We awoke the next morning in Amman, Jordon and promptly hopped on the cycles. We parked our Dahons down the block at the same outdoor coffee place that we had discovered the morning before, now more properly ordering unsweetened coffee, which is in Arabic “Kahuah Sadah.”

We sat down on a low-lying wall near a lower story alley, and began to drink our coffee. A group of fellows who were working below us to move some furniture and rugs around waved up to us, asking us to come down and interact. Scott obliged them, and soon the interaction evolved into a kind of comedic photo shoot. Here are the results.

We climbed back onto the road and started wheeling. We struck out in the opposite direction than we had the previous day.

We had another meeting, this time with a Finnish friend of Claudia’s. We met her in a large touristy market, which we discovered was one of the few places that was still operational, as it was run by Christians, of which there are many in Amman. It was Friday again, you see, and many of the Muslim-owned businesses had halted operation in observance of the sabbath.

We ate street food at the market: more hummus and pita, and falafel, and some shawarma wraps.

We spent the rest of the morning wandering around town with Claudia’s friend and learning about her unending frustrations with the administrative and bureaucratic hassles of trying to comply with the ridged requirements of the western powers that be. It turns out that in the face of no Jordanian ethical controls on studies, western researchers were required to jump through all manner of hoops to prove the ethical nature of their work. This is, in principal, good. But if it keeps people from getting any work done at all, are they not throwing the baby out with the bathwater? In the end it looked like our new friend would be spending the summer in Amman, but would not be able to do any research due to foot dragging.

As we were bidding goodbye, she taught us our new favorite Finn joke:

Q: “How do you tell a social Finn?”

A: “She’s staring at your shoes.”

We continued to crack up all the way back down the hill toward the city center. We loaded up on water, and after a quick session of furious work on correspondence for you, dear reader, we checked out and climbed onto the cycles. It seemed wise to put something more in our stomachs before heading to the bus station.

So we wheeled our fully loaded cycles over to a nearby falafel house and indulged in some of the house specialty and greasy cardboard containers of deep fried cauliflower. Outside the stand, a man peddled fan blades.

The meal was scrumptious in a most oily way, and feeling refueled, if somewhat laden with grease, we began to lean into the long climb out of the crater of Amman, back up to the bus station.

It was a long wheel up and plenty of climbing for three fully loaded wheelers. We stopped many times to make sure that we were on the correct route, to drink water, and to rest. Claudia was quite generous with her Arabic skills, stopping repeatedly to chat with large crowds of men outside of cafes, most of which she returned from with reports of thorough, though somewhat subdued, sexual harassment. Sometimes the sexual harassment would become slightly less subdued, and Claudia would find herself batting away stray hands. “This would be so much worse if I were not traveling with you two,” Claudia explained in exasperation. Scott and I continued to be flabbergasted at the behavior of Jordanian men, uncertain of how we could best protect her, and in total awe of Claudia’s ability to endure it.

At the bus station, we were soon surrounded by fellows offering to drive us to our next destination for unreasonable prices. Finally, we were able to find the fellow who ran the bus. He took one look at the cycles, and began a drawn out and tedious bargaining process. Finally, we were able to agree to a price to get us and all our stuff onto the bus. There was no luggage compartment, so we would need to pile our things onto the seats.

Once we finally got on, the driver pulled a last ditch attempt to get Scott and me to cram into the seat-and-a-half -sized space between our cycles and our luggage. Here again, Claudia came to the rescue. She was already hard at work making friends with our fellow passengers, who turned out to all be recent graduates of the Amman police academy.  She asked them how much they had paid for their tickets, and once we found out how drastically overcharged we had been, we found a more solid basis for an argument that our things might take up the back seats of the bus, with us occupying the following row.

In the face of our knowledge, the fellow began to exhibit what we would find to be a common Jordanian trait: rather than make any attempt to repair bridges or laugh it off (which would be the Indian, Indonesian, Cambodian, or Vietnamese style), the man simply became cold as ice, and refused to treat us with an ounce of respect for the rest of the journey.

This was fine, however, for he was at the other end of the bus, driving, and we were in the back with a whole crowd of new police friends. They asked about my ukulele, and I took it out, beginning to play. The driver of the bus promptly turned the radio onto a local pop channel and cranked the volume up.  Fair enough. I put the uke away.

With that the bus pulled out of the station and began its long crawl across the desert toward Wadi Musa. The bus ride was about four hours, enough to get comfortable, but not so much that we began to tire of the journey.

