most of the people here were immigrants or temporary laborers from Bangladesh.

Claudia needed to take a leak, and being rightfully somewhat wary of heading out into this city on her own, I decided to accompany her in the search. Just as we were asking at our second restroom-less ladies tailoring shop, a man in a giant flowing white robe came over and asked us in Arabic what we needed. Claudia began to explain to him who we were and what we wanted in his city. He asked us to follow him, and we did, past a giant pile of demolished buildings, down a set of stairs, and into a pitch black cul-de-sac. I was a bit worried, but Claudia seemed confident in this guy’s good intentions, so I trusted her. Our new friend fumbled noisily with a large lock and opened a door, spilling out a pool of dim yellow light.

Inside his house, he showed Claudia to the bathroom and as she got down to business, began to change out of his robes and into a lungi and the kind of white undershirt one might uncouthly call a “wife-beater.” Claudia exited the john, and while I took my turn, she began asking the chap for restaurant recommendations.

And so it was that we discovered that his house was, in fact, also a restaurant, specializing in Bangladeshi cuisine. This seemed like an interesting opportunity, and we hurried back out to find Scott and Jackson.

When I got outside, I found that there was some confusion going on with the car. It seemed that two fellows were trying to extract some kind of parking fee from our friends, who remained quite skeptical as to the official capacity of the gent attempting to monetize the section of crumbling asphalt on which we’d docked the Previa. Luckily a passer by explained to us, in no language any of us spoke, that we had better ignore the chaps, and so we did, heading back into the house/restaurant for a little food, but not before assuring ourselves repeatedly that the van was securely locked.

Inside, the Bangladeshi house/restaurant , our host was already hard at work rustling up a number of dishes. It seems that he kept them all ready to go, covered by bits of greasy cloth and requiring only the addition of a bit of flame from his very impressive and heavily modified propane stove. He ran the stove much like the way people pilot rental jet skis: aggressively, loudly, and with a large amount of jerking the apparatus around.

Soon plates of rice appeared before us, and then dishes of meat and freshly cut vegetables, as he prepared them, one by one.  There was certainly plenty of meat in this meal, and a number of delectable complex spices, the likes of which we had not tasted since… perhaps Sri Lanka?

Also, it seems, the fellow had called a number of his friends over to witness the group of foreigners who had chosen to visit his restaurant/home. And so it was that as we began to eat, a small audience formed around us, asking questions from time to time, and generally transmitting good energy.

Once we had finished the food (it was a splendid and rather large meal), we decided to all pose together for a few timed exposures.

So excited were our new friends when viewing the images we had taken, that we decided to head down the block and have a copy printed and framed for them to hang on the wall.

On our way to the photo printing shop, we were joined by a very uncomfortable character in a flowing white robe and head scarf. I believe he was looking for a ride and had noticed that we had a large van, but his language was as circuitous and difficult to interpret as his mannerisms. Even with Claudia’s Arabic skills, we were never quite sure  what he wanted. We had no room in the car for him, and while we tried to communicate to him that we did not believe we could help, he continued on speaking in strange incantations and waving a fist full of Oman reil in front of us.  Eventually, after a fair bit of uncomfortable conversation, he left.

Jackson turned to us once the man was outside. “That man is practicing black magic. I am sure of it.” Fair enough, Jackson.

We chose a nice gaudy frame for the freshly printed image and headed back to the house/restaurant. And here it is.

We decided it might even be worth taking one more group picture with the picture, if for nothing other than reflexivity’s sake.

We climbed back into the car and began to search for a way back to the main road. This proved easier said than done, and we spent at least 40 minutes wandering the dark and confusing back roads of Al Suwaiq. We were finally able to find the main road though, and once on it we made very short work of the remaining few hundred kilometers to Al Sawadi, a kind of seaside resort town. We were becoming way too fond of the hotel Previa, so upon entering the place, we already had little interest in staying at any of the expensive hotels, but we decided that it might be worth visiting them anyway.

So we parked the car outside the Al Sawadi beach resort and headed inside. It was the first time we had seen a bar in quite some time, and for a moment we considered having a drink. But after seeing the prices, we decided that perhaps just smoking a little Shisha in one of the tents in the back might be more affordable.

So we whiled away the next couple hours smoking hookah and chatting about life, the universe, and everything.

Once we had our fill of sweetly scented tobacco smoke, we paid our bill, which was just slightly more than the cost of one drink at the bar, and headed back to the Previa. That night we set up the hotel on a seemingly remote section of beach, not far from the resort, and relaxed into that air-conditioned, humming womb of dreams that is the Hotel Previa.

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.