End Of Snickets

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My first short-cut into Dubai from Sharjah was a wee desert track which ran through low dunes and camel camps, snaking its way down into the outskirts of the big city behind the Dubai abbatoir. These days it's called Beirut Street.

My second was a little further out, again a desert track and a fun drive each morning and night, a little dune bash to settle the mind. I've long said, if I had to sit on the Ittihad Road and that jostling, snarling line of cars I couldn't live in Sharjah. But I never have, so we've continued to embrace the joys of the Cultured Emirate. Time and progress eclipsed my second snicket, which is called the Mohammed bin Zayed Road now.

A few years ago, my current snicket was blocked by faceless forces. Well, Dubai's RTA. A running battle developed between JCBs laying an insane barrier of concrete blocks across the desert dividing Dubai and Sharjah. The Orcs were clearly intent on forcing the little band of 4WDs, who daily bumped their way over the short sandy stretch, onto the roads. For a time, to my great amusement, cars would dart around the lumbering yellow earth-movers, blocks would be pulled aside when the baddies weren't looking and we'd continue our merry way across the snicket. This went on for a while and The Man clearly gave up and left us to it.

Quite right.

But, of course, we always find a way to ruin things and word started to leak out about the snicket which slowly developed from a couple of holes in the barrier to great multi-laned super-snickets. We obviously reached Peak Snicket, because the other day, someone in authority clearly decided enough was enough. The JCBs came back in force, great fresh concrete barriers laid right the way along the border, earth-movers piled up huge sandy berms and the forces of Mordor kept at it relentlessly, quickly repairing any breaches that would appear. Their work is complete. The whole thing is now functionally impassable.

That's it. End of snicket.

And so this morning we went to school on the 611, the Emirates Road. It's a nasty, aggressive little high speed drive, the road at times seeming close to capacity and clogging slightly but it moved freely for the most part.

I was highly amused to find it took about the same time to get there as going across the snicket...

The Hatta Track Is Closed

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We tootled off into the Hajjar mountains, a merry little party of merry-makers and nieces on our way to take a whizz up the Track Formerly Known As The Hatta Track. As eny fule no, that track has now been transformed into a metalled road, the bumps evened out and the surface a ribbon of blacktop threading through the arid and majestic moutains.

The Hatta track takes you to the famous Hatta pools, a series of pools in the wadi bed, long strewn in graffiti but still beautiful. It takes you through the mountain villages of Rayy and Shuwayah, past the lovely Oleander Waterfall (now only accessible if you really know what you're doing, the original gatch track that led right up to it having long been washed away in a winter spate) down onto the plains that will take you to Al Ain and Buraimi.

Only now it won't.

We got to the UAE border point on the track, formerly only a sign on the open road and then a police post where your ID would be requested and glanced at before proceeding, only to be told that this time round, it would be as far as we were going. There had been trouble with the inhabitants of the village beyond the border point and people had been 'angry', the Omani police had been involved and there was a vague mumble about too many Europeans.

So that was it. Turned back. No Hatta track. Not even the NoFun OneCal blacktop one.

First Wadi Bih and now this. Pants.