Meanwhile the desert landscape was beautiful in a completely unique way, compared to the desert we had seen in Oman and the UAE. It was a place of large flat lands, mesas, and south-western-U.S.-style rock formations. As we drove on, we continued to chat with our newly christened police officer friends.  It turns out they were all coming back to Wadi Musa for a kind of graduation party.

They had been proudly showing us their newly printed diplomas,which they all proudly carried with them. Unfortunately, when we stopped to stretch our legs, one of them left his diploma somewhere in the middle of the desert rest stop. He began to dissolve into madness, searching the bus wildly. We attempted be be helpful by moving our stuff around as well, engaging with him in the doomed mission to manifest the lost diploma. Then, just as quickly as the madness had set in, it passed. The fellow became relaxed and cheerful once again, and we continued the ride as if nothing had happened.

When we finally arrived in town, the sun was just setting. Our new friend who had lost the diploma got on his mobile phone. He knew of a good cheap hotel, he explained, and soon a driver from the hotel had arrived in a van to take our stuff. We ended up loading our larger bags into the van, and wheeling up behind him.

The party was already well under way in this city. People were driving around in over stuffed cars, and all around us we could hear the unnerving sound of automatic weapons fire. It seems the new grads were firing their machine guns into the air in celebration.

This was a hilly place, some of the steepest wheeling of the entire trip to date, in fact. The roads were also polished to an unnatural slickness, perhaps by sand, or wind, I have no idea. But I found my back tire slipping and loosing traction on the steepest sections. Once we reached the hotel, we were somewhat disappointed to find it to be your classic backpacker-type joint. The clientele were almost exclusively foreigners, and the interior of the place was so cluttered with a mixture of advertisements for touring services to the surrounding sites,  old faded posters of the most beautiful places in Jordon, or large advertisements for Petra brand beer. Needless to say, we were already a little wary upon entrance.

The initial asking price was monumental by AsiaWheeling’s and most Asian backpacker’s standards. Further inspection of the room confirmed that this was no Chinese business hotel either. The place was grimy to be sure, and expensive. But it was late, there was gunfire all around us, and we were hungry.

So we started bargaining. It was the most drawn out, energy intensive and multifaceted bit of bargaining we had yet experienced. In the hotel’s corner there were two chaps, one good cop, friend-of-the-owner-just-trying-to-help-us-out-type guy and then the grumpy and predatory owner. One was a short portly smiley fellow. The other was a rail thin chap, with sunken eyes and a jagged scowl.  His teeth, blackened and disintegrating with decay, sat like sharp stones in his small mouth. In our corner, there was one Arabic speaking blond girl and two weathered fellows in Panama hats and mustaches. It was going to be a close one.

We dithered back and forth, frowning, stroking our facial hair, making clicking noises, and generally play-acting. Finally we settle on a price that was still quite high, but doable. We asked to have a moment to chat, and after a quiet word outside returned in to seal the deal. During the chat, however, it seemed that the price that had been offered had been either repealed, or never was valid to begin with.

So in frustration we continued the assault. Finally, when the two fellows continued to refuse to return to the aforementioned price, we began to prepare, as much as we did not want to, to leave. Just as were turning our backs, the wiry, scowly front desk attendant called out to Claudia in Arabic, “Where did you learn Arabic?”

“Egypt,” she replied.

They then began to ask her a series of questions aimed at confirming that indeed she had lived in Egypt. And Claudia seemed to pass this test.

“I am an Egyptian,” he replied, Gitanes cigarette bouncing in his mouth, and stuck out his hand.  He revealed a tattoo proving that he was a Coptic Christian, hailing from a particularly poor neighborhood of Cairo.

Finally it was over. We paid the man; relieved to be on to the next task, we headed up to our room and threw down our stuff.

From there, we climbed back on the cycles. Barely able to keep from sliding on the steep, slick pavement, we ventured downhill toward the city center to find a little dinner and an ATM. The ATM was easy, and while Claudia was “WarBucks-ing” as we had come to irreverently refer to the replenishing of the steady trickle of money which is AsiaWheeling’s lifeblood, a child appeared from the dark street. He pulled up on his bicycle, and hopped off, flicking down his kickstand with a sickening rusty squeak. He was very interested in our Speed Series Dahons, and we decided to let him take a little ride. He did not seem 100% trustworthy, though, so I headed off next to him on Claudia’s bike to accompany him for the wheel.

