Desert Camping

At the top of the medium-sized mountain near our campsite.

This weekend we had a new and very interesting experience... We went desert camping! Camping in the desert is a favorite pastime of Dubai-dwellers, and something we've been wanting to do since we arrived. However, I wouldn't say Jared and I are particularly 'camping' people, and in fact had never been camping together in the almost 8 years we've been dating. I probably haven't been camping myself since I was in high school, so you could say it's been a lonnng time since I've 'roughed it' in the way you do when you camp. But that didn't scare us and we eagerly accepted the invitation from our friends to join their camping convoy.

The idea was for the guys to all go mountain biking, and the girls to go hiking (it was a group of about 12 people, 6 couples, with a few others who I never actually got a chance to chat with so don't really know their story). We were to leave on Friday afternoon, get to the campsite before dark, set-up, BBQ for dinner, and then the next morning the biking/hiking would occur. A great plan in theory. However, this weekend it finally decided to rain in Dubai (and not just sprinkle, but pour, all day Friday) after about 10 months with absolutely no precipitation to speak of. We began to wonder if we were still going to go, but our friends Bruno and Beth who organized the trip were convinced that it would be dry once we got to the campsite.

So we got on the road at about 3pm on Friday and drove the hour and a half to the turnoff to get to the campsite. We were driving our little car (not the oh so fantastic Mitsubishi Lancer we've been renting for the last 1.5 years, but a temporary replacement for it, since the Lancer was in for servicing. The replacement was an even more ghetto-tastic Chinese car called a "Family Haima STD". Certainly not of superior quality). We had asked Bruno if he thought that our little car would be able to make it to the campsite (as everyone else was driving SUV's), and he said he thought it was "doable" in a normal car. Well we soon found out that the 'dirt road' to get to the campsite was in fact rocky mountain trails and dried up wadis. We all drove in a big convoy (with us in the back) and the 25ish minutes it probably took us felt like about 2 hours. Jared was driving and the stress and tension that ensued was nearly relationship ending, which is saying a lot for anyone who has spent even a little bit of time with us, and particularly in situations involving moving furniture and/or law school finals/bar exams. As we weren't sure if the car would make it, and nearly broke up about 12 times, I didn't get any pictures on the way in... I did on the way out though, which I will share below.

So, for some unknown reason, God had mercy on us and allowed our Chinese POS car to make it to the campsite. However, by the time we got there, there was only about 15 minutes of light left in the day, and it was just drizzling down rain. We commenced setting up camp, with the tent we borrowed from our friends Pauline and Kevin (who were also camping with us). Despite the fact that Jared and I were basically not speaking, we somehow set up our tent and managed to get the rain flap/outer tent up before everything got soaked. As we also (obviously) had no sleeping bags, we borrowed a camp bed [which collapsed within 5 minutes of laying on it] and foam camping mattresses from P&K as well (using spare sheets from home to make the bed... along with the pillows and duvet off our bed).

Once we were all set up, the rain finally let up and we ended up having a really fun night of drinking and grilling with a toasty campfire and good conversation. We even introduced all our non-American friends to S'mores courtesy of a S'more kit my Grandma D. got us for Christmas. The tension between Jared and I seemed to lesson as the night went on and the rain eased up (and we realized that remarkably, the air was still in all four of our tires).

Unfortunately, the rain continued through much of the night and I woke up to dripping periodically on my face (or maybe I woke up a lot because the camp bed had collapsed on me and so I ended up sleeping on the ground and trying to get Jared to share his foam mats with me). Either way, when we woke up we realized how beautiful the campsite was... If only it hadn't rained the one time in the year and a half we've lived here that we actually went camping. Oh well, in my experience, it isn't camping unless it rains.

After a hearty breakfast of eggs and English sausage, the boys sans Jared headed out to mountain bike. Jared was originally planning on borrowing a bike, but the logistics seemed to be getting too complicated and he didn't want to spend $60 USD on a bike helmet he would never wear again. So we stuck around the campsite and did some light hiking around the area to soak in the gorgeous scenery...

View of our campsite from above...

View of the mountains.

Another view.

Jared and the mountains.

Victory! (Jared at the top of the peak).

Me & Pauline, taking a load off.

The Family Haima at the campsite. I just had to get the effect of a car that had no business being in the middle of the desert mountains.

See, I'm not lying! It's really called the "Family Haima STD" no matter how ridiculous it sounds. Silly Chinese.

On the way out, with a bit more confidence the Haima could do it, but with just as many cringe-worthy-rock scraping the bottom of the car moments.

Off-roading in the Haima.

Yet another view... We just couldn't believe the car was actually driving this path, and relatively unscathed. Maybe we weren't giving the Haima enough credit.

Last view of the path out. Still can't believe we drove a two-wheel drive car through that, and that it made it!

So, overall, I would say camping was an interesting experience. Certainly memorably, and possibly something that we never need to do again.

And just to throw this in, we started out our weekend by running in the Dubai Marathon 10K Friday morning at 7:15am. The whole race experience was just a comedy of errors which began with us stuck in a traffic-jam for 45 minutes and missing the start of the race (despite leaving our house an hour before the race began to travel a distance less than 5 miles). Mind you, hundreds of other 10K (and marathon) runners were in the same situation and missing the start of the race. Once we finally got into the parking area (Dubai Media City, a congested and small area which I wouldn't even consider trying to fit 12,000 runners/cars into, but apparently the race organizers thought otherwise), we had to park literally on the front steps of the Microsoft building and were chased down and harassed by the security guard as we were leaving our car. We ignored him however. We reached the starting line of the race about 25 minutes after the race was to have begun and they were already wheeling away the starting arch, and had removed the starting gate, so that our chips didn't even register and so we weren't timed or even considered to have started the race (according to the official results). Jared took pleasure in taunting race officials as we passed them. Then when we got to the 'water stop' they were out of water (which is kind of ridiculous considering we were catching up to back of the pack people who are the ones that needed the water the most), so Jared told the water stop workers to go to hell as we passed. Funny enough, we both finished the race in really good times, Jared in 47 minutes, me in 49 minutes 37 seconds. I think it must have been the anger and rage giving us adrenaline. Oh well, chalk it up to another uniquely 'Dubai' experience.