While I was wheeling next to this kid, making sure that he didn’t disappear into the desert night with the Speed TR, another round of nearby machine gun fire sprang up. It was a startling kind of noise. I knew it was all in good fun, but something about mixing the sounds of war with those of celebration, was making getting used to this particular piece of culture harder than usual. By the time I returned back from my little wheel with this kid, Scott and Claudia had already asked a fellow for directions to a restaurant recommendation.

We followed his advice, and found ourselves wheeling not more than a block up the street to an pricey tourist-filled joint.  We sat down, taking our seats next to a bunch of British 17-year-olds, who were traveling in Jordon after graduating from high school. This place was way too touristy for AsiaWheeling… but we were hungry and tired, so we capitulated. We gave our order to a somewhat grumpy and overly costumed waiter, who spoke perfect English.

Soon the young kid who had ridden our bicycle showed up and sat down with us. He immediately ordered a Coke and began to chat us up. He took out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, and began smoking. Then he made a faux attempt to light my mustache on fire with his lighter. Pulling his hand back at the last minute and blowing out the flame, he proceeded to roll back into his chair consumed with laughter; we looked on confused.

The more time we spent with him, the more uncomfortable I became. Something was off about this guy. We couldn’t quite put our fingers on it. His English was okay, but not quite good enough to communicate consistently. He was likely not really dangerous in any way. He certainly wanted to get some free Cokes out of the relationship. But there was a strange performance aspect to the way he interacted with us that was really unsettling. Picking up his mobile phone, he fabricated conversations of business deals in an attempt to impress us.  In the end we hustled through our  mix-plates of falafel and pastes, and headed out the door.

Back on the cycles, we decided to indulge in a quick spot of night wheeling, letting the physical activity calm our somewhat frazzled minds. Wadi Musa… it was quite a place. It was the gateway to the splendorous world of Petra, an ancient city carved into the desert rocks. But had the beauty of its surroundings somehow turned its people into tourism-fueled predators?

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

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

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

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

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

And then there were three.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From there we followed the directions of this sign:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We woke up in an idling Toyota Previa in a ritzy neighborhood somewhere in the suburbs of Muscat, Oman. During our meandering search for a good spot to set up the hotel the night before, we had passed a Starbucks Coffee, positioned rather oddly in the middle of a causeway. We decided that rather than bash our heads against a wall and battle the morning traffic, visiting this place might be the solution to our morning needs.

It was, as all Starbucks are, unremarkable. The coffee was pretty darn good, and the pastries were expensive and overly sweet. However, they did have Internet, which we were able more or less to operate.

This was good, as it had been some time since we’d connected. So with stomachs full of American(o) style coffee and cold manufactured pastry, and our Internet lives in a slightly less in a state of shambles, we headed back out to the Previa, which was now positively cooking in the bright sun.

Now, unbeknown to you, dear reader, this whole time the illustrious Jackson had been cooking up quite a plan for us. We had, as you know, been sleeping in our van for the past few days and, as Jackson deemed it, we were overdue for a bit of Luxury. It seems we would be going straight up to the top on this one. Yes, I’m talking about none other the Al Bustan Intercontinental Hotel of Muscat.

Jackson had, through his many mysterious and illustrious connections, manifested for us a triple upgrade at this five-star hotel. This meant we could purchase their cheapest room, and would be automatically upgraded to their third- cheapest room, I felt quite sure would be overwhelmingly ballin’. In addition to the upgrade, we could check in early and check out late, plus some other perhaps yet-to-be disclosed perks. This was going to be magnificent. Jackson had been playing the Intercontinental and the Grand Hyatt off each other for the past couple days, working his magic and finding us the best room he could. Eventually we had selected the Intercon.

There was only one catch. It was a two-person room. It would be huge, of course, with plenty of space for all involved. But we decided we might be better off if, at least during the check-in process, the staff believed that it was only Jackson (a prominent Indonesian businessman), and his wife/weekend fling (Claudia) who were checking in the today.

So as we drove through Muscat, toward the opposite side of town, where the Intercontinental Hotel chain had bought up quite a giant swath of land, we hatched a plan. As we pulled under a large archway and into the grounds of the hotel, we entered a very un-Oman-like, and strikingly foliated world. It was all well watered and covered in grass, flower beds, and palm trees.  We drove by tennis courts and topiary gardens. Gardeners and grounds keepers were everywhere, struggling to maintain this unnatural greenery against the harsh climate. This was the place, for sure. We were in.

Well before the hotel itself was in view, we pulled over the car, and Jackson took the driver’s seat. Claudia took shotgun. We synchronized our watches, and exchanged wishes for good luck in the upcoming endeavors. Scott and I set out from there on foot, waving the rest of our team on toward the main facility.

It was blisteringly hot, and as Scott and I walked along the side of the road, we became soaked in sweat. Soon we came upon a large parking lot, across from which we caught our first glimpses of the massive hotel in which we’d be sleeping that night. It was a huge octagonal prism, a rather fetching mixture of an almost Soviet brutalism and traditional Islamic architecture.

We paused in the parking lot to chat for a moment with a fellow who was there washing cars. It’s always good to cultivate allies, here on AsiaWheeling.  It seemed that car washing was one of complimentary services of the hotel. The fellow spoke very little English, but was quite happy to see guests out strolling and sweating profusely. We idled in the shade with him for a while, exchanging non-verbal regards. Then it was time for him to work again, and for us to continue to move, always vigilant against detection.

Up ahead of us, across from the main entrance to the Intercontinental, was the beginning of a stretch of jagged rocky cliffs. These seemed the perfect place to hide out and wait for Jackson call. So we headed up into the lifeless rocky hills, to survey the terrain and bide our time.

In order to get there, though, we needed to use a kind of gardener’s drainage and wheelbarrow access trench. Three hundred meters down the trench, we found a rusted ladder that allowed us to scale a length of poured concrete wall and get up onto the base of the first rocky cliffs. Up we went, scrambling over the crumbling and jagged stone that made up most of the terrain around Muscat. From the top of the crag, we had an unencumbered view of the grounds. They were quite impressive: a large swath of beach, countless pools, hundreds of deck chairs with umbrellas, a few outdoor bars and restaurants, plenty of stark white uniformed employees, and from what we could see very few guests.

It was then that Scott got the call. He crouched down against the rocks and spoke in a ragged whisper. When he hung up, he looked at me through the boiling heat.  My pupils were so closed against the bright sun that his face was all but invisible, shaded by the brim of his Panama hat.  As he turned his head up to me, the sun spilled over his chin and mustache, exposing a toothy grin. “We’re going in.”

I gave a solemn nod and scrambled down the rock face. Soaked in sweat, we emerged like fugitives from the bushes that hid the drainage and wheelbarrow access trench from passers by and strolled across the parking lot up to the front gate of the Intercontinental. Jackson was there to meet us, leaning against a giant pillar just inside of the air-conditioning, looking at his watch. I gave him a tip of the Panama hat; he gave a slight bow.

We heartily shook hands, introducing ourselves, and exchanging AsiaWheeling business cards. “How was the flight?” Jackson asked. “Rotten,” we replied.

“Well, shall we get down to business?” he said, turning on the ball of his foot to lead us toward the elevators. We nodded, and with hands clasped behind our backs, we strolled behind him and up to the room.

Claudia had already made herself at home, and was deep into investigating the facilities. All our baggage had been brought up by the hotel staff, and had been placed in the massive luggage storage cubby near the entrance to the room. There were complimentary fruits and sugared dates to refresh ourselves after a day of traveling.

The room boasted a gigantic tiled bathroom with gold fixtures (including bidet), a kind of antechamber for the bathroom, where one might spend time getting pretty, an immense collection of complimentary potions, and a balcony with chairs, table, and a view of the pools, cliffs, and a bit of beach.

There was a mirrored cabinet full of crystal goblets, fancy teacups, saucers, silverware and the like for in-room picnicking. There was even an Ethernet cable sticking out of the wall, promising Internet.

It was this particular feature that Claudia was investigating at the moment we arrived. The hotel’s server seemed to be asking for a password and or some money. For one of the nicest hotels in the world, this seemed a bit of a nickel and dime. “No worries.” Jackson replied, “I’ll solve this.” And with that the illustrious Jackson picked up the room phone and began using a combination of tough love and Indonesian black magic to manifest a free Internet password for us.

And with that, we leaned back and began eating free fruit and generally relaxing. As we were munching and enjoying our new found surroundings we began to realize something: we would be here in this hotel room for the next 25-32 hours, and we certainly could not afford to eat at any of the restaurants nearby. This meant one thing: in-room picnic time. And for this we would need supplies.

Claudia and I grabbed the keys to the Toyota and headed off in search of supplies, while Scott and Jackson continued to relax and explore the hotel.

We arrived back in very high spirits, in part from our triumphant purchases at a giant Omani grocery outfit and positive interactions with the employees there, and in part from having just flown down the highways of Oman, windows down, grocery bags fluttering in the wind, and singing along to some old Presidents of the United States of America tracks. We loaded all the food into a Dahon folding bicycle bag and strolled into the lobby. The people at the front desk must have been quite curious as to why a woman, presumably Jackson’s wife, staying at such a fancy hotel would appear, sweating like a pig, out of the glaring heat, along with her husband’s business partner, toting a giant oblong black bag filled with what looked like loaves of bread, fruit, and thousands of jars of Arabic pastes, but could have also very well been a dead body. We flashed big grins at the staff and grunted our way across the palatial hotel lobby, eventually heaving the bag of groceries into the wrong bank of elevators.

It’s true. We were crazy. Just crazy enough to work.

When we finally opened the door to our room and threw down our load, Scott and Jackson were discussing an issue of some medical importance. It seems Jackson’s sunburn had taken a turn in the bizarre rash-like direction, and after some team consultation, the two of them decided to head out once again in the Previa, to seek some medical attention. But before that, it was time to have a little in-room picnic feast. Once we were all full, Claudia and I wished our dear friends good luck in their mission, and while they headed out into the city, we headed out to the beach.

The next three hours were spent swimming, wandering amongst tide pools, and using the free kayak rental service.

Part way through our kayak trip, a smiling and chiseled employee of the hotel was dispatched in a speedboat to kindly inform us that it was time to return the kayak. So we did.

As we headed back toward the hotel, we encountered Scott and Jackson, who had arrived back not long ago. Reunited once more, and relieved to hear that Jackson’s skin condition would be easily treatable, we all headed back to the room for a celebratory badam milk drink.

The rest of the evening was spent using the facilities of the Intercontinental Muscat to the greatest extent we could. And it felt great.

We swam in all the pools, used the towel service, sat and watched the sunset from the deck chairs, sang songs, and played ukulele into the night.

A luxurious experience indeed.

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.

We awoke the next morning as the bright Omani sun began to heat up the interior of the car. It had been a hot night on that gravely beach, especially since we had decided to leave the windows closed for fear of being eaten by insects.

Despite the heat and some moderate sweating, I slept quite well, and as we stretched and took stock of our surroundings, we were already working on improvements to the Hotel Previa algorithm.

We began the day by taking a quick dip in the sea and drinking a few Red Bulls. The water was the same crystal clear blue that we had remembered, and as we swam, wearing the Dawn Patrols, I could look down and see the bottom, tens of feet below my kicking legs. Much refreshed by the dip, we loaded the bikes back into the Previa and set out in search of breakfast. We spotted a roadside Yemeni café, near a gas station and decided to check it out. It smelled good inside, so we sat down, ordering coffee, hummus, salads, and a large plate of fish.

The food was splendid, and the owners of the shop were quite entertained when, after paying the bill, we proceeded to unload four bicycles from our beloved Previa.

It was time to wheel this city, but for one reason or another, Jackson felt that parking a couple kilometers up, in the town proper, would be superior to parking here at the station. Fair enough, we thought. So Scott, Claudia, and I hopped on our Dahons and Jackson took the wheel of the Prev to meet us in town.

Having spent plenty of time in Indonesia, Hong Kong, and the UK, Jackson naturally pulled onto the left side of the road, where he proceeded to, as an unlicensed driver, take the rental car around a blind cliff-side turn directly into oncoming traffic. We screamed at him, but the windows were up.

We decided that either we were all in a world of trouble, or Jackson would figure it out and we would meet in town. Traffic was light here…maybe he would even make it all the way to town without seeing another car?

Regardless, there was only one choice at this point: wheeling.

And with that, we headed out onto the road. We met up with Jackson in central Khasab; he had come through the experience unscathed, and the four of us headed out to explore the city. The landscape was savagely gorgeous, with almost no plants, just rock, sand, and sea.

The buildings were mostly small, many of them crumbing, some of them lavishly expensive, and other than tea and hookah joints, all the businesses seemed to be import/export companies.

The city, of course, had many, many mosques, with a rather impressive central one in the middle of a great round-about.

We spotted a diving and sporting goods shop as we rode, and decided to buy snorkels. This shop also seemed to be focused more on import/export than retail, but they were happy to sell to us. The water had been so clear and beautiful that morning and the evening before, that we were sure that the underwater view would be to-die-for.  But once we saw how expensive masks and snorkels were at this shop, we decided to wheel on in search of a more affordable option. Sure enough, a few shops later we found it.

For about $6.00 a person, we were able to buy four complete mask and snorkel sets. Sure they were of terrible quality, but we needed them only for the next week or so. So we bought the suckers and strapped them onto the backs of our cycles.

From there we headed back to the beach for another dip. Unfortunately, due to some bizarre change in the currents, the water had become quite cloudy. So, throwing the snorkels into the back of the Previa next to the cycles, we headed out in search of more Oman. There would be more underwater opportunities in the future.

Unfortunately, in order to get more Oman, we actually had to drive back to the UAE. You see, dear reader, Musandam is disconnected from the rest of Oman, as a little autonomous chunk of what would logically be the UAE. Control of the Musandam Peninsula, however, gives Oman partial control over the Straits of Hormuz, which, it seems, is of some strategic interest to them.

So onward we went, back to the border we had crossed the day before, shelling out more cash and heading back into the UAE. We scrutinized the map, and it seemed there was a road that would allow us to move directly to the border, through the mountain range we had driven around the day before.  And so it was toward that mountain range that we drove.

A lack of signage made locating the exact road difficult, but we learned from a passing truck that athough no signs indicated it, we had indeed found the correct road.

We were somewhat surprised, however, when we asked the truck driver for his estimate of the time it would take to reach the second Omani border: four hours. This was more, even, than the time it had taken to drive all the way around the mountains the day before.

The reason for the estimate, however, became apparent as the road soon dissolved into a gravely mountain pass. Then it began to get steep. And soon we had exceeded the capabilities of our beloved Previa.

While the lifeless jagged landscape through which we drove was both beautiful, terrible, and strangely inviting, we decided that we needed to turn back, lest we end up stranded or worse, trapped in a snarl of twisted metal at the bottom of some savage lifeless valley.

We made sure, however, to take a few glam shots of the Previa, of course, in this dramatic landscape.

Back on honest bitumen, we tore on, around the mountains down the same roads on which we’d come, eventually turning toward the UAE.

We drove past a few giant oil-pumping and refining stations, some of which were emitting huge plumes of flame.

We stopped once again in Ras Al Khaima, this time for dinner. We wandered the streets for a while before selecting a Shawarma restaurant. The food was amazing, following our so far golden trend of truly succulent meals consisting always of hummus, salad and some meat dish, this time Shawarma.

We stopped again at a giant night market that sprang up out of the empty, pitch black desert. We wandered around looking for a  rest room, but instead found a sleeping encampment of nomads. I decided to pee elsewhere and we moved on.

Soon we found ourselves in the much larger city of Fujairah, capital of the Emerate of Fujairah, where it was time to eat some more. We spotted a giant LuLu’s hypermarket, and decided to indulge our fascination with foreign grocery stores.

Inside, we found some really fantastic products, which I would like to share with you now:

The selection was truly dizzying.

In the end we settled on a few of those sticky sweet Arabic pastries, the most well known (in America) of which is, of course, Baklava. Jackson also insisted on a certain Arabic ice cream he is quite fond of. It was all delightful.

I purchased a non-alcoholic beer (the only kind you can get in the UAE without some serious paperwork) . It was undrinkable.

And then we were at the border of Oman, once again. A very tall, dark, confident, and pleasantly exotic smelling man in a flowing white gown and intricate Omani hat stamped our passports, charged us another hearty fee, and together with the other three workers at the border warmly welcomed me to Oman, taking my hand and shaking it. So far the best border experience of the entire trip.

We drove on through the night, in search of a city known as Sohar, fabled to be the birthplace of none other than Sinbad the Sailor himself, a character I will not take the time to elaborate on in this post, but whose Wikipedia article is well worth a skim at least.

It took a few hours, and a wrong turn that lead us to a giant oil refinery was emitting multiple plumes of startlingly large flame, but we eventually arrived in Sohar. We immediately headed to the sketchiest outskirts to find a nice empty beach on which to set up the Hotel Previa. Instead we found a large public beach, next to a large public park. We were exhausted though and, trusting our luck, we just unloaded the bikes, locked them to a palm tree, and went to sleep.

This night, we let the engine run, with air conditioning on (albeit at the lowest setting). It was so humid on this beach that as we slept, the cool, air conditioned exterior of the windows began to collect condensation which ran in slow drops down the glass as we slept like babies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sugar free,” we all replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The place: Grinnell, Iowa.

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

The weather: cool fall morning, misty, crisp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Totally and completely impressive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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